An hour is usually not considered prime estate by any means by most people. In fact, you would not realize that it has been an hour since you opened those multiple tabs side-by-side on your browser and jumped from one to the next without finishing your business on either. Why then, would turning back the clock by an hour make a difference to anybody at all? Daylight saving kicked in last night for most of the United States bar Arizona (still not sure about the logic they follow, but then, it is hard to go by logic in general when you are in Arizona). At 2:00 AM, Google automatically updated my Android device's time to 1:00 AM. So did the Windows OS on my laptop. I woke up feeling sheepishly proud of myself, having not wasted an entire Sunday morning in bed, but actually up and running by 9. And then it hit me!
You see, I never lived in a country where we fiddle around with our clocks unless the batteries run out. In fact, at numerous railway stations and government offices, we don't touch our clocks at all, deeming them sacrosanct and beyond the reach of human touch. But now, having moved to Colorado this July, I was unsure of what to expect when the clock strikes 2 on a chilly November night. The only calculation I had done was that I would now be 12.5 hours behind India, so calling my parents at 7 PM MST was okay, but not at 6 PM MST as I had grown used to. Then a friend texted me earlier today that sunset was around 5 PM, so a run after that would not be fun. I didn't pay much attention to it till I actually looked out of my window, and voila, it was pitch dark outside at 5:30 PM!
If you need some context, most of my undergrad life was spent going for a run at 6:00 PM after the lab was done and the IITB campus was coming to life around the gymkhana ground. Darkness at 5:30 PM is comparable to the tragic ending of The Departed to me. Does this mean that I have to become a morning person now? More importantly, will dinner time actually move up from 9 PM to 7-ish since bed time will have to change disproportionately? A good friend of mine even suggested investing in a 'sunlight box' that is a commonplace in every Scandinavian household, since those poor folks are actually lucky to see any sunlight at all at that frigid latitude.
My day is going to be an hour shorter for the next 5 months, and I figure that I'll get used to it. But then, the clock moves back to daylight saving, and I'll be a confused Indian again!
PS: A public service announcement. Can we go easy on the Swedes please?
