Daylight savings

Though a common practice in much of the Western world, daylight savings time, or summer time, is an alien concept for most Pakistanis. It was last attempted here in 2002 as an experiment with little success, and is in place again from roughly 2 hours ago.

I wasn’t around the last time this was tried and may look like a bit of a hassle. However, I’m sold on the benefits and have moved the clocks forward by an hour. The best benefit I see is that it’ll still be light outside at 8pm and “theoretically”, there’ll be more time for outdoor activities (not that I’m ever free for anything other than work these days).

I’m sure there will be a great outcry from the masses, most who don’t quite understand it (took most people I know a while to “get” it, and they were a bit more intelligent than the average Joe…er.. Javed). And already, people are accusing the government of disrupting their prayers (the timings of which are based on the position of the sun and have nothing to do with PKT anyway).

The biggest hassle I’ll face is getting the servers and my digital toys to play nicely. Had to manually change the time on the BlackBerry and the SonyEricsson, the latter of which also conveniently and quite wrongly, adjusted Los Angeles’s time by an hour. Even this post will be dated an hour earlier since timezone data seldom changes on servers and I haven’t gotten around to patching it manually.

The main reason for the change, saving power in wake of the severe shortage we’re seeing, may be questionable since there will likely be an increase in energy used for cooling and little savings on that used for lighting. However, it might help us improve our daily routines for once and just maybe have more leisure time. I say make full use of it.