Bombay, and India generally, isn't the only place chronometrically out of step with the rest of the world. Lots of countries, particularly in Asia, are a half-hour out of sync, including Burma, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan.

Nepal is 40 minutes off the mark. Saudi Arabia, ever the trailblazer, has some bizarre system in which clocks are supposedly reset to midnight every day at sunset.

All of this traces back to the haphazard system of timekeeping prevalent before the 1884 Washington conference that established Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the international reference point.

Prior to this, people made use of "local mean time," i.e., they figured out approximately when the sun was directly overhead, called that noon, and went from there.

India, as it happens straddles two time zones, but for obvious reasons preferred to have one uniform time throughout the country. Rather than choose between GMT+5 and GMT+6

the government apparently decided to split the difference