Whenever I call home, I have to do this li'l math of timezones to keep track of the time in India.Who decided that India has to have this perverse GMT+ 5.5 hours as the IST. The Geography or Politcs or something else entirely?
A little whirl back in 1884 lead up to a conference in Washington DC standardized the entire operation of timekeeping by dividing the world into 24 zones with GMT as the base reference.It could have been anything but this one is convenient as there is hardly any major landmass that gets divided by the International Date Line.(Imagine living in a place with 2 dates at the same time). So far so good. Most countries rounded off ther local time to differ by GMT in whole hours and as long as everyone followed, they differed from their adjacent timezones by a single hour.
How was time kept before this conference.Simple.Maharajas used Jantar Mantars to calculate the local mean time by taking noon as the reference.Those exotic sundials should still tell us the local mean time.
After the 1884 conference, India was straddled between two timezones of GMt+5 and GMT+6 and guess what we choose.Neither. I say the seeds of Non Aligned Moment were sown at that moment.(Does that rob Nehru of the originality for the idea?) What happens to Nepal. They decided to beat us10 minutes from us and started using GMT+5.6 .Excellent.Way to go! I dont know of any other major country that has fractional timezones. Enough Said.Let me make my call.
4 comments:
A few explanations, why 5.5 is better than 5 or 6 and better than having two time zones - East and West(?)
Just like Bombay to do something different
from wikipedia
"Indian Standard Time (IST) is the time zone for India. It is 5 hours and 30 minutes ahead of GMT/UTC. The entire country shares the same time. Although using one time universally has its advantages, the drawback is that in places in the far east, the sun rises very early and sets very early, while in the west it rises late and sets late.
The Indian Standard Time is calculated from the Allahabad observatory. Allahabad has 82.5°E longitude which corresponds to an exact 5 hours and 30 minutes difference between India and Greenwich, the reference point for GMT.
India's time zones were established in 1884. However at that time there were two standard time zones, Bombay Time and Calcutta Time. The IST came into effect in 1905. However, Bombay still persisted with its own time zone, 39 minutes behind IST, until 1955."
[Hirak] Good Addition. Having two timezones is not that problematic given that in US we deal with 5 pretty easily.Plus we dont have the concept of daylight savings. Having two different timezones would probably help atleast make people think about the nature of the abstraction of time we chose.
All said and done,I guess its a matter of convenience and convention agreed upon by a majority.
Daylight Savings + Time Zones = Recipe for disaster
btw...muchos gracias for adding my blog to your list! :)
[A.Diddy]
>Daylight Savings + Time Zones = Recipe for disaster
During WW1 they needed some way to do most work when light was available and Bingo! DST..They forgot to undo what they have contrived as a convenience.
De nada! Thansk for the adding me to yours :)
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