All of India is on one time zone, which is called Indian Standard Time. It's pretty amazing, considering the size of the country (1.27 million square miles; about one-third the size of the U.S. and while it takes up only 2.4% of the world's land area, 15% of the world's population lives here). In fact, right now here's what time it is in India right now.But the big joke is that Indian Standard Time is actually a joke about when people show up for scheduled events. Any time from 15-90 minutes late for something seems to actually be the standard. And the strangest part -- no one seems to care. One person told me that the biggest difference between Mumbai (fka Bombay) and Hyderabad is that in Mumbai, when you have an appointment with someone you know they'll show up at some point during the day, but in Hyderabad there's no guarantee they'll show up at all!
The other odd time thing is the hours that some of the Indians work. For people who are employed by western companies, many of them work a 2-11pm shift (or later shift), in order to have overlap with the US offices to make it easier for people to work together. That's pretty much the shift we work when we are over here as well.
When Deloitte first opened an operation in Hyderabad, they were actually office sharing with a software company. The employees of the software company would work until 6pm, then the Deloitte employee would take over that person's desk and computer and work from 6pm to 4am or so. Yikes!
