The Call Beyond — Digital Edition

The Call Beyond is the monthly magazine of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi, devoted to the integral philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. This repository is the open-source reading framework behind the magazine's digital edition — a small, dependency-free, accessible reader with on-device personalization and search.

Live edition: https://ashishbhateja.github.io/callbeyond/

Open framework, gated content. The code that powers the reading experience is open source and fully inspectable. The magazine content is the intellectual property of the Ashram and stays access-controlled — it is supplied at build time, not stored here. See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for why it's built this way.

Why

The goal isn't only to publish the magazine, but to help a new generation engage with it — to turn time-tested philosophy and Indian scriptures from something you read into something you can actively work with and question. The framework below is the foundation — including a first thematic journey, the 2026 editorial arc, already in the reader. VISION.md describes where it's headed next (guided reflections, grounded "ask the texts" Q&A, and a wider, younger, multilingual audience).

What's in the framework

• On-device personalization (src/personalize.js) — a transparent recommender that ranks articles by the themes a reader engages with. Every suggestion comes with a plain-language reason, and nothing leaves the browser. No backend, no tracking.
• Client-side full-text search (src/search.js) — an inverted index with TF-IDF ranking over a whole edition, with zero dependencies.
• The year as a journey (src/journey.js, content/2026-arc.json) — the editorial arc rendered as an interactive path: three movements, twelve themed months, festival anchors, and the January⇄December mirror, with the current month highlighted and linked to its readings.
• An accessible reader (src/reader/) — semantic, keyboard- operable, mobile-first, with dark-mode and reduced-motion support.
• A reproducible build (scripts/build.mjs) — inlines the framework with one edition into a single self-contained page, ready to gate with StaticCrypt on publish.

No runtime dependencies. The framework uses only standard browser APIs; the build and tests use only the Node standard library.

Reusing the framework

The engines are dependency-free and content-agnostic: the recommender, search, and journey modules operate on any themed JSON corpus. The framework can therefore power other gated or contemplative content sites — not only this magazine — and the modules can be lifted out and used on their own.

Try it locally

# 1. Serve the repo (the reader loads its edition over fetch)
python3 -m http.server 8000
# open http://localhost:8000/src/reader/reader.html

# 2. Build a single self-contained edition page
node scripts/build.mjs content/sample-edition.json   # -> dist/

# 3. Run the engine tests (no install needed)
node scripts/smoke.mjs

The reader loads content/sample-edition.json — synthetic placeholder content used only for development. Real editions are gated.

Project structure

Path	What it is
src/personalize.js	On-device recommendation engine
src/search.js	Client-side full-text search
src/journey.js	The editorial-arc engine (the year's "thematic journey")
src/reader/	Reader UI — reader.html, reader.css, reader.js
scripts/build.mjs	Edition build pipeline
scripts/smoke.mjs	Dependency-free tests for the engines
content/	Edition manifests (only a sample is committed)
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md	Design and rationale
index.html	The currently published, gated edition (built artifact)

Status & roadmap

Early but real. The engines are tested and the architecture is in place; the next work is tracked in the issue tracker — archive-wide search, richer personalization, WCAG 2.2 AA conformance, and formalizing the gated-publish step.

Contributing

Contributions to the framework are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Please don't commit magazine content; develop against the sample edition.

Security

The framework is static, dependency-free, and keeps all reader data on-device. See SECURITY.md for the threat model and how to report issues.

License

The framework code is released under the MIT License. Magazine content is © Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi, all rights reserved, and is not covered by that license.

Acknowledgments

The Call Beyond is published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi. This digital edition is an independent open-source effort to make the reading experience fast, accessible, and personal.