The iMetric System

As a person with a science and technology educational background, I am a lover of the metric system of measurement. It’s much simpler and more uniform than the stupid Imperial system with foot-pound-pint stuff! But let’s not forget that there’s a system that is even worse — the “iMetric system”: the very unique measurement system that is prevalent in present day India.

How can it be worse than the metric or imperial system? Well, because it uses elements of both those systems and some elements from other lesser known and/or obsolete systems. Also, you have to know when to use which system. And the worst of all, the rules for when to use which system change from region to region and context to context!

1. Length Measurement

The metric has it nice and simple — a meter and then multiply or divide by powers of 10 (10, 100, 1000, …) to give you kilometers (1000m) for bigger distances and centi- or millimeters (0.01m and 0.001m respectively) for smaller ones.

The imperial system also has it simple-ish — 12 inches in a foot and 3 feet in a yard; miles (5280 feet) for the measurement of bigger distances.

The iMetric system uses all of the above — meter and its variants, inches, feet and yards. And there are rules for when to use which for length measurement -

Rule #1 Road distances are written in meters and kilometers. So, the signs on a highway will say “Agra — 150 km” or “U-turn — 300 m”. (Even though distances are not measured in miles, the word “mile” can still be used metaphorically in literature or political speeches, e.g. “miles to go before I sleep!” or “this is a milestone for the country”)

Rule #2 Height of a person is always measured in feet and inches, for example, a matrimony advertisement or a flier for a lost person — “Height — 5 feet 8 inches, colour — wheatish”. (It took me some time after moving to Germany to remember my own height in centimeters).

Rule #3 Foot is almost exclusively used in measuring land that you own or are constructing buildings on. For example — a house with a 10-feet front, or a 60-feet wide street in front of the house.

Then there are other units like “kos”, “angul” etc that were mentioned in the ancient Indian economics text called, Arthashastra. These units are actually not used for measurement in present day India but they do make their way into speech through idioms and phrases.

2. Area Measurement

Metric system: square m, square km (10001000 sqm), square cm (1/10001/1000 sqm) etc

Imperial system: square feet, square yards (3*3 sq feet), acres (4840 sq yards) etc iMetric system: all of the above + some traditional Indian units. Rules for when to use which units for area -

#1 When measuring really big areas like a whole state or country for official records, square km is used. For example — the state of Rajasthan in India is 342,239 sq km (which is incidentally the closest in area and population to Germany; I checked it when putting the size of Germany in perspective).

#2 Other relatively big areas, e.g. national parks, are measured in acres. For example, the area of the main campus of my alma mater in India, BHU (Banaras Hindu University), is over 1300 acres and that is not counting its agricultural campus of over 2000 acres. (This, by the way, makes BHU the biggest residential university, by area, in Asia and also 12 times bigger than the smallest country in the world — Vatican city.)

#3 Typically, the area of houses or residential lands is measured and advertised in square yards. “Our house is 230 yards!” a person might boast. Colloquially, people don’t say “square yards” but simply “yards” when mentioning the area like this. The listener knows instinctively that they mean area, not distance.

#4 Nowadays, the area of “mass-produced” residential flats and houses in big construction projects is measured and advertised in square feets. In the most expensive areas of India (which are also the most expensive in the world), a flat of just 900 square feet might fetch 1 crore rupees or more. (See the unit “crore” in the “money measurement” section). With its large population, India has a general lack of living space. The house size is becoming smaller. So, the usage of a small unit like square feet makes more sense than sq. yards or sq. meters!

#5 Farming lands, especially in rural northern India, can still be measured in “bigha”, a traditional Indian unit of area. As per Wikipedia, “there is no standard size for bigha”. In different places in India, it can range from 1,500 to 6,771 square meters. Taking an example from the region of India I myself come from (western part of the state of Uttar Pradesh), a Bigha is subdivided into “kachha bigha” (“raw bigha”) and “pakka bigha” (“ripe bigha”) and can range from 625 sqm to 2500 sqm. The calculation is actually too complicated for my small brain! And while bigha is not an official unit, you might hear the farmers talking about their land exclusively in bighas. And the local legal officials handling the land-related cases would use them too.

#6 There is another unit of area measurement in India — “Chatak”. It is equal to 45 square feet and is only used in the Bengal region.

3. Volume Measurement

Metric System: Liters (1 Liter = 1000 cm3), ml (milliliter), cl (centiliter), Cubic meters (= 1000 liters)

Imperial System: (Fluid) ounce, pints, quarts, gallons (different gallon for the US and the UK)

iMetric System: surprisingly only the Metric units … but (you knew there was ‘but’ coming) with a twist on the terminology.

For some reason, several centuries of British rule left the volume measurement unaffected in India (the Brits managed to influence all else though). In India, the volume of things is still measured entirely in ml and liters. The word “gallon” is used but exclusively for specific containers for purified drinking water that are sold in most suburban areas. You buy a “gallon” (i.e. one of these containers) and invert it over a water dispenser with a tap. This “gallon” actually contains 20 liters of water. Now that increasingly more people are installing water purifiers in their homes, gallons (the containers, not the units) are becoming less popular. Though, they are still the best way of carrying water from one place to another (unless it’s about supplying large amounts of water to drought-hit areas; that’s when water tankers are used).

Another terminology confusion regarding volume measurement in India is “kilo”. Many Indians use the terms “kilo” and “liter” interchangeably. For example — “get 2 kilo milk today instead of our usual 1; we have guests coming!” When I was a kid, we had a cow and, in later years, a buffalo and my parents sold milk to the neighbors. I never heard my parents or the neighbors use the term “liter” when measuring the milk. And it was all fine for me until I got to the 6th or 7th grade. That’s when I learnt about units of measurement. I told my parents that “kilo” was a wrong term to be used for volume measurement. They paid no attention whatsoever to me and continued their work in their way. To this day, they continue to say “kilo” when they mean liters and honestly, it doesn’t make any difference because the other person understands what they mean. It’s only my science-oriented-OCD brain that is annoyed by it!

4. Weight Measurement

Metric system: gram, kilogram (1000 gm), milligram (1/1000th of a gm) etc

Imperial system: ounces, pound (16 ounces), stones (14 pounds) etc iMetric system: all of the above + some traditional Indian units. Rules for when to use which units for weight -

#1 Except in special circumstances, as mentioned in the next rules, things are measured in grams and kilograms. For example, you might yourself weigh 60 kgs and might want to buy 200 grams of ginger from the weekly vegetable market.

#2 In the specific case of buying wool, ounces and pounds are used. I remember my childhood days when my father would go to the wool store in winters to buy bowls of wool for my mother’s knitting projects and the shopkeeper would say — “This is authentic Australian wool! Soft as butter, feet it! A bit expensive though, 150 rupees an ounce!” (or whatever the price was). I was too little to know why the wool was almost always Australian or why the unit was ounce.

#3 When shopping for gold, you must use the ancient Indian unit of ‘tola’ which is apparently now standardized as 11.6638038 grams. The hundredth part of Tola, called ‘Ratti’ is also used by jewelers. Fun fact: Ratti is based on the seeds of a pea/bean plant and is a remnant of the Indus valley civilization. Other related units are ‘chatak’ (different from the Bengali unit for area) which is equal to 5 tolas or 58.32 grams, ‘pav’ (4 chataks or ~250 grams), and ‘ser’ (4 pav or ~1000 grams). This last one appears in many Hindi/Urdu stories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And ‘chatak’ is used by many rural people as a metaphor for “a very small quantity”.

5. Temperature Measurement

Imagine this. An Indian friend tells you a story of him going to pilgrimage in Kedarnath. “It was freaking freezing! In my hometown, I have never seen a temperature below 5 but the temperature in Kedarnath was -10 degrees.” Then the same friend tells you one day “Yesterday I had to go to the doctor’s. I had a fever of 102 degrees!”

“102 degrees!” you are shocked and wonder why the friend hasn’t spontaneously combusted yet. He hasn’t because of the temperature measurement peculiarities of the iMetric system!

Metric System: degree Celsius (and Kelvin for very scientific conversations)

Imperial System: degree Fahrenheit (By the way, have you ever read the history of Fahrenheit and how scientists came to “mark the scale”. It’s a super confusing story, so confusing that to this day I am not sure if the Fahrenheit scale even makes any sense!)

iMetric System: both of the above with very specific rules -

#1 Degree Celsius is used officially for pretty much everything — weather report on TV, teaching metal melting points to kids in a science lab etc. For example, the “record-breaking winter” in Delhi is reported as -1 degree (Celsius).

#2 One exception to the above rule is body temperature measurement which is unequivocally measured in Fahrenheit, e.g. a “102 degree fever”. If a doctor were to tell a patient’s temperature in degree C, the doctor would be considered either a quack or an idiot or both.

Funny (and tragic) thing though is that most people don’t even realize that it’s two different units they are using. Or maybe it was just that one fool who never did — me. For close to 20 years of my life, I never realized that a 100 deg for water-boiling, as written in my book, was not the same as 100 deg for fever. Also, even when I realized it, I didn’t question the usage of two different units at all. “It’s the way it is!”

6. Money Measurement and Counting

Metric and Imperial Systems: When it comes to counting and defining money, all countries in the world use the decimal system, i.e. a counting and division system based on 10, 100 and 1000s. Okay, that’s not totally true. There are two exceptions — Mauritiana and Madagascar, whose currencies are theoretically non-decimal. Why only theoretically? Because the (non-decimal) sub-units are too small to be used in practice.

The decimal system dominates the world of money and counting in general. Even the very-loyal-to-Imperial-units-countries like the UK have long redefined their currency to be a 100-based system. So, a modern British pound has 100 pence as compared to the old Pound which had 20 shillings (and 1 shilling = 12 pennies).

iMetric System: Indian currency system is also decimal. Though, it wasn’t always that way. Before 1957, an Indian Rupee had 16 “annas” and 1 anna was 6 “paisas”. Even after the decimalization of the currency, it took decades upon decades to root out the anna-paisa based thinking from people’s minds. I remember that even up until the mid 1990s, many people from rural areas used the terms “chaar-anna” (4 annas) for a 25 (decimal) paisa coin and “aath-anna” (8 annas) for 50p. Again, it didn’t hurt anyone or caused any confusion because the buyer and the seller both knew what was meant.

While the term “paisa” has been retained in the INR (Indian New Rupee) where 1 Rupee is 100 Paisas, the term “anna” is still used in idioms and figures of speeches. For example — a very cheap and low-quality thing can be said to be “worth 2 annas”. There are other money terms that are also used in everyday phrases, such as “Taka”. Taka was a currency in eastern parts of India. It is now the name of the official currency of Bangladesh (which was an eastern part of pre-independence India).

In the context of counting, the most unique part of the iMetric system though is the terms used for big sums. While most of the westernized world uses a system of multiplying by 1000 and terms like millions, billions (UK and US have difference in ‘billion’ too; US billion is 1000 million but UK billion is a million million), and trillions, India uses a system of multiplying by 100 (the separating commas are also placed after 2 digits), with specific terms like ‘lakh’ (100,000), ‘crore’ (100 lakhs), ‘arab’ (100 crores) and such. And they are deeply embedded in Indian culture.

7. Time Measurement

There is only one popular system of time measurement in the world — the “sexagesimal” system, i.e. a system based on division by 60. I actually wondered why we humans use a decimal system (10-base) for measuring everything but time and why base-60 of all things? Apparently, it goes back to the ancient babylonian and sumerian civilizations. They used a 60-based system for counting, possibly because then anything can be easily divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. So, when used for time measurement, this system allows us to divide an hour into 2 parts, 3 parts, 4, 5, or even 6 parts quite easily. Though, I am sure that if we humans had started to use any other system, we would’ve gotten used to it and would’ve found that quite convenient. And also, why don’t we use the sexagesimal system for counting other things then? This might go back to ancient India where zero was invented which led the wheels of the decimal system in motion.

Another thing worth mentioning here is that humans have also experimented with decimal time. Apparently, France used a decimal time system (1 day = 10 decimal hours, 1 decimal hour = 100 decimal minutes, 1 dMinute = 100 dSeconds) for 6–7 years during the French revolution (1794–1800). More recently, the Swiss watch company Swatch (and the Swiss know a thing or two about measuring time or at least selling time measuring gadgets, i.e. watches) came up with a decimal time system where a day was divided into 1000 decimal minutes or “beats”, counted from 000 to 999; 000 being midnight and 500 noon. Needless to say that the system didn’t pick up (even though Swiss watches remain as popular as ever).

Coming to the iMetric system of time measurement. There are no surprises here. Indians also measure time in the same way as everyone else: 1 day = 24 hours, then 60 minutes and 60 seconds. But that doesn’t mean that Indians are ever on time. If you are planning to meet with an Indian and they say “I will be there in 5 minutes!”, those ‘5 minutes’ van anything between 5 minutes and 2 hours. This is the reason why IST (Indian Standard Time) is jokingly referred to as Indian “Stretchable” time. So, when a wedding invitation card in India mentions a dinner time of 7 pm, the guests don’t show up before 8:30 pm. Also, I have never seen those “2-minute noodles” sold by Maggi in India being cooked in 2 minutes, at least not the way Indians prepare them.

Also, India also briefly had daylight saving time, not surprisingly during the British Raj. The British government found it inconvenient that when they changed summer/winter time in London, the time in India remained the same. So, they experimented with daylight saving in India for some years (1942–1945; during WWII). This was stupid on two accounts — 1) India is a relatively low-latitude country and the difference in day-time length is not that stark in summer or winter, and 2) Indians are already so confused and nonchalant about time that you are inviting a disaster by adding the clock-change component. Actually, this might be the reason why India doesn’t use multiple time zones even though it easily could -

India lies between longitudes of 28 degrees East (a place called Ghuar Moti in Gujarat) and 97 degrees E (Kibithu in Arunachal Pradesh). That’s a difference of almost 70 degrees. Because the Sun takes 1 hour to move 15 degrees, India observes a difference of around 4 hours 40 minutes in the sun-rise (and sun-set) in the easternmost and westernmost parts. If Indian states were independent countries, they could easily be using 3–4 different timezones to cover this large difference. But they don’t and it’s a good thing because think about all those train routes of 36–48 hours or even longer running across India. Operating those trains would be a bigger chaos than it already is. Or those cricket matches taking place in different Indian cities during an IPL (Indian Premier League) season. Trains might be or not be on time but we Indians can’t tolerate any confusion about the time of a cricket match!

In the end, India is happy with just one timezone even though it means that you have a really early sunrise if you are in the states of Assam or Meghalaya but a quite late sunset if you are in Rajasthan or Gujarat. It’s similar to the extremely late dinner culture of Spain which follows CET — Central European Time — but lies much further in the west relative to other central European countries.

Dates and Stuff

Yes, Indians love to eat dates!

Oh right, we are talking about “dates”. No, most of us Indians don’t (openly) date because our parents don’t allow it!

But I think we were talking about “dates”, the numbering of days in a month and year and other calendar stuff. Well, that’s a complicated subject.

Remember the year 2012 when people were worried that the world was coming to an end? You know what was all that about? Calendar. Apparently, the ancient Mayan civilization had a calendar that ended in 2012 (some say, it was only because the Mayans ran out of space on the rock they were writing their calendar on). This story is but one illustration of the existence of many different calendars in the world over the history. In India itself, there are many different calendar systems with their own date systems.

Let’s discuss some of the most used calendars in India. There is of course the Gregorian calendar (aka “Christian calendar”) introduced by the British. Unless it’s about religious stuff, Indians use the Gregorian calendar. So, when they say “date” in India, Gregorian date is what they mean.

Then there is the Hindu Vikram Samvat calendar that started counting the years 57 years before the Gregorian one. In all Hindu religious ceremonies and pujas, the priests mention the Vikram year, month and date. It’s a solar calendar that uses lunar (not lunatic) months. So, the dates are as per the phases of the moon and are called tithis. They don’t line up at all with the dates and that’s why pretty much all Hindu festivals are a source of great contention — on which date do you celebrate Diwali or Holi or Rakshabandhan … Usually, the Hindu calendar tithi of a festival spills over two dates. Half the experts go for this date and half for the other. The common public just picks one based on their faith in the experts, based on their neighbors’ choice and sometimes based on personal convenience!

Then there is Muslim Hijri calendar which starts counting the years from the year Hazrat Muhammad traveled (made a “hijr”) from Mecca to Madina, i.e. 622 years after the Gregorian calendar. It’s a lunar calendar and would have the same problem of a day spilling over two Gregorian dates but most muslims follow the Mecca time or dates in case of contention.

Then there is also the Bengali samvat (spoken as sambat in Bengali) which has its epoch 593–594 years after the Gregorian calendar and is a solar calendar. I don’t have much idea about this calendar and I never had to.

Surely, there are many more calendar systems in India like the Parsi calendar (for the small zoroastrian community in the western parts of India) and I can’t list them all. The point is that India has many systems to define dates. Though, you shouldn’t have problems navigating India due to that because the Gregorian calendar is used by default for everyday life. Though, that doesn’t mean that Indians have any special respect for dates. But they still respect dates more than time!

A British friend was once telling me, in a half funny, half annoyed manner, that many older Indian guys that he dealt with for buying and selling houses all had a date of birth 1st January. How was that possible? Well, it’s not a magic trick! Noting down the date of a child’s birth wasn’t something that Indians bothered themselves with. People of the generation of even my parents, i.e. born in the 1950s and 60s, don’t know their exact birthdays. They probably know the religious calendar day they were born on but not an actual date. So, when they needed to register for university or a job or something, they just chose a random date. And because 1st Jan is just the most convenient date to choose, many elderly Indians migrating to the UK in the decades past were all seemed to be born on the new year’s day. It’s not like a whole generation of women jointly decided to get pregnant on a fixed date and then deliver the baby on exactly 1st Jan! Though, how cool would that be!

So, there you have it, the Indian measurement “iMetric” system. There are too many shades and too many little things in the system to cover it in one piece of writing. So, don’t blame me if you apply the knowledge you gained here in India and fall short.