Indian Standard Time Breaks Down

The northeastern state of Assam (population 30 million) is associated in the Indian imagination mainly with lush tea gardens and a long-running insurgency that seeks to establish an independent Assamese state. But last week, Assam rebelled against an order perhaps even more tyrannous on an everyday level than the one embodied by distant New Delhi: It announced it would soon secede from Indian Standard Time.

The state's chief minister, Tarun Gogoi, said Assam would be moving forward one hour from the rest of India, from five hours, 30 minutes ahead of Greenwich Mean Time to six hours, 30 minutes ahead of GMT. This declaration was met with alarm by those Indians who have never traveled abroad, who bask in the stability and reliability of Indian Standard Time wherever they journey in the country (India doesn't employ daylight saving time, either), and for whom the idea of changing a clock setting within an Indian territory is as absurd as that of changing one's age. After all, shouldn't time have certain standards, just like democracy or fresh produce? Not for them the strange and slippery American way of different times at the same time, a relativism entirely characteristic of a culture in which anything goes.