World clock

The Emirates sit at a convenient point on the world's clock, which is a large part of why so much long-haul aviation routes through them. Four hours ahead of UTC, the country can reach European business hours in the afternoon and East Asian ones in the morning from the same working day, and this page lines major cities up against current Gulf Standard Time so you can see, live, what o'clock it is at the other end.

The distinctive feature is that nothing here moves. The Emirates have no summer time and no history of it, so every change in the gap between Dubai and somewhere else originates at the far end. Colleagues in London and Frankfurt shift twice a year; colleagues in Mumbai, Karachi, Manila and Nairobi never do; colleagues in New York shift on different weekends from the Europeans, which is how a chain of three offices can end up rearranging itself twice in a fortnight while the middle one has done nothing at all.

Cities on the page

• Riyadh, Doha, Kuwait City, Muscat and Manama across the Gulf
• Mumbai, Karachi, Dhaka, Colombo and Manila
• London, Paris, Frankfurt, Moscow and Istanbul
• New York, Toronto, Los Angeles, Cairo, Nairobi, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sydney

India is the relationship that catches people out most often, because the offset is not a whole number: Mumbai is an hour and a half ahead of Dubai, permanently, which turns a 9 am call here into a 10:30 am call there and a nine-hour working day into a shorter overlap than anyone plans for. Nepal is stranger still, at two and a quarter hours ahead. Within the Gulf the picture is simpler — Riyadh, Doha, Manama and Kuwait City all sit an hour behind, while Muscat shares the same hour exactly.

The clocks here apply each city's real rules for today's date rather than a difference someone remembers from last year, which is the only dependable way to avoid ringing a colleague at breakfast or a relative in the middle of the night.