IST in relation with the bordering nations

Indian Standard Time (IST) is the time observed throughout India and Sri Lanka, with a time offset of UTC+05:30. India does not observe Daylight Saving Time (DST) or other seasonal adjustments. In military and aviation time, IST is designated E* ("Echo-Star").^[1]

Indian Standard Time is calculated on the basis of 82.5° E longitude, from a clock tower in Mirzapur (25°09′N 82°35′E / 25.15°N 82.58°E / 25.15; 82.58) (near Allahabad in the state of Uttar Pradesh) which is nearly on the corresponding longitude reference line.^[2]

In the IANA time zone database it is represented by Asia/Kolkata.

History[link]

After independence in 1947, the Indian government established IST as the official time for the whole country, although Kolkata and Mumbai retained their own local time (known as Bombay Time) until 1955.^[3] The Central observatory was moved from Chennai to a location near Mirzapur, so that it would be as close to UTC +5:30 as possible.

Daylight Saving Time (DST) was used briefly during the Sino–Indian War of 1962 and the Indo–Pakistani Wars of 1965 and 1971.^[4]

Criticism and proposals[link]

The country's east–west distance of more than 2,000 km (1,200 mi) covers over 28 degrees of longitude, resulting in the sun rising and setting almost two hours earlier on India's eastern border than in the Rann of Kutch in the far west. Inhabitants of the north–eastern states have to advance their clocks with the early sunrise and avoid the extra consumption of energy after daylight hours.^[5]

In the late 1980s, a team of researchers proposed separating the country into two or three time zones to conserve energy. The binary system that they suggested involved a return to British–era time zones; the recommendations were not adopted.^[5][6]

In 2001, the government established a four–member committee under the Ministry of Science and Technology to examine the need for multiple time zones and daylight saving.^[5] The findings of the committee, which were presented to Parliament in 2004 by the Minister for Science and Technology, Kapil Sibal, did not recommend changes to the unified system, stating that "the prime meridian was chosen with reference to a central station, and that the expanse of the Indian State was not large."^[7]

Though the government has consistently refused to split the country into multiple time zones, provisions in labour laws such as the Plantations Labour Act, 1951 do allow the Central and State governments to define and set the local time for a particular industrial area.^[8] In Assam, tea gardens follow a separate time zone known as the Tea Garden Time or Bagantime that is one hour ahead of IST.^[9]

Time signals[link]

Official time signals are generated by the Time and Frequency Standards Laboratory at the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi, for both commercial and official use. The signals are based on atomic clocks and are synchronised with the worldwide system of clocks that support the Coordinated Universal Time.

Features of the Time and Frequency Standards Laboratory include:^[10]

• Four caesium and rubidium atomic clocks;
• High frequency broadcast service operating at 10 MHz under call sign ATA to synchronise the user clock within a millisecond;
• Indian National Satellite System satellite–based standard time and frequency broadcast service, which offers IST correct to ±10 microsecond and frequency calibration of up to ±10⁻¹⁰; and
• Time and frequency calibrations made with the help of pico– and nanoseconds time interval frequency counters and phase recorders.

IST is taken as the standard time as it passes through almost the centre of India. To communicate the exact time to the people, the exact time is broadcast over the state–owned All India Radio and Doordarshan television network. Telephone companies have dedicated phone numbers connected to mirror timeservers that also relay the precise time. Another increasingly popular means of obtaining the time is through Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers.^[11]

See also[link]

• Equation of time
• International Atomic Time
• Terrestrial Time
• Time zone (list)
• Zoneinfo

References[link]

External links[link]

• National Physical Laboratory
• Evaluating two timezones and Daylight Saving Time for India, by Viral Shah & Vikram Aggarwal.

Time zones present

Standard time is the result of synchronizing clocks in different geographical locations within a time zone to the same time rather than using the local meridian as in local mean time or solar time. Historically, this helped in the process of weather forecasting and train travel. The concept became established in the late 19th century. The time so set has come to be defined in terms of offsets from Universal Time. Where daylight saving time is used, the term standard time typically refers to the time without daylight saving time.

The adoption of Standard Time, because of the inseparable correspondence between time and longitude, solidified the concepts of halving the globe into an eastern and western hemisphere, with one Prime Meridian (as well its opposite International Dateline) replacing the various Prime Meridians that were in use.

History of standard time[link]

Great Britain[link]

A standardized time system was first used by British railways on December 11, 1847, when they switched from local mean time to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). It was also given the name Railway time reflecting the important role the railway companies played in bringing it about. The vast majority of Great Britain's public clocks were being synchronised using GMT by 1855.

North America[link]

Prior to 1883, local mean time was used throughout North America, resulting in an inordinate number of local times. This caused convoluted regional and national train schedules. In 1870, Charles F. Dowd proposed four time zones based on the meridian through Washington, DC for North American railroads.^[1] In 1872, he recommended the Greenwich meridian. Sandford Fleming, a Canadian, proposed worldwide Standard Time at a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute on February 8, 1879. Cleveland Abbe advocated standard time in order to more effectively coordinate international weather observations and resultant weather forecasts, which had previously been coordinated using local solar time. He recommended the concept of four time zones across the contiguous United States, based upon Greenwich Mean Time, in 1879.^[2] On October 11, 1883, the heads of the major railroads met in Chicago at the former Grand Pacific Hotel^[3] to adopt their own Standard Time System of five standard time zones for the continental U.S.A. and Canada. The new system was adopted by most states within one year after railroads did so. At noon on November 18, 1883, the U.S. Naval Observatory changed its telegraphic signals to correspond to the change.^{[citation needed]} The Standard Time Act of 1918 established standard time in time zones in U.S. law as well as daylight saving time (DST). The daylight savings time law was repealed in 1919 over a presidential veto, but reestablished nationally during World War II.^[4][5]

In 2007 the United States enacted a federal law formalizing the use of Coordinated Universal Time as the basis of standard time, and the role of the Secretary of Commerce (effectively, the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and the Secretary of the Navy (effectively, the U.S. Naval Observatory) in interpreting standard time.^[6]

See also[link]

• Time zone
• Universal Time
• Daylight saving time
• International Meridian Conference of 1884
• Mecca Time

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Ian R. Bartky (January 1989). "The adoption of standard time". Technology and Culture 30 (1): 25–56. DOI:10.2307/3105430. JSTOR 3105430. 
• Eviatar Zerubavel (July 1982). "The standardization of time: a sociohistorical perspective". The American Journal of Sociology 88 (1): 1–23. DOI:10.1086/227631. JSTOR 2779401. 
• "World Time Scales". National Institute of Standards and Technology Physics Laboratory. 2002. Archived from the original on July 29, 1997. http://web.archive.org/web/19970729054246/http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/world.html. Retrieved August 26, 1997. 

Ram Singh (known by his followers as Satguru) (February 3, 1816) was a religious leader and social reformer^{[citation needed]} and the first Indian to use non-cooperation and boycotting of British merchandise and services as a political weapon. He was the religious leader of the Namdhari (Kuka) sect of Sikhism. Ram Singh launched his revolt against the British on 12 April 1857 by hoisting a white flag of freedom and announced a programme of far reaching significance.

He called for the people to boycott government services^{[citation needed]}, boycott British run educational institutions and law courts, boycott foreign made goods and defy British laws. He was the originator of the nonviolent^{[citation needed]} and civil disobedience movement in Punjab in 1872.

Ram Singh's fight for independence was a turning point in world history for it eventually sounded the death-knell of colonial rule in the British empire. Mahatma Gandhi later used the concepts of non-cooperation and civil disobedience propounded by Ram Singh as political weapons against the British^{[citation needed]}. His ideas played a key part in securing India's Independence from the British.

References[link]

• Ram Singh's escape from Burma

External links[link]

• Sikh history - Namdhari
• Namdhari history
• Origin of Non-Violence

This Indian biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

This Sikhism-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie in 2007
Born	Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr. (1966-10-07) October 7, 1966 (age 45) Wellpinit, Washington
Occupation	Poet, Short-Story Writer, Novelist, Screenwriter, Filmmaker
Nationality	Spokane/Coeur d'Alene/American
Genres	Native American literature, Humor, Documentary fiction
Literary movement	Indigenous Nationalism
Notable work(s)	• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian • Smoke Signals (film) • Reservation Blues • The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven • War Dances
Notable award(s)	American Book Award 1996 National Book Award 2007 PEN/Faulkner 2010

Sherman Joseph Alexie, Jr. (born October 7, 1966) is a poet, writer, filmmaker, and occasional comedian. Much of his writing draws on his experiences as a Native American growing up on the Spokane Indian reservation. He currently lives in Seattle, Washington.^[1]

His combinations of poetry, short stories, novels, and films have won several awards. Some of his best known works are The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1994), a book of short stories, and Smoke Signals (1998), a film of his screenplay based on The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.

His first novel, Reservation Blues, received one of the fifteen 1996 American Book Awards.^[2] His first young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is a semi-autobiographical novel that won the 2007 U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature^[3] and the Odyssey Award as best 2008 audiobook for young people (read by Alexie).^[4] His collection of short stories and poems, entitled War Dances, won the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.^[5]

Life[link]

Childhood[link]

Sherman Alexie was born on October 7, 1966^[6] on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. His father, Sherman Joseph Alexie, was of Coeur d'Alene descent and his mother, Lillian Agnes Cox, of Colville, Flathead, Spokane and white descent.^[7] He was born with hydrocephalus, a condition that occurs when there is an abnormally large amount of cerebral fluid in the cranial cavity.^[8] Because of the hydrocephalus, Alexie underwent brain surgery when he was only six months old.^[7] It was a surgery that he was not expected to survive.^[7] The doctors said that if by chance he were to make it through the surgery, he was expected to suffer from permanent mental disabilities.^[7] However, Alexie's surgery was successful and surprised everyone by surviving with highly advanced mental faculties.^[8] Alexie grew up in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian reservation, in a rough environment with challenging circumstances.^[8] His father was an alcoholic who often left the house for days at a time.^[8] To support her six children, Alexie's mother, Lillian, sewed quilts and worked as a clerk at the Wellpinit Trading Post.^[8]

Alexie's life at the reservation school was also challenging because he was constantly teased by other kids on the reservation. They called him "The Globe" because he had a large head due to the hydrocephalus.^[8] It also didn't help that he had to wear government-issued glasses.^[8] Until the age of seven, Alexie suffered from seizures and bedwetting and had to take strong drugs to control them.^{[9] [8]} He was excluded from many of the activities that are rites of passage for young Indian males because of his health problems.^[9] Despite this rough upbringing, Alexie excelled academically. He loved to read and he read everything he could get his hands on, including auto repair manuals.^[10] By the age of twelve he had read every book in the entire library at his school.^[8] It was clear he was looking for a greater challenge in his education.

Education[link]

In order to better his education, Alexie made the decision to leave the reservation and attend Reardan High School in Reardan.^[8] The school was thirty miles off the reservation and Alexie was the only student of Native heritage among mostly white students.^[9] He excelled at this new school and became a star player on the basketball team, not to mention the only Indian.^{[8] [9]} The team was ironically called the Reardan High Indians.^[8] Along with the basketball team, Alexie was also class president and a member of the debate team.^[8]

His successes in high school won him a scholorship in 1985 to Gonzaga University, a Roman Catholic school in Spokane. ^{[8] [9]} Originally Alexie enrolled in the pre-med program at Gonzaga with hopes of becoming a doctor.^[9] However, he became squeamish in his anatomy classes.^[9] After an unsuccessful try at medicine, Alexie switched to law, but that didn’t work out either.^[9] The pressure of succeeding in college became too much for Alexie and he began drinking heavy amounts of alcohol to cope.^[11] Though he was not happy with his choice of career path, Alexie found comfort in literature classes.^[9] In 1987 he dropped out of Gonzaga University and enrolled at Washington State University (WSU).^[9]

At Washington State, Alexie enrolled in a creative-writing course taught by Alex Kuo. Kuo was also of Indian descent. Alexie was at a low point in his life and Kuo served as a mentor to him.^[7] Kuo gave Alexie an anthology entitled Songs of This Earth on Turtle’s Back by Joseph Bruchac, which is a book that changed his life.^{[7] [9]} The book inspired Alexie to start writing. He was inspired from reading works of poetry that were written by other Native Americans.^[7] With his new appreciation of poetry, Alexie started work on his first collection, The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems, which was published in 1992 through Hanging Loose Press.^{[12] [7]} With the success of his first published work of poetry, Alexie stopped drinking alcohol and quit school just three credits short of a degree. However in 1995 he was awarded a bachelor’s degree from Washington State University.^[9]

Today[link]

In 2005, Alexie became a founding Board Member of Longhouse Media, a non-profit organization that is committed to teaching filmmaking skills to Native American youth, and to use media for cultural expression and social change. Mr. Alexie has long supported youth programs and initiatives dedicated to uplifting at-risk Native youth.^[13]

Alexie is married to Diane Tomhave, who is of Hidatsa, Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi heritage. They live in Seattle with their two sons.^[12]

Literary Works[link]

Alexie's stories have been included in several prestigious short story anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories 2004, edited by Lorrie Moore; and Pushcart Prize XXIX of the Small Presses. Additionally, a number of his pieces have been published in various literary magazines and journals, as well as online publications.

Themes[link]

All of Alexie’s poetry, short stories and novels all assert the same themes: despair, poverty, and alcoholism among the lives of the Native American people.^[11] According to Sarah A. Quirk from the Dictionary of Library Biography, Alexie asks three questions across all of his works: "What does it mean to live as an Indian in this time? What does it mean to be an Indian man? Finally, what does it mean to live on an Indian reservation?"^[7] The protagonists in most of his literary works exhibit a constant struggle with themselves and their own sense of powerlessness among white American society.^[11]

Influences[link]

Alexie’s writings are meant to evoke sadness, but at the same time he uses humor and pop culture that leaves the readers with a sense of respect, understanding, and compassion.^[11] Alexie’s influences for his literary works do not rely solely on “traditional” Indian forms, but instead he “blends elements of popular culture, Indian spirituality, and the drudgery of poverty-ridden reservation life to create his characters and the world they inhabit,” according to Quirk.^[7] As mentioned, Alexie uses humor in all of his works. According to Quirk, he does this as a "means of cultural survival for American Indians-survival in the face of the larger American culture's stereotypes of American Indians and their concomitant distillation of individual tribal characteristics into one pan-Indian consciousness."^[7]

Poetry[link]

Alexie’s career began with the publishing of his first two collections of poetry in 1992, entitled, I Would Steal Horses and The Business of Fancydancing.^[7] In these poems Alexie uses humor to express the struggles of contemporary Indians on reservations. Common themes include: alcoholism, poverty and racism.^[7] Although he uses humor to express his feelings, the underlying message is very somber and serious. The Business of Fancydancing was very well received, selling over 10,000 copies.^[9] Alexie actually refers to his writing as “fancydancing,” which is the name given to the changes made to the traditional dances by Native American veterans from World War II.^[10] To him, it is the mental, emotional, and spiritual outlet that he finds in his writings.^[11] Leslie Ullman commented on The Business of Fancydancing in the Kenyon Review where she wrote that Alexie “weaves a curiously soft-blended tapestry of humor, humility, pride and metaphysical provocation out of the hard realities…: the tin-shack lives, the alcohol dreams, the bad luck and burlesque disasters, and the self-destructive courage of his characters.”^[11]

Alexie’s other works of poetry include:

• Old Shirts and New Skins (1993)^[11]
• First Indian on the Moon (1993)^[11]
• Seven Mourning Songs For the Cedar Flute I Have Yet to Learn to Play (1994)^[11]
• Water Flowing Home (1994)^[11]
• The Summer of Black Widows (1996)^[11]
• The Man Who Loves Salmon (1998)^[11]
• One Stick Song (2000)^[11]
• Face (2009), Hanging Loose Press (April 15, 2009) hardcover, 160 pages, ISBN 978-1-931236-71-3 ^[11]

Fiction[link]

Short Stories[link]

Although well reviewed as a poet, Alexie published his first prose work, entitled The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, in 1993.^[7] The book consists of a series of short stories that are interconnected throughout the book. There are no dominant characters, but instead, several prominent characters that appear in other works by Alexie. According to Sarah A. Quirk, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven can be considered a bildungsroman with dual protagonists, “Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, moving from relative innocence to a mature level on experience.”^[7]

Ten Little Indians is a collection of “nine extraordinary short stories set in and around the Seattle area, featuring Spokane Indians from all walks of urban life,” according to Christine C. Menefee of the School Library Journal.^[11] In this collection, Alexie “challenges stereotypes that whites have of Native Americans and at the same time shows the Native American characters coming to terms with their own identities.”^[11]

War Dances is a collection of short stories, poems, and short works. It won the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The collection, however, received mixed reviews.^[11]

Other short stories by Alexie include:

• The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) (collection of short stories)^[14]
• What You Pawn I Will Redeem (2003), published in The New Yorker[1]

Novels[link]

In his first developed novel, Reservation Blues(1995), Alexie expanded the characters of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. He expands on the characters Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Victor Joseph, and Junior Polatkin who have grown up on the Spokane Indian reservation. While in the short story collection they were in their teens, Reservation Blues show the boys in their thirties.^[15] Verlyn Klinkenborg of the Los Angeles Times wrote in a review of Reservation Blues from 1995, "you can feel Alexie's purposely divided attention, his alertness to a divided audience, Native American and Anglo."^[15] Klinkenborg goes on to say that Alexie is "willing to risk didacticism whenever he stops to explain the particulars of the Spokane and, more broadly, the Native American experience to his readers."^[15]

Alexie's young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a coming-of-age story that began as a memoir of Alexie's life and family on the Spokane Indian reservation.^[11] The novel focuses on a fourteen year old Indian named Arnold Spirit. The novel is semi-autobiographical in that it includes many of the events and characteristics of Alexie's life.^[11] For example, Arnold was born with hydrocephalus, and was teased a lot as a child, as was Alexie. Also, the story centers around Arnold's transfer to Reardan High School, the same high school that Alexie transferred to as a teenager.^[11] The novel received great reviews. Bruce Barcott from the New York Times Book Review observed, "Working in the voice of a 14-year-old forces Alexie to strip everything down to action and emotion, so that reading becomes more like listening to your smart, funny best friend recount his day while waiting afer school for a ride home."^[11]

Other Novels by Sherman Alexie include:

• Indian Killer (1996)^[11]
• Flight (2007)^[11]

Films[link]

In 1998 Alexie broke barriers by creating the first all-Indian movie, Smoke Signals.^[11] Alexie based the screenplay off of his collection of short stories The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.^[11] The film was directed by Chris Eyre, a filmmaker Cheyenne-Arapaho heritage and it was produced and acted by Native Americans.^[9] It tells the story of two young Native Americans, Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who leave the reservation on a road trip to retrieve the body of Victor’s dead father.^[11] The film took top honors at the Sundance Film Festival.^[11]

Other film projects include:

• The Business of Fancydancing (writer and director, 2002)
• 49? (writer, 2003)
• The Exiles (presenter, 2008)

Awards and honors[link]

1992

• National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship

1993

• PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Book of Fiction for the story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven^[7]

1994

• Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award^[7]

1996

• American Book Award (Before Columbus Foundation) for Reservation Blues^[2]
• Granta Magazine: Twenty Best American Novelists Under the Age of 40
• New York Times Notable Book for Indian Killer
• People Magazine: Best of Pages

1999

• The New Yorker: 20 Writers for the 21st Century

2007

• National Book Award, Young People's Literature, for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian^[3]

2009

• American Library Association Odyssey Award as the year's "best audiobook for children or young adults", read by Alexie (Frederick, MD: Recorded Books, LLC, 2008, ISBN 1-4361-2490-5)^[4]

2010

• PEN/Faulkner Award for War Dances^[5]
• Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award
• Puterbaugh Award", the first American Puterbaugh fellow
• California Young Reader Medal for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian^[16]

Translators of Sherman Alexie's works[link]

Alexie's works have been translated into many languages. His translators include:

• Czech - Jiri Hruby, Lubos Snizek
• Hebrew - Lia Nirgad
• Hungarian - Zoltán Holbok
• Japanese - Mizuhito Kanehara
• Punjabi - Gurjap Toor
• Swahili - Kudus Babatunde Akinwande
• Swedish - Ingela Jernberg
• Persian - Amir Mehdi Haghighat
• Tamil - Velupillai Prabhakaran
• French - Valérie Le Plouhinec
• Finnish - Jussi Hirvi
• Dutch - Aleid van Eekelen-Benders

See also[link]

	Poetry portal
	Literature portal

• List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas
• Native American Renaissance
• Native American studies

References[link]

Sources[link]

• Nygren, Åse. "A World of Story-Smoke: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie." MELUS 30.4 (Winter 2005): 149-169.
• West, Dennis, and Joan M. West. "Sending Cinematic Smoke Signals: An Interview with Sherman Alexie". Cineaste 23.41998 29-33.
• Alexie, Sherman; Bill Clinton and Tom Lehrer. "A Dialogue on Race with President Clinton". News Hour (July 9, 1998).

External links and further reading[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Sherman Alexie

• Fallsapart.com, Official Sherman Alexie Site
• Sherman Alexie at the Internet Movie Database
• Voice of the New Tribes article by Duncan Campbell in "The Guardian" January 3, 2003
• Berglund, Jeff and Jan Roush, eds. Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays, (2010) ISBN 978-1-60781-008-7.

Interviews

• Identity Theory, Robert Capriccioso interviews Sherman Alexie
• Iowa Review Joelle Fraser interviews Sherman Alexie
• OPB.org, Interview on Oregon Public Broadcasting radio show Think Out Loud (aired October 8, 2009)
• National Book Foundation "Interview With Sherman Alexie" as 2007 Award winner, by Rita Williams-Garcia