Saving the precious

They say that “Time and Tide waits for no man”, sometimes sayings can go wrong literally I mean. This Sunday daylight savings begins. So it is that time of the year again when we wind up our watches manually (if not digital ones that can adjust the timings automatically) an hour ahead. I personally do not like this daylight saving beginning for a silly reason; I am going to lose an hour of my Sunday sleep. But believe it or not this can leave a little lag in our body clock, especially if you are the kind of person like me who has a highly alert body clock. One hour does make a difference sometimes. Ofcourse naturally we do get adjusted to this time change in two or three days. I first felt this daylight savings pretty strange. I have heard about this before coming to the US, as our projects at work mainly involved US clients and we do adjust our meetings according to their time change. But the actual experience of a time change only happened last year. The first thing that I had some confusion was in the begin and end of this “Daylight saving”. We all know that on winters the days are short and nights are long, therefore in literal sense we should have daylight savings begin in winter months. But I learnt that Daylight saving Time (DST) ends by the first sunday of November and begins by the second Sunday of March. Thanks to Wikipedia which helped me resolve my confusion a bit.
To understand why this is called so, we need to understand the purpose of DST. DST is mainly used to exploit long warm days of summer and it greatly benefits retail and many other recreational activities based on daylight. This has other benefits as well like savings in energy as there is a lesser need for lighting when times are adjusted. Sunrise and Sunset times during summers and winters vary so widely here, hence that is why daylight savings are a norm in many parts of the world like US, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand etc. Probably that’s why we never had a time change in India, where sunrise, sunset times do not vary so widely according to seasons. Therefore we save the extra daylight we have during summer months and in the winter there is not much daylight left and hence the DST ends.
So are we really losing or gaining time? No not all. In US the clocks turn an hour ahead at 2.00am on the second Sunday of March (so note that this day will only have 23 hours) and the clocks shift back to 1 am at 2 am in the first Sunday of November ( hence 25 hours this day, which means an extra hour for my Sunday sleep!). The rule for DST varies according to countries, US and Canada follows the same rules. In Europe the days in which DST starts and end varies. So this can cause some confusions in case of travel, meetings etc. And the day which DST starts and ends have changed in the past, so setting these rules in our computers and other automated systems can be a challenge and may cause errors at certain cases. Though our computers are programmed to automatically change times (provided we have set our time zone correctly) all our other clocks and wrist watches we have to manually change. And remember the next call you make to India or any other timezone. Our times may be an hour ahead or behind. Whether we like it or not, really understand its benefits or not DST is a way of life here, probably most wont even notice it after some years of living here. But yes it can make some sayings go wrong atleast in some sense…