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Both Aparna and I love international travel. The longer the haul, the better it is. Unlike many people we do not complain about jet lag. In fact we are fascinated by time zones. The time difference between our homeland India and the east coast of United States, where we live now, is ten and a half hours. Indian time is 10 1/2 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. India has only one time zone and there is no Daylight Saving Time there.
So to make a phone call from the US to India (or vice versa) one has to always calculate the local time there. I am so obsessed with this time difference that my friend has presented me with a clock that simultaneously shows the time in 4 different cities of the world. A little over a year ago, I learnt how to do such a thing for a web page using Java Applets. Below is the result.
These clocks do not adjust to Daylight Saving Time. |
1. Instead of setting the clock forward one hour in spring (and thus going against nature), why cannot people go to work one hour earlier from April to October and leave one hour earlier so that they can still have enough daylight time left to go to the beaches or whatever they want to do while the sun is still up? That will spare the people, who write the flight arrival and deparure times for various airlines, from making extremely difficult calculations since not all countries or not all parts of some countries have Daylight Saving Time. Furthermore, not all countries begin and end the Daylight Saving Time on the same date! What a pain in the - you know where - this Daylight Saving Time is. I mean, come on, this is 21st century. Not everybody works in the agricultural farms in summer time these days! We can abolish this DST thing now!
2. The summer days are already long. So instead of making them longer, why do we not set the clock forward one hour in fall, so that we can at least try to have a longer day when the days are really short?