The Tea Garden Time Zone in India, & more | #228
+ Guess all the movie references in this one song 👉👉
Friends,
The inevitable wave of despair rolls in for those blessed souls working with American clients - the creeping realization that your already thrilling evening calls and onsite meetings will now be pushed back by a whole hour thanks to that archaic ritual known as Daylight Savings. Because clearly, in a world of high-speed internet and AI, what we really need is a system designed in 1895 to tweak the daylight hours for farmers. Mark November 2nd in your calendars, as it’s the day when your already endless workday in India gets gloriously extended.
To compensate for that extra hour that we all ‘receive’, here’s a newsletter dedicated to the man-made concept of time, and some fun facts about it.
Things we learnt this week 🤓
2024 is coming to an end (already?!) and you want to party hard on 31st December more than once. Is that even possible? Well if you are in the vicinity of the Samoas it is possible. In 2011, Samoa decided it was done with missing out on the first sunrises and switched time zones to cozy up with its trading partners like Australia and New Zealand. So now, when it’s Friday in Samoa, it’s still Thursday just a short boat ride away in American Samoa. It is the one place where the Dr Rajkumar song hits differently - If you come today, it's too early, if you come tomorrow it's too late.
Q: How many time zones does India have?
A: Some might say 2 in jest - Indian Standard Time and Indian Stretchable time.
But do you know we have a time zone dedicated to our love of tea? Well not exactly, but in the eastern parts of India the locals use Tea Garden Time or as the locals colloquially call it - Bagaan time. IST was introduced by the British in the 19th century, because, naturally, having a giant country stretch across multiple longitudes but only one time zone made perfect sense. But in the far eastern corner of India - Assam, has its own idea of time. Here, Tea Garden Time runs one hour ahead of IST, because if you’re going to grow world-famous tea, you need to start early. In Assam, the sun rises early—around 4:30 AM in the summer—and setting clocks ahead by an hour allows the tea estates to make the most of daylight. Despite the “one nation, one time zone” mantra, people in Assam juggle two clocks.
Here’s a fun trivia question about time zones - which country has the most time zones? If you are thinking of a large country such as USA or Russia, you will be surprised by the answer. While the USA and Russia have 11 time zones each, the country that pips them is… La France with 12. How does a country smaller than Rajasthan manage to pull off this feat? It’s thanks to France’s far-flung territories scattered across the globe. From Guadeloupe in the Caribbean to French Polynesia in the Pacific, France has quite the timekeeping empire. It’s the ultimate excuse for French people to show up fashionably late. "Oh, I’m sorry, was that meeting in this time zone? I was thinking in Reunion Island time." Bon Heure only.
From IWTK, with love 💌
Can you recognize all the movie references in this song?
What infamous set of events is Simpsons referring to here?
Only In India 🇮🇳
Ab ki baar, dulhan dilado yaar.
💜 IWTK