Last Word - Shashi Tharoor

Time for a Change

Back in 1974, as a teenage collegian, I spent a summer holiday at the tea estate of a classmate’s father near Jorhat in Assam. One of the first things I discovered during that idyllic escape was that I had to reset my watch to “tea time”, an imaginary clock invented by the planters that was the time on my watch plus two hours.

Indian Standard Time, my friend’s father explained, made no sense in a place where the sun would be rising by 4am and setting by 3.30pm if the planters used the same clock as the people in New Delhi.

I was sufficiently schooled in nationalist sentiment to be vaguely offended by this, seeing it as something of a betrayal of Indian ness not to be on the same time zone as the rest of the nation. And yet, within a couple of days, I realised that it made eminent practical sense, if for no other reason than to avoid the confusion of getting up well after the crack of dawn and finding one’s watch claiming it was the middle of the night.