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| Sauvage_x |
on Sat 31 Jul 10, 1:47 AM to Sauvage_x's blog.
Silly Hats and the Missing Month. No this is not the title of the next Harry Potter episode.
| While I worked in Nepal, on-and-off for two years, I kept notes of all the things and thoughts that happened along the way – the weird, the wonderful, the sobering. This is the fourth instalment of what I'd like to share. May it educate, entertain or amuse (or offend). |
Nepal has its quirks and idiosyncrasies.
The time difference there is five hours AND FORTY-FIVE MINUTES away from the UK. (They wanted to be 15 minutes different from India, to celebrate their national inferiority complex).
They also have their own unique calendar, which has its similarities to the Gregorian calendar: there are 12 months per year, and 29-32 days per month (they make up how many days should be in each month as they go along). I believe the current year is 2067.
When I say “they make up the calendar as they go along”, what I mean is “the serious important-looking men in silly hats make up the calendar as they go along”. Every year, as the Nepali New Year approaches (roughly April 14), lots of self-important old men in silly hats shout at each other incomprehensibly on national television about which months should get extra days here and lose days there. They are priests and they are high caste and they are experts in the sun, the moon, the stars, and silly hats, and how dare anybody challenge them, etc etc. I have never seen a group of people have so many vehemently held pet theories and grudges over such petty narrow issues, not even in academia (well…).
These arguments garner much finger-wagging and table-bashing and are rather entertaining to watch even if you have no clue what they're talking about.
| This year's argument was, however, particularly… Nepali. |
They wanted to not bother with an entire month.
Lots of important-feeling men in silly hats had started to agree with each other that the sun, the moon and the stars were misaligned and would do something awful if we didn't make grand adjustments to the calendar.
And besides, the last month wasn't that great anyway.
So the plan was, instead of having the twelfth month, they would just skip forward to the next year once the eleventh month had finished. You don't really celebrate birthdays in Nepal so that wouldn't have upset people. Great plan, no problems.
| But there was another detail, another slight issue in their plan that made it seem just a tiny bit less clever. |
The last day of the eleventh month would be a Sunday… But when they started the New Year, the men in silly hats wanted it to jump to Wednesday. Everybody else in the world would be having Monday, but 29 million people on the side of the Himalayas would be having their own magical little Wednesday because the men in silly hats say so.
They wanted the time difference to be five hours, FORTY-FIVE MINUTES AND TWO DAYS and none of the men in silly hats at any point raised the slight issue of whether this might be a really stupid idea.
Nepalis wonder why the Indians take the piss out of them but it may be because they let self-important insular men in silly hats decide that they should have Wednesday when the rest of the world has Monday.
In the end, the men in silly hats decided that they shouldn't have their own magical little Wednesday when the rest of the world is having a Monday. Not because it would interfere with their already limited integration with the rest of the world, but because some of them decided they'd made a mistake in their stellar calculations.
They didn't even get rid of the last month. How disappointing.
Disclaimer: If you are Nepali, this was likely to offend and I'm sorry for that… on the other hand, none of this is made up!?
Edited Sat 31 Jul 10, 12:25 PM by Sauvage_x
