Yesterday Pakistan became the first South Asian nation to adopt daylight – saving time, pushing clocks forward by one hour. The three-month experiment although aimed, as elsewhere, at cutting energy costs by taking advantage of long summer days, will create chronological confusion in Asia, reported the Los Angeles Times.

Consider this: Pakistan lies west of India and is usually half an hour (yes, half an hour) behind its political archrival. But by winding its clocks forward today, Pakistan is now half an hour ahead of India, whose time remains unchanged. The situation seems a little absurd, like California being ahead of Utah.

Or take India and its little neighbor Bangladesh. Imagine India as a friendly country with its arm slung over Bangladesh’s shoulder. The hand on the shoulder is India’s northeast corner, a sizable chunk of territory connected to the rest of India by a thin arm of land.

Now, a Bangladeshi who crosses his country’s western border finds himself in India, whose time is set to half an hour behind Bangladesh. So far, so good. But if he goes in the opposite direction, across the eastern frontier, he finds himself in India yet again, and still has to turn his watch back 30 minutes, even though the sun will rise earlier than it did when he was at home.

To complicate matters further, official time as decreed by Katmandu, the Nepalese capital, falls on the 15- or 45-minute mark relative to most of the rest of the world.

So, for example, when it’s 6 p.m. in New Delhi, in Katmandu it’s 6:15 p.m. A worried mother in Los Angeles calling Nepal at 7:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time will reach her mountain-trekking daughter just as the young woman is sitting down to a cup of butter tea for breakfast at 8:15 the next morning.

After the daughter scales Everest at 1 p.m., snaps a photo and starts climbing down the Chinese side of the mountain, she’ll find that she has suddenly lost 2 1/4 hours for her descent, because according to China, it’s already 3:15 p.m.

The head-spinning clutch of time zones attests to the fact that a country’s official time is linked as much, if not more, to political considerations as scientific ones.