For the first fifteen years of my life, I
lived through time without even knowing that it can be switched and
shifted. Back then, time was just there. Playing a trick on someone else
or setting a clock were the only occasions to manually move the hands of
time. Of course there was those clocks with names of other places, New
York , London , Sydney , each showing a different time. Yet those
different times didn’t interfere with the real time. Those international
clocks, they as well could have been pieces of a Hollywood movie, until
I sat in a westbound plane, faced with the nonchalant suggestion of the
stewardess to set watches to the local time. Something stirred inside
me, while I spooled hours backwards in a matter of seconds.
Various journeys later, my inner clock
should have become accustomed to this scenario. Not so. At the start of
my first trip to India , I found myself standing in front of an airport
clock that announced an unbelievable time in black on white. “01.17,” it
said. I checked my wristwatch, but it didn’t make a difference, as I had
moved it to local time right at the beginning of the flight already.
“Back home, it is still yesterday,” I thought as I watched the seconds
tick away, trying to calculate the exact home time. 1.17 minus three and
a half hours. Quarter to nine? A strange calculation, to cross the
midnight line in subtraction, and I wasn’t sure whether I got it right
after all. The relativity of time, it always had been one of the
mysteries of life to me, next to the one how to look fresh after an
eight hour flight, after crossing continents.
Fortunately someone had invented radio
controlled alarm clocks with an auto time function just when the
government decided winter and summer time was the ultimate idea to save
energy. All that was left to do for me on the days of time season’s
change now was to take a morning walk though the flat and set all clocks
accordingly. One hours plus. One hour minus.
Which is basically the way I usually
dealt with the time zone change, too: looking for the official time, and
taking it as a given thing. Yet there was one question that kept
circling in my mind in India , unanswered, even after I had a good
night’s rest: Where did those extra 30 minutes come from? I had never
heard of half hour zones before. It didn't seem to make too much sense.
My guidebook was overflowing with bits and pieces of information, yet it
didn’t know the answer to this question either. “Indian Standard Time (IST)
is the same throughout the country,” it stated. “It is 4 ½ hours ahead
of Paris , 5 ½ hours ahead of London / Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), 3 ½
hours behind Tokyo and 4 ½ hours behind Sydney .”
The whole topic, summed up in two
simple sentences that didn’t even mention winter and summer time
differences. Maybe the one who had to write these lines was as firm in
time zones as me, I thought, or simply ignored those thirty minutes
cropping up on four occasions in two lines. Soon I learned that ignoring
it actually was the common reaction to the time mystery. “This is how it
is,” another tourist explained to me. When I asked the man at the hotel
reception, he shook his head slightly, and then returned the question:
“There is a four and a half hour time difference between India and the
Middle of Europe? But where does this half hour come from?”
A day later, the chain of my watch
broke. Almost as if it was weary of carrying all those seconds, minutes,
and hours. I considered leaving it behind, together with the half hour.
Yet I wasn’t ready to give up. Thus, the curious coincidence made me go
and search for a shop with watches or clocks in its window. It took an
hour, some searching, and some relentless crossing of streets to finally
find it. But the effort was worth it. Entering the shop, I was greeted
by a wall filled with clocks, each and every one of it showing a
different time. It felt like I had finally arrived in the centre of
time.
Of course, I asked the question again.
“The reason for this half hour,” the shop owner said, then turned, and
started to sort through various clocks that were lying on a glass cube.
I stood there, waiting, unsure whether he was searching for the answer,
or wanted me to skip the topic.
Finally he looked at me. “I think it also is a sign of independence”, he
said.
After a polishing pause he added: “Especially as Greenwich is British.”
He didn’t say more, and I hesitated to ask further questions about the
topic, or about the clocks on his wall. I wasn’t even sure whether his
explanation was grounded on facts, or whether it was just a personal
opinion. Yet I liked the attitude it expressed.
“To have an own time, it is a symbol
of independence,” I scribbled on a piece of paper after I left the shop.
Then I sat down on a bench, and watched the flocks of cars and cabs
rushing up and down the street, of people and bikers going this way and
that way, while I dreamed of the day when someone would come along and
invent an independent watch. |
