Why are we always a day late?
Some people ask- and they ask this every year- why we Indians celebrate Eid or mark Arafah/Ramazan a day after the Arabs and the West and pretty much the entire world. This question arises because we are used to seeing the world with Japan to the extreme right and the USA to the extreme west of the atlas. But what we need to understand is that this perspective of the globe, and the International Date Line that runs between Alaska and Russia, are both arbitrary. The world is round; so technically, any longitude on the globe can be taken as the International Date Line. When it is 1st Jan in Japan, it is still 31st Dec in Alaska, and it remains so for almost 24 hours. This, despite the fact that they share the same night. The International Date Line of Islam, however, is not arbitrary. It begins at the place where the moon is first sighted. And that place is towards Western Pakistan/Iran. So naturally, the date also begins there. The 1st of Ramazan, for example, begins at Isla