JOHNNY Hart’s absolutely hilarious comic strip ‘BC’ has the kid ant asking the dad ant who invented daylight saving. Dad ant tells the kid that it was Edison, but not Thomas as is commonly believed. It was his brother Mason, the inventor of the Mason Jar, who did it.

Every day, so dad ant tells the kid, Mason would go to his workshop, blow a jar as they used to blow glass jars in the old days and set it out in the sun to dry before capping it.

Little did old Mason realise that his jars were filling up with daylight and when he capped them, he got a jar full of daylight. Since blowing glass jars was his business, he soon had a whole great bunch of them all duly filled with daylight. Then one day the expected happened: just about sunset, one of the jars, perhaps too overfilled with daylight, blew the top. And, presto! the world had an extra hour of daylight.

Satisfied, kid ant turns around while dad ant nonchalantly spits out his wad of tobacco and says to himself, ‘This home schooling could turn out to be a lot more fun than I thought.’ This, I suspect, is the sentence with a little variation that some bureaucrat in Islamabad, having high-fived his lesser crony, said.

With the variation the bureaucrat’s sentence would be something like, ‘Could you believe these moronic politicians would fall for this one so soon again? Making them look like fools is going to be a lot more fun than we thought.’

As the late great Peter Ustinov once said that he suspected there was a room in the foreign office where they taught future diplomats to stammer, so too do I suspect there are several rooms in every department in the Islamabad secretariat where sinister characters concoct such imbecile ideas to be inflicted upon us poor masses via our unthinking herds of politicians. It might work for the West with its high literacy to put their clocks forward by an hour every spring and back every autumn, but in a country of just about 10 per cent actually literate people, it does not.

Go back 19 years and you first find this absurd idea almost being inflicted upon us by the first PPP government. It was the winter of 1989-90 when out of the blue came the announcement that Pakistani clocks were being set ahead — yes, ahead — in a few days’ time.

The nation immediately went into turmoil. Thank heavens we only had PTV to tell us how our lives were going to be revolutionised by this one hour of jiggery-pokery. Had private channels been then inflicted on us as now, they would have gone into overdrive screaming about how the Zionist-Hindu lobby had launched the final solution for the unmaking of Pakistan.

Good sense prevailed and the idiotic idea was killed before it could actually be put into practice. Years stumbled by and then we had The Man Who Would Refuse To Ever Know His End Is Come. One summer (was it 2002 or the year after?) it was announced that like most of the western world, we too were to put our clocks ahead by one hour.

Those very same bureaucrats, having sold their crazy idea to generalissimo-politico, were once again sniggering up their sleeves. They could hardly believe that the person who thought he was the smartest thing ever to happen to this sorry land was so easy to fool.

Shortly after we began revelling in the extra hour of General daylight, the people of Sibi being particularly enamoured of it especially when temperatures there hit 52 Celsius, I went cycling around rural Punjab. As I waited for my cup of tea at a village teashop, an elderly woman came along to ask the man what time it was. He told her and she looked a little uncertain as she turned to go. Then she stopped and asked if this was the ‘real’ 10 o’clock or Musharraf’s 10 o’clock.

This woman of rural Punjab, like all those of her kind sprinkled across the villages of the entire country, was a real Pakistani: simple, with little or no education, whose daily timetable was guided less by clocks, more by the rising and setting of the sun.

When she needed to milk her buffalo, she did not give a fig about what the clock said. She milked it when the stars above still blazed and the horizon had just a touch of colour. Summer or winter, it was the sun that set the pace for her chores of the day, the same way it did for those millions of other real Pakistanis.

The foolishness was permitted to persist for a full six months because generalissimo did not want to admit he had made a very foolish mistake. Reversion to Pakistan Standard Time was greeted with a great sigh of relief. Speaking of PST, here’s another gem which shows why we should not indulge in this gimmickry that suits only 100 per cent literate nations. Radio Pakistan and PTV announcers would tell you what o’clock it was Pakistan Standard Time. No one told those morons that the time we were going by was not PST but summer time.

If you have kept your eyes open and watched the pattern of life in Pakistan, you will know that it was the introduction of satellite TV that turned our lives around. Until then, ordinary folks would watch the nine o’clock news on PTV and hit the sack. Then came ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’, and people who could not understand a word of English stayed awake all night watching the same inanity again and again and again. And so it was since the onset of the Nutty Nineties that our lives were no longer guided by the sun.

Now when the government told the traders to do business on Sunday instead of Friday in order to stagger businesses and offices, the traders duly thumbed their noses at the government. They also told it to go to hell about closing at 9 pm. Why, it was their business and they had every right to carry on until whenever they wished, they are now on record as having said. They have every right to go home about midnight and watch Indian soap operas until the muezzin calls them to their first duty of the day. Saving electricity be damned.

Frankly, if you ask me, I say why settle for just one hour of daylight saving. We can have as many Mason Jars of daylight as we want if we set our clocks forward by, say, five or even 10 hours. Maybe even a few years. Why not claim to be living in the year 2199? Imagine the daylight and the electricity we will save by eliminating the intervening years. No half measures, I say, go the whole hog.

The writer is the author of several travel books.

odysseus@beaconet.net

It is a safe bet that there will be no mass shedding of tears when US President George W. Bush visits Slovenia to attend the final summit of his presidency between the European Union and the United States June 10.

During his two terms in the White House, trans-Atlantic relations proved so divisive for Europe that Donald Rumsfeld, the former defence secretary, famously characterised the continent as being split between ‘old’ and ‘new’. The former, according to Rumsfeld, opposed the war against Iraq; the latter approved of it.

Still, there appears to be a determination on both sides that Bush’s swansong in Slovenia should not be marred by disharmony. Some contentious issues will be discussed: an 11-year-old EU ban on US poultry imports, and the fact that the US allows citizens of some EU states but not others to enter its territory without a visa. More sensitive topics, especially those relating to civil and political rights, look set to be avoided, however.

Dimitrios Papadimoulis, a Greek left-wing member of the European Parliament, has urged the EU side to press Washington for the closure of Guantanamo Bay, the controversial prison camp in Cuba, and to demand an end to the secretive torture, detention and kidnapping programme run by the Central Intelligence Agency (allegedly with the cooperation of many European governments).

“The European Parliament wants Guantanamo closed down,” he said in a debate with representatives of EU governments and the European Commission. “We also want secret prisons closed down. Are you going to say something about that to the Americans?”

Neither the Commission nor the government of Slovenia, the current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, answered his question.

Emilou MacLean, a staff attorney with the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York, suggested that the imminent departure from office of Bush offers no pretext for European reticence on Guantanamo. In a new report, the CCR states that interrogators from a number of countries have been granted access to the prison camp by the US, where they have threatened detainees. The interrogators hailed from China, Uzbekistan, Libya, Jordan, Tunisia and Tajikistan — all of which have been criticised for human rights abuses by the US State Department.

Some 50 detainees are believed to face grave risks to their personal safety if they are returned home. Human rights activists have asked European governments to provide shelter to many of these detainees. Some of them have already been cleared for release but remain in custody.

“It is critical that the international community speaks loudly and clearly,” MacLean added. “Actions, in addition to words, are needed to close Guantanamo. We’re at a critical juncture right now at the end of a political cycle, and hopefully there is an opportunity to right the wrongs that have been created. But that is only going to happen through pro-active deeds.”

Climate change — a major irritant in EU-US ties — will feature on the agenda in Ljubljana.

Although the US is the only major industrialised country to have rejected the Kyoto protocol on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases, the European side is hoping to convince it to be more constructive in efforts to find a successor to Kyoto. Such efforts are scheduled to culminate in an agreement at a major conference in Copenhagen next year.

By that time, either John McCain or Barack Obama will have had ample time to settle into the White House. Both have indicated that they regard climate change as an urgent problem, unlike Bush who made his living in the oil industry before entering politics full-time.

Stephan Singer, a climate change campaigner with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), is not expecting any concrete results to emerge from the discussions on the environment during next week’s summit.

“The EU would be well advised not to put too much resources into negotiating with a dying administration,” he said. “The real debates will take place once there is a new president in the White House.”

Singer believes that the EU has been “lucky” in a sense that Bush has not been receptive to calls for swingeing cuts in the emissions of carbon dioxide and other substances blamed by scientists for heating the earth’s atmosphere. The lack of commitment to the environment in Washington has allowed the EU become a “self-proclaimed leader” in global efforts against climate change, he added.

“I would be happy if the US shows real leadership and embarrasses the EU into taking a stronger position,” he said. “That would be great.”

Without doubt, much of the conversations taking place on the margins of the summit will focus on the US presidential election, slated for November.

Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Britain’s Oxford University, said this week that the “working assumption” in this continent is that both McCain and Obama would be “more multilateral” than the frequently isolationist Bush administration.

Judging by his statements to date, Obama could be “a hell of a lot more multilateral,” the professor added, and his election “would be greeted with an extraordinary welcome” in Europe.

—IPS Nrews