Allahabad - that's where the east-west midpoint was determined, and the time zone derived from that .
Sent from my iPad On Oct 12, 2012, at 10:56 AM, Naresh <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks everyone for the quiz help (more audio -visual question banks welcome) > and Mr Bonobashi for the encouraging noises!! > > > I always wondered about this...Mr Cecil from The Straight Dope has nailed it.. > > Naresh > > Why is India 30 minutes out of step with everybody else? > > June 5, 1981 > Dear Cecil: > > It must be these uncertain times, but once again I find myself coming to you > to find the solution to a tantalizing enigma. In banks and other places that > want to give that continental effect, one sees rows of clocks showing the > time in various locales--New York, Paris, London--you know what I mean, being > a man of the world. Anyway, the hour hand varies, but the minute hand is > always the same--except for Bombay! It's always half an hour off. Or is the > rest of the world half an hour off? I'm very concerned about this. Please > explain so if I ever go to Bombay I can set my watch correctly. > > — Garnet J., Seattle > > Dear Garnet: > > Bombay, and India generally, isn't the only place chronometrically out of > step with the rest of the world. Lots of countries, particularly in Asia, are > a half-hour out of sync, including Burma, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan. > > Some have even stranger quirks. If my handy time-zone map here is to be > believed--I am a little dubious about some of it--Nepal is 40 minutes off the > mark. Saudi Arabia, ever the trailblazer, has some bizarre system in which > clocks are supposedly reset to midnight every day at sunset. Keeping one's > watch properly attuned aboard the Riyadh-Rangoon express must be an > exhausting experience. > > All of this traces back to the haphazard system of timekeeping prevalent > before the 1884 Washington conference that established Greenwich Mean Time > (GMT) as the international reference point. The conferees divided the world > into 24 zones, the time in each of which was to differ from a whole number > of hours from GMT. > > Prior to this, people made use of "local mean time," i.e., they figured out > approximately when the sun was directly overhead, called that noon, and went > from there. City A's time would thus differ by some odd number of minutes > from that of cities B and C to the east and west. For instance, in 1880, > England established two times zones for the British Isles--GMT for England, > and Dublin Mean Time, 25 minutes earlier (or later, depending on how you look > at it), for Ireland. > > After the standardization conference, most countries "rounded off" their > local time, as it were, so that it differed by a whole hour(s) from GMT and > from adjoining time zones. But some, for reasons of geography or politics, > rounded off to the half-hour. Newfoundland, for example, was (I think) three > hours, 35 minutes, and some seconds behind GMT before standardization, and > elected to round off to three hours, 30 minutes--owing, I suppose, to the > native perversity of its inhabitants, who delighted in being out of sync with > the rest of Canada. > > India, as it happens straddles two time zones, but for obvious reasons > preferred to have one uniform time throughout the country. Rather than choose > between GMT+5 and GMT+6 (which would make dawn and dusk in the far reaches of > the country either unusually early or unusually late), the government > apparently decided to split the difference. I can't explain Saudi Arabia, but > nobody else ever has either. > > — Cecil Adams > > > > On 11-Oct-2012, at 8:38 PM, Ingrid Srinath <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Do peruse: >> http://old.qi.com/links/ >> >> Especially: >> >> http://www.straightdope.com/ >> >> >> Ingrid Srinath >> >
