A reader asked, when calculating departure and arrival times between two undisclosed locations in Iran and India, why are the time zones only a half-hour apart?

Good question.

Here are some answers for your reading enjoyment (truth/fact verification is up to the reader):

1. Only the Swiss can make perfect timekeepers so the rest of the world’s clocks have drifted with time.
2. The Iranian nuclear research programme has been going on longer than we thought and messed up many atomic clocks in the Middle East.  Same for India and its clock-based relationship to Pakistan, Nepal and the rest of the world.
3. The Einsteinian gravitational wave spacetime field bending theory never really caught on in certain parts of the globe and thus seems to have a weaker effect there.

4. There are many nations that opt to follow a different time zone than is common elsewhere. Some locations opt to observe times that are less than a full hour off of neighbouring time zones — Nepal for example is a quarter hour off India, which is a half hour off the normal pattern. Nepal does not recognise summer time and never alters the clock during the year. The abnormal time zone settings are not limited to Asia — the State of South Australia, for example, opts to use a half-hour time zone rather than a full hour. [Read more: Why is India, Nepal, Iran, and Kabul thirty minutes off of the rest of the world’s time? Ex. It’s 7:18 pm in Houston Texas, 1:18 am tomorrow in London, 7:18 am tomorrow in Bangkok, 10:18 am tomorrow in Sydney, and 4:48 am in Kabul. 4:48. Why 30 min diff? | Answerbag http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/909906#ixzz1oTCYg64d]

5. The Chavez Rule: It’s my country and I’ll do what I want to distinguish my people’s proper sense of time from yours.
6. Forget about me.  Ask you average basement geographer.