The New Nation - Internet Edition

Maswood Alam Khan

Years back it was my pleasant daily chore to feed my pigeons after I had woken up from my sleep around 7 in the morning. If for any reason, especially on holidays, I was late to get up, my pigeons used to flock together on the balcony attached to my bedroom and coo in unison a little fumingly until I had to wake up to feed them. I was flabbergasted by the precision of the pigeons' biological clocks that guided them to remind me that my own biological clock was at times not working well.

Saturday, 20 June 2009, had started one hour earlier for introducing Day Saving Time (DST) for the first time in Bangladesh. All clocks and watches have been advanced so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less.

We would be racing against the clock to maximise our use of daytimes and minimise our use of nighttimes. With the clock running one hour ahead, Bangladesh Time from now on is to be set at Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) plus 7 hours instead of traditional 6 hours and to revert back at GMT plus 6 hours on October 01 this year and again at GMT plus 7 hours on April 01, 2010. Biological clocks of Bangladeshis will need time to sync with the sudden and periodical wakeup calls by one hour forward and then by one hour backward, a horological drill many of our rural people may find vexing.

DST has been introduced with a view to saving energy that is wasted at night primarily by incandescent electric lights. We hope people will both go to their bed at night and hit the road in the morning one hour earlier.

Will people reach their office desks at 9 sharp on Sunday morning (which was 8 AM on Thursday last)? I doubt. Our past experience suggests we Bangladeshis are pathologically tardy and cannot really afford to be on time. In our society, an invitation for dinner at 8 in the evening really means 9:30 at night. The host would be stunned, perhaps even destroyed, if you show up in the dinner at 8 sharp assuming the time mentioned in the invitation letter was genuine. We are, however, better timekeepers than those in the Middle East where an invitation often does not even include the time, but can be "Come for the evening." For the host or hostess to fix a minute or even an hour implies that the guest is not wanted before then, an unforgivable breach of hospitality.

Wearing a wristwatch round the clock and following the watch to regulate our daily doings has for decades already been integrated as a part of our lifestyle for the rich and the poor even in remote and rural areas.

The wrist-watched man in a village who used to milk his cow at a certain time, say 9 in the morning, will now follow his wristwatch to milk his cow at 9 AM like in the past, though the new 9 AM is in fact an old 8 AM. But the cow who is not aware of the change forcibly made in the horologist's clock may feel twitchy if the cowman touches her udder before her biological clock ticks 9. The milking cow, I am afraid, may yield lesser quantity of milk by a measure equivalent to what her udder would have stored in an additional hour, unless the cowman can somehow cajole his cow into going for her nocturnal sleep one hour ahead.

I am concerned about the fate of one of my friends who has a shop in Patwatuly in the older part of Dhaka city selling and repairing watches and clocks for the last twenty years. Rural people who have already deemed wearing a wristwatch a useful fashion, I am afraid, may revert back to the old style of following the sun for maintaining the time. The roaring business on watches which had been soaring for the last few decades may start plummeting due to doctoring the clocks two times every year for the new timekeeping system of 'Day Saving Time'.

As a child in the sixties my another friend Shamsuddoha, by duress of his parents, used to go for his haircut in the shadow of a mango tree belonging to a barber named Haridas in the village of Mandra under Bhaggyakul union of Dhaka district. About 30 families of the village had a barter contract with Haridas, the barber. Haridas would have to cut hairs of the male members of the contracted families in exchange of annual disbursement of an agreed quantity of paddies.

There was nothing under the mango tree as furniture except two low wooden seats facing each other, one for the barber and the other for the client. The barber's folded knees were served as resting pads of the client's forehead.

At times Haridas also used his folded knees to clamp a naughty child's head, lest the child move his head to invite an injury from his running scissors or straight razor while cutting hairs from the child's rear head.

Haridas, the busiest barber in the locality, served only the contracted members in the morning till a point of time when he must rush for his barbershop in a nearby market to serve the general clients in exchange of ready cash. Haridas, my friend Shamsuddoha poignantly remembers, used to gaze at the sun at a reflexive frequency while cutting hairs of his clients in the morning session. Haridas knew from the position of the sun what was the exact moment for him to stop working under the mango tree and to proceed for the market. Haridas was never late in turning up to his regular barbershop in the market.

Horologists one day had invaded our soil with an arsenal of clocks and watches to rob cowmen of their biological clocks that used to wake them up at dawn to milk their cows and to rob Haridases of their dexterity in measuring time from the position of the sun moving on the sky or from sensing the organic clock ticking away deep inside their brain.

Human beings, plants, animals, birds, and insects have a biological clock that tells each of the living species when to eat, sleep and when to wake up. Biological clocks can be readjusted according to exposure to the day/night cycle of the outside world. Biological clocks are also fitted with alarms, which, if you know how to set, can wake you up at a prearranged time, or remind you of appointments.

Mechanical or horological clock, to my humble opinion, was the first artificiality to distance human life from the nature. Horologists have made humans to behave like cogs in a machine; they have taught us that life is finite, they have trained us to be tireless, and they have encouraged chemists and druggists to snatch away our sleeping pleasures. Mechanical clock has made us crazy and greedy. We have been made slaves to be dictated by two small hands of a clock. The ticking sounds of a clock are painful reminders that we are fast moving towards our graves---a crippling horological reality that has not yet agonised cows and pigeons and some of the present-day Haridases.

Now has arrived another gang of robbers to train our mind to forget what we have been used to; they are giving us sermons as to how we, like an ostrich, can burry our heads in the sand to shy away from an impending storm. We are asked to defy our biological clock that has already been adjusted with the horological clock synched with the movement of the sun in both winter and summer.

Unlike in other parts of the world, which are far away from the equator, where the duration difference between daytime in summer and daytime in winter is huge our summer days in Bangladesh are comparatively much less long and winter days not much less short, thanks to our close proximity to the equator. For hundreds of years, summers and winters, as they are now, have acclimatized our farmers to a pattern on how to follow the sun to program their living, their praying and their farming in all the seasons round the year. Sudden introduction of DST advancing the clock by one full hour may twist or jeopardise many hidden mysteries, rituals or mechanisms that have long since been dependent on the solar system and well cemented with our faiths and beliefs.

We could better utilize our excess daytime in summer by announcing an earlier morning time to start our works only in offices and factories without tinkering with the hands of the clock. For maximum daylight, all we could have done is get up at daybreak. No need to change the clocks and force everyone else to follow the schedule of the rich and the powerful in urban areas who waste energy at night and don't wake up before 8 or 9 in the morning. If I get up at 5 in the morning, I want it to be my own decision, not anybody else pretending it's 6.

Thanks to DST in Bangladesh I must change my sleeping style by readjusting my biological clock. I have to hit my bed by 10 in the evening to get up next day at 4 in the morning. I have now to get up very early to relish that mysterious grey light that precedes dawn. DST is going to help me wake up by the loud, harsh, and raucous notes of a rooster followed by more musical renditions from other species of birds that chirp fitfully to herald the morning. Life is full of wonders if we all could follow the advice of the proverb Benjamin Franklin had authored 225 years back: "Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise".