# Why is India 30 minutes out of step with everybody else?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767
**Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
**Created:** [January 2, 2015, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767 "2015-01-02T13:32:26Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Keithy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Keithy)
#### Post date: [January 2, 2015, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/1 "2015-01-02T13:32:26Z")
Another factor that may have influenced the choice of a 1/2 hour in the time differential could be the fact that India was a British colony. Us Brits are an idle lot and we head out to (what was) Bombay for a tour of duty on the tea plantations or at the embassy it is such a drag adjusting your watch - not to mention working out what time it is back back home when telephoning in a report about the state of the natives - so what better wheeze than a 5 1/2 time difference? You can just take your watch off, _turn it upside down_ and put it back on, Robert is indeed your mother’s brother and you have the correct time 😃
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### Author:  [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)
#### Post date: [January 2, 2015, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/2 "2015-01-02T14:56:23Z")
It helps if we know what column we are talking about. Perhaps this one is it:
[Why is India 30 minutes out of step with everybody else?](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1354/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else?)
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### Author:  [@sbunny8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sbunny8)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2015, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/3 "2015-01-03T00:10:44Z")
> [@Keithy](#):
>
> so what better wheeze than a 5 1/2 time difference? You can just take your watch off, _turn it upside down_ and put it back on, Robert is indeed your mother’s brother and you have the correct time 😃
I don’t see how that could work. If your watch shows 2:30, the hour hand is halfway between the 2 and the 3 while the minute hand is pointing at 6. Turn the watch upside down and now the hour hand is pointing halfway between 8 and 9 while the minute hand is pointing at 12. That’s not a valid configuration. It indicates neither 8:00 nor 9:00.
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### Author:  [@Claverhouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Claverhouse)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2015, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/4 "2015-01-03T00:39:23Z")
And for my next trick, I shall show you how to find to find True North !
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### Author:  [@GaryM](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GaryM)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2015, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/5 "2015-01-03T00:58:55Z")
Why is the island of New Foundland in a 3 1/2 hour time zone? Because it fits better there than in 3 or 4.
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### Author:  [@JakartaDean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JakartaDean)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2015, 9:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/6 "2015-01-03T09:22:04Z")
And, of course, in 1884 Newfoundland was not a part of Canada, in fact not until 1949.
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### Author:  [@bienville](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bienville)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2015, 10:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/7 "2015-01-03T10:09:33Z")
> [@sbunny8](#):
>
> I don’t see how that could work. If your watch shows 2:30, the hour hand is halfway between the 2 and the 3 while the minute hand is pointing at 6. Turn the watch upside down and now the hour hand is pointing halfway between 8 and 9 while the minute hand is pointing at 12. That’s not a valid configuration. It indicates neither 8:00 nor 9:00.
**Keithy** must be wearing a digital watch.
When it is 11:34 in Bombay, in London it is hell. You can check my math on that, but I’m pretty sure it’s correct.
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### Author:  [@Lucretia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucretia)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2015, 11:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/8 "2015-01-03T11:10:19Z")
It ain’t just India. Afghanistan is like that, too. Frustrates the hell out of myriad American service members trying to call home.
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### Author:  [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2015, 11:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/9 "2015-01-03T11:10:45Z")
> [@Keithy](#):
>
> Another factor that may have influenced the choice of a 1/2 hour in the time differential could be the fact that India was a British colony. Us Brits are an idle lot and we head out to (what was) Bombay for a tour of duty on the tea plantations or at the embassy it is such a drag adjusting your watch - not to mention working out what time it is back back home when telephoning in a report about the state of the natives - so what better wheeze than a 5 1/2 time difference? You can just take your watch off, _turn it upside down_ and put it back on, Robert is indeed your mother’s brother and you have the correct time 😃
Telephoning? I think not.
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### Author:  [@qazwart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/qazwart)
#### Post date: [January 4, 2015, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/10 "2015-01-04T00:43:49Z")
Cecil claims befuddlement about the time in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia is suppose to be ruled by Islamic law.
The day starts at sunset and is divided into 24 hours. However, the day hours and night hours are not necessarily the same length. Sunset to sunrise is twelve hours and sunrise to sunset is twelve hours. Thus, “midnight” is sunset and sunrise is 12:00.
You learn this type of stuff when you work on Unix systems’ time mechanism. In the Unix OS, time is the number of seconds since “the epoch” which is January 1, 1970 GMT on most systems. Then, you use various functions in the API to set the timezone and the time. This is complicated by the various and ever changing implementations of daylight savings time which actually makes calculating Saudi time look easy in comparison. Consider this, when daylight savings ends, the night has two different 2:15am. If something starts at 2:15am, which is it? What about the time four days from now if DST starts or ends in that time period. You learn that adding 86,400 seconds is not the best way to calculate one day because not all days have 24 hours (86,400 seconds) in them.
The truth is that there has always been two times in Saudi Arabia. One is Islamic time which is what Cecil mentioned and was what most timezone maps showed. And the other is Saudi Arabian Standard Time which is three hours before GMT. Those $2.5 million Patek Philippe watches don’t work so well with constantly varying hours, plus it’s hard to run a multinational business. Sometime in the mid-1980s, Saudi Arabia officially switched from Islamic Time to Saudi Arabia Standard Time, but both times are still used. Times for prayers and fasts use Islamic time. Businesses mainly use SAST.
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### Author:  [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)
#### Post date: [January 4, 2015, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/11 "2015-01-04T01:26:46Z")
For $2.5 million they damn well should.
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### Author:  [@susan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/susan)
#### Post date: [January 4, 2015, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/12 "2015-01-04T04:06:29Z")
> [@](#):
>
> Sometime in the mid-1980s, Saudi Arabia officially switched from Islamic Time to Saudi Arabia Standard Time
So after the column was published. Might be time for an update.
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### Author:  [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)
#### Post date: [January 6, 2015, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/13 "2015-01-06T17:10:02Z")
Cece didn’t even mention Chatham Island, which is 45 minutes earlier than New Zealand which it is a part of. Chatham Island is actually east of the date line and “ought” to be 23 hours behind NZ. And the date line is “bent” to accomodate the Aleutians.
There is a joke in Canada that the CBC will one day announce: “The world will end at 3:00 this afternoon, 3:30 in Newfoundland.” As the CBC announces its programs which are delayed for each time zone, except they don’t for NFLD, so that all programs announcements are a half later in NFLD. Whose official name, BTW, has for some years been “Newfoundland and Labrador”. I think that may be because Quebec has never given up its claim on Labrador.
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### Author:  [@Grestarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grestarian)
#### Post date: [January 6, 2015, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/14 "2015-01-06T22:26:46Z")
I asked this question of one of our Indian consultants. He explained that it was a twisted result of petty politics: When India gained independence from British rule, M.A. Jinnah insisted there be a separate state for Muslims and Pakistan was reluctantly split off. Then Jinnah refused to share the same time-zone as India – and insisted Pakistan shouldn’t be the one to change. Eventually India gave in and shifted to UTC+5.5 hours while Pakistan stayed at UTC+5
I wasn’t there, so I wouldn’t know. But Jinnah is painted in a poor light in the movie Gandhi, and the explanation would seem to fit that image.
–Grestarian
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### Author:  [@qazwart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/qazwart)
#### Post date: [January 6, 2015, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/15 "2015-01-06T22:30:15Z")
I found this [comment](http://web.mit.edu/freebsd/head/contrib/tzdata/asia) about Saudi time:
# Saudi Arabia
#
# From Paul Eggert (2014-07-15):
# Time in Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Arabian peninsula was not
# standardized until relatively recently; we don’t know when, and possibly it
# has never been made official. Richard P Hunt, in "Islam city yielding to
# modern times", New York Times (1961-04-09), p 20, wrote that only airlines
# observed standard time, and that people in Jeddah mostly observed quasi-solar
# time, doing so by setting their watches at sunrise to 6 o’clock (or to 12
# o’clock for “Arab” time).
#
# The TZ database cannot represent quasi-solar time; airline time is the best
# we can do. The 1946 foreign air news digest of the U.S. Civil Aeronautics
# Board (OCLC 42299995) reported that the "… Arabian Government, inaugurated
# a weekly Dhahran-Cairo service, via the Saudi Arabian cities of Riyadh and
# Jidda, on March 14, 1947". Shanks & Pottenger guessed 1950; go with the
# earlier date.
#
# Shanks & Pottenger also state that until 1968-05-01 Saudi Arabia had two
# time zones; the other zone, at UTC+4, was in the far eastern part of
# the country. Ignore this, as it’s before our 1970 cutoff.
#
# Zone NAME GMTOFF RULES FORMAT [UNTIL]
Zone Asia/Riyadh 3:06:52 - LMT 1947 Mar 14
3:00 - AST
LMT is _Local Mean Time_
AST is _Arabian Standard Time_
I’m trying to find older versions of the time database to get a full discussion of Saudi Arabian time.
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### Author:  [@Anthony\_Kaye](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anthony_Kaye)
#### Post date: [January 6, 2015, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/16 "2015-01-06T23:57:53Z")
> [@Keithy](#):
>
> Another factor that may have influenced the choice of a 1/2 hour in the time differential could be the fact that India was a British colony. Us Brits are an idle lot and we head out to (what was) Bombay for a tour of duty on the tea plantations or at the embassy it is such a drag adjusting your watch - not to mention working out what time it is back back home when telephoning in a report about the state of the natives - so what better wheeze than a 5 1/2 time difference? You can just take your watch off, _turn it upside down_ and put it back on, Robert is indeed your mother’s brother and you have the correct time 😃
India was never a British colony. In its final form, for 70-odd years it was the Indian Empire, ruled by the British Monarch’s representative there, the Viceroy.
This had the very handy side-effect of enabling Queen Victoria to style herself Queen-Empress, thus enabling her in one mighty bound to leap ahead of those lesser continental empires- Russia, Germany, and Austria.
It’s surprising to remember that the last Queen-Empress, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, wife of the last King-Emperor George VI, died this side of the millennium.
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### Author:  [@Anthony\_Kaye](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anthony_Kaye)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2015, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/17 "2015-01-07T00:20:21Z")
“The Administrator has specified that only FIVE MINUTES is allowed for an edit”? Oh puleeze!
Where does that leave us hopelessly acomputerate two fingered typists?
At least a warning should pop up during an edit that we need to get our skates on.
My afterthought was “Of course being an Empire didn’t stop us occasionally treating it like a colony. London told the Viceroy to declare war on Germany in 1914 and 1939 with no consultation with the natives whatsoever”
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### Author:  [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2015, 3:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/18 "2015-01-07T03:21:38Z")
> [@Grestarian](#):
>
> Then Jinnah refused to share the same time-zone as India – and insisted Pakistan shouldn’t be the one to change.
This has to be either total BS or there’s something more to the story. What power over India did Jinnah have that it could demand this of India? Not to mention that - while I recall that Jinnah was perhaps a bit of a dick - I struggle to believe he would give a damn about being in the same time zone to any extent worth making a point about it.
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### Author:  [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2015, 6:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/19 "2015-01-07T06:19:04Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#):
>
> Cece didn’t even mention Chatham Island, which is 45 minutes earlier than New Zealand which it is a part of. Chatham Island is actually east of the date line and “ought” to be 23 hours behind NZ. And the date line is “bent” to accomodate the Aleutians.
>
> There is a joke in Canada that the CBC will one day announce: “The world will end at 3:00 this afternoon, 3:30 in Newfoundland.” As the CBC announces its programs which are delayed for each time zone, except they don’t for NFLD, so that all programs announcements are a half later in NFLD. Whose official name, BTW, has for some years been “Newfoundland and Labrador”. I think that may be because Quebec has never given up its claim on Labrador.
Nepal is on the 45-hour increment too.
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### Author:  [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)
#### Post date: [January 7, 2015, 7:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-india-30-minutes-out-of-step-with-everybody-else/708767/20 "2015-01-07T07:05:02Z")
> [@Hector\_St\_Clare](#):
>
> Nepal is on the 45-hour increment too.
Wow, not only do they have a weird time zone, but it’s almost two days before anyone else! 😃
(Nepal is always good here for a “weird facts” topic).
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