I wonder why - 6
Day light Saving
Most of the western countries, follow a rather peculiar method to save energy and make maximum use of the sun light, which they call 'Daylight Savings Time'. The whole idea of adjusting time beats me.
Let's say you are going to your place of work by the 8 AM train. And from one day onwards the timing was changed to 7 AM and there are no other trains that can take you to your destination. What would you do?
The simplest thing would be to wake up an hour earlier and catch the 7 AM train. Or you can advance your watch by an hour the previous night itself, catch the 7 AM train and fool yourself thinking that you have caught the 8 AM train.
The rationale behind 'Daylight Savings' is very simple. In countries farther away from the tropics, the days become much longer than the nights during summer. By starting the day earlier, sunlight can be utilised to the maximum thereby saving power. Wouldn't it be a much simpler option to advance things by an hour? Say shift the work hours and school timings instead of adjusting the clocks all over the country.
I wonder why the westerners want to do things in the most complicated way and take pride by calling themselves advanced. What a chaos it would be on the days when they move from one time to another? How much of effort and resources would have been wasted so far in developing software, watches and other gadgets to adjust to the 'Daylight Savings'. Adding to that, there is no single date that is universally followed.
Here is a list of some incidents which make 'Daylight Savings' appear silly.
How does it feel when you read something like this " A baby boy was born at 1.45 am DST. Unfortunately he could not sustain life and died at 1.30 am on the same day".
In what way is DST better than Janakaraj of the film "Unnal Mudiyum Thambi", who would tie a rope to his house and try to move it away from a stinking pond. I am yet to find a convincing reason to accept DST as the best possible solution for saving energy.
More about DST can be found here
posted by b a l a j i at 5:00 AM
5 Comments:
I agree with you, it can be a really confusing situation. I have trouble synchronizing the time in my server logs to IST because my server is in Canada and observes EST/EDT (which one???)
good article and thoughts Balaji...
yes, it causes problems sometimes...on the day when there is a change...and specially with different timezones it is even a bigger problem...
a little away from the topic, it seems India has an option of having two time zones, but it sticks to one to avoid confusion...
balaji,
agree with you.. they call it complicated, but quite 'stupid'.. I should say... Enna irundhaalum, traffic lights illati, car otta theriaadhavanga dhaane? appadi dhan yosipaanga!!
yup.... causes lots of confusion!! not only on the official n business front, also on the personal front!! I donno abt evryone, but, for me the day wen these things happen is totally screwed... I end up goin to bed too late or wakin up too late n u knw wat, the entire cycle gets disturbed!!
blogsurya,
they can spend on peserving heritage because they can afford. how many would approve Indian government spending millions to reclaim some of the 1000 year old temples that I had been recently.
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