Slight correction: Nepal is not offset by 40 minutes from the hour. Nepal’s time is UTC/GMT +5:45 hours.
I’ve Googled the topic to death, and can’t find the historical reason for the unusual 45 minute offset in Nepal. I wondered if Nepal might be dividing the difference between India and China but I did the math and that’s not it. Of course, China has its own bizarre time zone thing going - ONE time zone (UTC/GMT +8:00) for a vast country that should rightfully be at least four time zones.
I visited Nepal in 1993. I had a digital watch at the time that had three faces that could be set to different time zones and there wasn’t one for Nepal so I had to set it to India time and make the correction. I recall that the travel guide said that they set their time that way purposefully so that they would be different than India.
Welcome to the SDMB, kayemmdee.
A link to the column you’re commenting on is appreciated. Providing one can be as simple as pasting the URL into your post, being sure to leave a blank space on either side of it. Like so: Why is India 30 minutes out of step with everybody else? INACTIVE - The Straight Dope
Well, that may or may not be the case.
I have looked all over the web, including very well-researched reports on the history of the development of time zones, and I have yet to read of any verified historic reason why Nepal is so unique.
Travel guides don’t always have their facts straight - meaning I’m going to continue to suspend believing this is the reason for the 45 minutes-after-the-hour time zone.
I’m inclined to believe that “just to be different from India” is sufficient reason for Nepal to have this time-zone difference.
I base this on my experience in Mexico. Most of the country, including the state of Oaxaca, is set officially to the same jour as U.S. Central time, and shifts an hour during the summer months, for “daylight savings”, like in the U.S.
However, a mountainous sub-region in the northern part of the state of Oaxaca, comprising about two hundred rural indigenous villages, stubbornly refuses to recognize the daylight savings change. Therefore, for about half the year, you have to reset your watches when you go up into that part of the state – except when you’re visiting the few state and federal instituations which have branches up there. (Luckily, by chance, this is easy to remember, once you realize that, by coincidence, the time in those mountains of Oaxaca is the same as “Mountain Time” in the U.S.!)
Anyway, the reason for this difference is simply because indigenous Oaxacans have always tried to find little ways to thumb their nose at the state and federal governments. It’s an (occasionally violent) tradition which goes back at least to the Spanish Colonial era, or even earlier (sticking it to the invading 15th-century Nahuas, say.)
So, yes, “just to show the bigger power that you have some say over how you do things locally” can be reason enough for some policy like this, silly as that may sound to us.
Damn, how pathetic does your country have to be that it’s biggest claim to fame, next to the Dalai Lama, is that they have a different time zone to everyone else…because they can?
The Dalai Lama is from Tibet.
Their biggest claim to fame is having the biggest mountain in the world. Also the Buddha was said to have been born there.
So they don’t even have that? Damn, things are worse than I thought!
Anyway, the reason for this difference is simply because indigenous Oaxacans have always tried to find little ways to thumb their nose at the state and federal governments. It’s an (occasionally violent) tradition which goes back at least to the Spanish Colonial era, or even earlier (sticking it to the invading 15th-century Nahuas, say.)
So, yes, “just to show the bigger power that you have some say over how you do things locally” can be reason enough for some policy like this, silly as that may sound to us.
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Just because someone could be true doesn’t make it so. (This is the Straight Dope, for gods’ sakes, so let’s stick with what is true not what might be true.)
Nepal may well have set its time zone to thumb its nose / be different from India. However, so far I have found no verifiable reference that states why Nepal chose the time zone it did - aside from conjecture such as has been posted here.
So, until I find that solid reference, I will continue with Nepal having an odd time zone for some unknown reason.
This is from the Nepali Times:
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And with [Westerners] came global time zones. Set in 1884, it was agreed to use the Greenwich meridian as zero and measure 24 standard meridians on longitudes 15 degrees apart. But it was not till 1956 that we set our watches for the first time to Nepal Standard Time, with the meridian at Mt Gauri Shankar, 100km east of Kathmandu. It wasn’t Mt Everest because Gauri Shankar was closer to Nepal’s centre of gravity, as it were.
It was a choice that set our clocks 10 minutes ahead of India, which at the time used the longitude that passed through Calcutta. When our neighbours switched their meridian to Hyderabad in 1971, we officially had four degrees of separation, and presto, found ourselves a further five minutes ahead of the Indians.
With the information age, there is now some grumbling that we should set ourselves to Indian time. Acharya is unimpressed. He told us: “Why should we change something that is well established, scientific and accepted?” Apparently it’s not as simple as rounding off to the nearest zero. More nationalistic naysayers will probably dismiss the idea simply on the grounds that our perceived lead over India will narrow.
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I’m thinking of the pointy-haired boss in “Dilbert” on a phone call…
“I’ll call you back in an hour - but you’re 3 hours behind us, so I’ll call you back in 4 hours. …what? You guys are 3 hours ahead of us? Then I’ll, … Whoa, you’re blowing my mind here…”
Thanks for the post - an interesting summary of what went down regarding Nepali time.
From the article: How much are those 15 minutes worth? For most Nepalis it is part of an inbuilt elasticity when it comes to punctuality-the foundation of the old ‘Nepali Stretched Time’ joke. It is our grace period, a quarter of an hour that we tack onto to every appointment and still consider ourselves to be “on time”. Even if we are, technically, 15 minutes late.
Nepali stretched time is interesting, but not very meaningful as to the “why” the “tradition” persists. In the end, Nepalis have adjusted to the difference. It’s like the person who habitually has his clock / alarm set to “give himself” 5 or 10 extra minutes. He knows he has that extra time and adjusts accordingly - it’s just a mind game. It’s not like time is actually created out of nothing.
I think it’s just practical, in the global information age / economy, to have everyone in the world on the hour or, if necessary, on the half hour (where a country - such as India - divides the difference between two time zones so the entire country can be on one time zone). Being on the quarter or three-quarter hour doesn’t set anyone apart as “special” as much as “obstinate”. For non-Nepalis not used to making the conversion, it leaves room for error / confusion.
Perhaps, one day, everyone will be doing business as per a 24-hour “world clock” (Greenwich Mean Time?) while still maintaining their local time (if need be). “Noon” is mainly meaningful in the context of the sun being overhead, but obviously countries such as China and Mexico have survived with fairly skewed time zones in the name of uniformity of “clock time” within the country.