What’s Mankuthimmana Kagga
Mankuthimmana Kagga — often called the Kannada Gita — is a collection of 945 philosophical verses by D.V. Gundappa (DVG). Written in the 1940s, it wrestles with life’s biggest questions with a rare combination of humility and depth. It deserves a wider audience.
KaggaBot
It’s a small automation that does one simple thing: post two verses from the Kagga every day to Mastodon (an ad-free social media platform), automatically, without anyone pressing a button.
What’s in the code
The core of the bot is a Python file containing all the verses of the Kagga, individually scraped and stored as structured data.
A script picks from this collection and formats each verse for posting. GitHub Actions handles the scheduling — no server required, no ongoing cost.
Verses in .py file → bot script → GitHub Actions cron → Mastodon post
The scheduling magic
A GitHub Actions workflow file defines two daily triggers — morning and evening. When the schedule fires, GitHub spins up a clean environment, checks out the code, and runs the bot. That’s the entire pipeline.
Two posts a day, every day
on: schedule: - cron: ‘0 6 * * *’ # morning - cron: ‘0 18 * * *’ # evening No cloud bill. No server to maintain. No babysitting.
Why Mastodon?
Mastodon is open, ad-free, and has a clean API — ideal for a bot that exists purely to share literature, not to game an algorithm. The posts are public and readable by anyone, no account needed.
Why this matters
At two posts a day, it takes over a year to work through all 945 verses of Mankuthimmana Kagga.
That’s the right pace for philosophy — slow enough to sit with, regular enough to build a habit. KaggaBot transforms reading a classic Kannada text into a daily practice, entirely on autopilot.
The whole project is open source. If you want to adapt it — for a different text, a different language, a different platform — the bones are all there.