Terms of Use

The agreement

These terms are the agreement between you and [LEGAL ENTITY NAME] ("we", "us"), who operate KarmaVaani at [PRODUCTION DOMAIN]. By reading the site, creating an account, or posting anything here, you accept them.

We have tried to write this the way we write everything else here: plainly, and without hiding the parts that matter — including the places where the site does less than we would like it to.

Last updated: [EFFECTIVE DATE]

What KarmaVaani is

KarmaVaani is a Hindu knowledge and community platform. It carries:

• the complete Bhagavad Gita — 701 verses across 18 chapters, with Sanskrit, transliteration, and English;
• the complete Valmiki Ramayana — 23,291 verses across 648 sargas in 7 kandas;
• the Mahabharata — 2,114 sections across 18 parvas, in English prose;
• a temple atlas of around 3,490 temples, plus pages on deities, festivals, and a glossary of terms;
• community writing — essays, discussions, questions and answers, temple reviews, and event listings, contributed by members;
• AI companions that answer questions grounded in the scriptures above.

Reading is open to everyone. Writing, replying, reviewing, and asking require an account.

Your account

You need an account to contribute. When you create one you agree to:

• give a real, working email address, and keep your password to yourself;
• be at least [MINIMUM AGE] years old;
• take responsibility for everything posted from your account.

One person, one account. Do not impersonate someone else, and do not use a display name designed to make people think you are someone you are not.

Tell us at editor@karmavaani.in if you believe someone else is using your account.

There is no self-service account deletion yet. If you want your account closed, email editor@karmavaani.in and we will close it and remove your contributions. How we handle your personal data is covered separately in the Privacy Policy.

Acceptable use

This section is the community guidelines. There is no separate rulebook, and pointing at one would only give you two documents to reconcile.

This is a place for people who are genuinely interested in the texts and the traditions around them. Disagree freely; the arguments are half the point. But do not:

• post spam, advertising, affiliate links, or SEO filler;
• abuse, harass, threaten, or demean other members, or attack people for their caste, community, religion, gender, or origin;
• post material you know to be false, or present invented verses, references, or translations as authentic;
• post sexual content, graphic violence, or anything unlawful;
• post other people's private information;
• upload or link malware, or try to break, overload, scrape at scale, or work around the limits of the site;
• use the AI companions to generate content you then pass off as scripture, or to produce material that breaks any rule above.

We may set limits on how often you can post or how heavily you can use the AI companions, and change those limits, to keep the site usable for everyone.

Reporting

Signed-in members can report a discussion thread, a reply, a temple review, or a temple event directly from the page it appears on. The reasons available are spam or advertising, offensive or abusive, misinformation, off-topic, and other.

There is no report control on essays, comments, questions or answers yet. To report one of those, email editor@karmavaani.in with the URL and a line about the problem. It reaches the same moderators. The Contact page explains this in more detail.

What you write here

You own what you write. Your essays, comments, replies, answers, reviews, and event listings remain yours. We do not claim ownership of them.

The licence you give us. When you post something on KarmaVaani, you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce, display, distribute, and make minor adaptations of it — formatting, excerpting, generating previews and search-index entries, and quoting it in material that promotes the site, such as email digests and social posts. This licence exists so we can actually run the site. It lasts while your contribution is on KarmaVaani and for a reasonable period afterwards in backups and archives.

You keep every other right. You can publish the same piece anywhere else, at any time, with no permission from us.

What you are promising us. That the work is yours, or that you have the right to post it. That it does not infringe anyone's copyright, trademark, or privacy. Featured images are added by URL — if you link an image, you are confirming you have the right to display it that way, and you are responsible for it.

Removing your own work. You can edit or delete your own essays, reviews, and other contributions whenever you like. Once deleted, a piece stops being served from the site, but copies may linger briefly in caches and search indexes, and other members may have already quoted or replied to it.

If you believe something here infringes your copyright, write to editor@karmavaani.in with enough detail to identify the work and the page, and we will look into it.

Moderation and suspension

Reports go to our editorial team. We review them and may remove content, dismiss the report, or suspend the account behind it.

A suspended account can still read KarmaVaani. Suspension blocks new comments, discussion threads and replies, temple reviews, and temple event listings. It does not currently block new essays, questions or answers — that gap is in our database rules, we intend to close it, and until we do we remove those contributions by hand. We would rather tell you what the sanction actually does than describe one we do not yet impose.

We remove content and suspend accounts when the rules above are broken. We try to be proportionate — a first off-topic post is not the same as sustained abuse — but we do not owe anyone a warning before acting, and serious cases are acted on immediately. We are a small team and we do not guarantee that every report is answered individually.

If you think a decision was wrong, reply to us at editor@karmavaani.in. We will take another look.

The scripture texts and their translations

The Sanskrit of these works is ancient and in the public domain. The English is not automatically so, which is why every translation on KarmaVaani was chosen for its copyright status, and why we credit it:

• Bhagavad Gita — Sanskrit, transliteration, and word meanings via the open gita/gita dataset, released under The Unlicense. The English translation is by Swami Sivananda (d. 1963), in the public domain in India under the author's-life-plus-sixty-years term.
• Valmiki Ramayana — Sanskrit and transliteration are the scripture itself. The English is derived from the public-domain translations of Ralph T. H. Griffith (1870s) and H. P. Shastri (1927), as cited by the source compilation we drew on. We attribute Valmiki and those translators.
• Mahabharata — the English prose translation of Kisari Mohan Ganguli (1883–1896), in the public domain, taken from a CC0 digitisation of the Project Gutenberg and sacred-texts editions.

Errors of transcription, alignment, or attribution are ours, not the translators'. If you spot one, please write to editor@karmavaani.in — corrections are welcome and we act on them.

Many temple photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and remain under their own licences, held by the photographers who made them. Nothing on this page grants you rights in someone else's photograph.

Our own editorial writing, page design, code, and the arrangement of this site are ours, and are not in the public domain. Read, quote, and link freely. Do not republish it wholesale as your own.

The AI companions

KarmaVaani has AI companions for the Gita, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata, and one that draws on all three. Each is restricted to its own text, retrieves passages from it, and cites what it drew on.

They are study aids. They are not teachers, and they are not authorities.

• Answers can be wrong. A companion can misread a passage, miss context a scholar would supply, or state something with more confidence than it has earned. Check the citation against the full text — every verse and section is on this site, free to read.
• Not a substitute for a qualified teacher. For initiation, ritual practice, or a serious question about tradition, ask a guru, an acharya, or a scholar who knows you and your sampradaya.
• Not professional advice. Nothing a companion says is medical, mental-health, legal, or financial advice. If you are in crisis or facing a decision with real consequences, please speak to a qualified professional. If you are in immediate danger, contact local emergency services.
• How it works. Your question, and the passages retrieved for it, are sent to a third-party AI model provider to generate the answer, along with up to the last twelve messages of the conversation. Conversations are not saved to your account. Do not type anything into a companion that you would not want leaving this site — no passwords, no identifying details about other people, nothing confidential. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly what is sent and to whom.

An answer is generated for you, not published by us as editorial content, and we do not present it as a settled reading of the text.

A short form of this notice belongs on the pages where you ask, above the question box, not only here in clause thirteen. [AI NOTICE AT POINT OF USE — /ask and /gita show one muted line beneath the chat that never says the answer is machine-generated or that it can be wrong, while both pages invite questions about anxiety at work. Ship the notice above the input on both pages, then keep this paragraph; otherwise delete it rather than promise it.]

Membership and donations

Reading KarmaVaani is free. There is an optional Supporter membership and a one-off donation option, both handled by third-party payment providers. Card details are entered on the payment provider's own screens and are never stored by us.

What a membership costs, how long it lasts, whether it renews, and what it unlocks are set out on the Refund Policy and on the membership page. Those two must agree with each other and with the product before this page is published: [MEMBERSHIP PRICE, BILLING PERIOD, AND WHETHER IT RENEWS AUTOMATICALLY]. Refunds and cancellation are governed entirely by the Refund Policy; we make no separate refund promise here.

A membership unlocks specific features on the site. It does not buy influence over moderation decisions, editorial judgement, or what the AI companions say.

A membership is also not immunity. If we suspend an account for breaking these rules, suspension does not end a paid period early and we do not refund the remainder of one.

Third-party services

KarmaVaani depends on services we do not control: a hosting platform, a hosted database and authentication provider, an AI model provider, payment providers, and an email sender. Their outages become our outages. Each one is named, with what it receives, in the Privacy Policy — that is the single place we keep the list, so there is only ever one version of it to keep current.

Pages here also link out to other sites. We do not control those and are not responsible for what they contain.

What we do and do not promise

We run KarmaVaani carefully and we care about getting the texts right. But we provide it as it is. We do not promise that the site will always be available, that it will be free of errors, that a translation or an atlas entry is flawless, or that any particular feature will still exist next year. We may change, suspend, or discontinue parts of the site.

We are not responsible for what members post. Contributions are the views of the people who wrote them, not ours.

Limits on liability

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses — lost profits, lost data, or loss arising from decisions you made on the strength of something you read here, including an AI-generated answer.

Where liability cannot be excluded, our total liability to you is limited to [LIABILITY CAP].

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

Ending it

You can stop using KarmaVaani at any time, and ask us to close your account by writing to editor@karmavaani.in.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, or restrict access where we are required to. The licence you granted for content you have already posted continues for material already distributed and for archival copies, but we will remove your contributions from the live site on request.

Changes to these terms

We will change these terms from time to time — when features change, when the law changes, or when something here turns out to be unclear.

The current version always lives on this page, with the date it took effect at the top. For material changes we will [HOW WE ANNOUNCE MATERIAL CHANGES] before they take effect. If you keep using KarmaVaani after that, you accept the updated terms. If you would rather not, close your account. We give the same advance notice before a material change to the Privacy Policy.

Governing law

These terms are governed by [GOVERNING LAW], and disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of [COURTS AND PLACE].

Reaching us

For anything to do with these terms, moderation, copyright, corrections, or account closure, write to editor@karmavaani.in.

Grievances requiring a designated officer should be addressed to [GRIEVANCE OFFICER NAME AND CONTACT].

Postal address: [REGISTERED ADDRESS].

The rest of the fine print

About KarmaVaani · Privacy Policy · Refund Policy · Contact

This document is a draft. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer.