Tick talk:

Indian Standard Time turns 120

- Rachel Lopez

For much of history, we lived happily without clocks, turning instead to the sun, moon and stars, content with a vague understanding of where we were in the day. Early attempts to harness time, in fact, were met with protest.

From there to atomic timers, optical devices and zeptoseconds, see where things stand - and how even this looks set to change

Milestone alert! January 1 marked 120 years of the adoption of Indian Standard Time. For anyone whose eyes darted to their watch, this means that our national clock — five-and-a-half hours ahead of London, three-and-a-half hours behind Tokyo, and a full fourteen-and-a-half hours ahead of Alaska — has been in use since 1906. Midnight at 01-01-1906, to be precise.

And being precise is exactly the point. Because what is time, really? We wake up when the alarm rings; not when the sun rises. In much of the world, it’s noon when the clock says it is; not necessarily when the sun is overhead. The sun is still at the centre of the solar system. But modern life revolves around the clock.

It might look elegant: hours, minutes, seconds, and time zones falling neatly into place. But it is an artificial imposition of order on the natural day. It’s why timekeeping involves so much manipulation: Daylight savings; Eastern Standard and Mountain Standard; microseconds and nanoseconds (as you'll soon see).

It is a concept shaped as much by math as by science, religion, colonialism and power.

We believe in overtime, ETAs, New Year's Eve countdowns and that our Zomato order is 11 minutes away. We fight over the right to such belief too. We did it in 1906, when colonial India adopted IST. Today, 120 years on, the fight has changed.

Second opinions

“We've always lived with time, we just utilised and measured it differently,” says historian Shekhar Krishnan.