I must congratulate Trishna Gurung for raising the issue of an irrational Nepali Standard Time fifteen minutes out of tune with the rest of the world ('15 minutes of fame', #155). For those who have to deal with the modern world all the time, travel often, use the Internet or have to call to or from Nepal, it is 15 minutes of senseless, time-wasting calculations one has to do often in the middle of a bad jetlag. If you look at a map of the world's time zones, you can see that much of Nepal is in the GMT+6 hours zone. Sri Lanka, although it is slightly west of this band and in the GMT+5 zone, has kept its time six hours ahead of the GMT, the same as Bangladesh. Mahendranagar is on the same longitude as Colombo while much of Bangladesh is east of Jhapa. During my feeble attempts to see if this transition to sanity could be done, what I have been told is that it is a deep-seated element of Nepali nationalism-basically to be 'ahead' of India, which is GMT+5 1/2. Well, we could still be that and more (if that matters so much) without being GMT+5 3/4, only if we followed the good examples of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka by keeping NST at GMT+6. The added bonus would be rationality and comfort as well. Can we make such a transition on, say, the coming Dasain or 00:00:01 hrs of 01.01.2004?

Dipak Gyawali,
Patan Dhoka

. Why do we have to base Nepal Standard Time on what India does or doesn't do? So what if their meridian is Hyderabad? We have our base on the longitude of Mahalangur Himal. We follow ours, they follow theirs. Besides, Nepal is an elongated east-west country, and there should be no problem having two time zones if we think that's feasible. Let's stop following other people around and make our own pragmatic decisions based on what suits us without giving up our uniqueness and identity.

Rohit Kumar Gurung,
London