Three centuries ago, a Dutch mathematician named Christian Huygens invented a new religion. He didn’t mean to. All he did was to build a pendulum clock that allowed people, for the first time in history, to keep track of hours and minutes accurately. But over the decades, this power attracted millions of followers.

The clock, however, is not omnipotent. Yes, it will get a lot of attention around the globe on New Year’s Eve, 1999, but that is the exception. Many cultures still march to different drummers. Time seems to move faster in Frankfurt than in San Salvador. Monks in Burma know it is time to get up when there is enough light to see the veins in their hands, and showing up on time is cause for ridicule in Mexico Robert Levine and his researchers visited sites around the world to measure the accuracy of public clocks and to time how long it takes downtown pedestrians to walk 60 feet and postal clerks to sell a stamp, in Switzerland, clocks are slow or fast by an average of just 19 seconds. In Brazil, one man was more than three hours off when he told Levine it was “exactly 2:14”. At the central post office in Jakarta, Levine was sent outside to street vendors.

Much of the world lives on what Levine calls “event time.”In Paris, you might set a business meeting for 3 p. m, but in Burundi, you ask how long it takes to get to the nearest market, you might get an answer like “the time it takes to cook rice.”

If that sounds appealing, don’t be too hasty to move abroad. Clock addiction is tough to break. Learning a new pace of life is like mastering a foreign language. And there are drawbacks to timeless living. You might be able to show up for work at your convenience. But you could spend a day or more waiting to make a telephone call. You feel slighted in the United States if your lunch date never shows; but in Kenya, a perfectly reasonable excuse is that on the way to meet you, he ran into a friend and decided to join him for lunch instead.

Levifie seems to think than the West is becoming more devoted to the clock with each passing minute. A new atomic clock is so accurate that it won’t be off by more than a second a million years from now. And clock worship appears to be spreading to the developing world, where vendors hawk watches on city streets. But often they are selling prestige rather than punctuality. On some of their watches, the hands don’t move.

The author quotes the example that clocks in Switzerland “are slow or fast by an average of just 19 seconds” while “in Brazil, one man was more than three hours off” in order to imply _ .