If an extra day were not added to the calendar every fourth year, we would run into the trouble of celebrating
our all too familiar seasonal festivities. The Grishmer Chhuti (summer vacation) would invariably come in the
Haimantic (mid-October) days in every 754 years. The same thing would happen to Bangla's Sharodio
Parbon (the Durga Puja), which would be celebrated in the summer month of Baishakh (April) instead of the
usual Kartik (October) month. Who would want that? To keep sanity to all these the timekeepers of the
western world had devised a very clever method. They opined what's so wrong in adding one extra day
once every four years to keep the seasons all intact.

It all started like this. Mother Nature is playing some cruel mathematical tricks with us for a long long time.
This trick is to do with Earth's rotation. There is some odd thing about the way the Earth travels around the
sun. We all know that the time it takes the earth to spin once on its axis is a day. The time it takes the
Earth to complete its annual trip around the sun is a year. Believe it or not, these units of time do not divide
evenly! In summary, there is a "Spin Problem." If the Earth would spin a tad slower than its normal spin, the
year would be precisely 365 days instead of 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and a little over 45 seconds.
Think of it, if the day were just a minute longer than it is, we would not need Leap Year Day. Can one stretch
the time a little longer? How about redefining the unit of time? Instead of 1440 minutes making up the day
(24 x 60 minutes), define one day equal to 1441 minutes. Our entire problem relating to "Spin Problem" will
simply go away. However, since we cannot change the unit of time, the next best thing the Roman pundits
have devised is to compensate the world for losing approximately one-fourth day every year. That action
however created another problem.

The Romans were smart enough to add one-fourth day to get the 365.25 days Julian Year. However, the
discrepancy was still there. It takes the Earth to go around the sun in 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and
a little over 45 seconds. However, the Romans added an extra 11 minutes and 15 seconds to the calendar.
This addition has caused the seasons to creep through the calendar once again, only slower, and in the
reverse direction. According to a calculation, the Earth would run into the same problem as described
earlier but this time once in about 23,000 years. Fortunate for us, things never reached that far. In Vatican,
during Pope Gregory XIII's time (1582) the calendar was about ten days out of whack. To correct the problem
10 extra days were added to the calendar, which has brought us thus far without any seasonal problem.

A new rule (Gregorian) was put in place to make sure that the calendar maintains the seasonality. This rule
is the following: If the year is divisible by 100, it is not a Leap Year UNLESS it is also divisible by 400.

It turns out that the Gregorian Rule is not a foolproof rule, after all. Following this rule, the Earth's season
will again get six months out of whack once in 60,272 years. And to correct this, another rule was created.
You might as well call this 'the Modern Rule'. According to this, if the year is also divisible by 4000, it is
NOT a Leap Year. Therefore, two thousand years from now in the year 4000, there is not going to be any
Leap Year Day. In that year, February would end in 28 days. You may ask: What this correction would do
to the calendar? According to a calculation, the Earth's season would again get out of alignment once in
every 3.5 million years (to be exact 3 million 565 thousand and 426 years). A long time you might say.

Now that we are getting one extra day in this millennium year, have you considered how would you spend
the day? I wished the world would celebrate this date by taking it easy on this special day. We could have
taken the day off pondering the mathematical incongruity that was imposed on us by Mother Nature.
Nonetheless, that won't be the case. We now live in a very competitive world, indeed. Just the other day, I
was reading The Wall Street Journal, the modern day "Bible" of the world of finance in the West. One
particular news item really caught my attention. It read: "Leap Day add $ 25.26 billion to the domestic
product of USA this year." LeapSource, a Phoenix outfit that provides web-based finance and accounting
back office services computed this number. Reading this news item the corporate America is probably
heaving a sigh of relief knowing that an extra $ 25.26 billion worth of goods and services would be generated
this year due to an extra day that was applied to this year's calendar.

As I was reading the Wall Street Journal's snippet of news, I Immediately juxtaposed the news to what goes
on in an ordinary day in impoverished Bangladesh. I doubt it very much that any politician in Bangladesh in
the right frame of his mind would think about the contribution of this year's Leap Year Day to the GDP growth
of our anemic economy. Why do I say this? Because most politicians in Bangladesh, those who are not
elected to any public office, would look at one day thinking -- could I call this day a hartal day? They would
never think for a moment how much growth would be impeded by the curse of hartal. How many stomachs
would go hungry because of the work stoppage! How many lives would be lost due to hartal! How many
school, college, and university students would sit idle at home not learning the skills that would be necessary
for them to become productive citizens of Bangladesh.

Four years ago by checking the Commonwealth Online website I calculated that each day would add about
U.S. $100 millions to the GDP of Bangladesh. Therefore, if the unscrupulous politicians of Bangladesh would
not designate February 29, the Leap Year Day, as a hartal day then, Bangladesh's GDP would grow by
another 100 million U.S. dollar.

For the sake of the anemic economy of Bangladesh let me hope that this Leap Year Day goes unscathed
without having any hartals (by the opposition parties) or counter hartals (by the ruling party and their alliance).
Let the Leap Year Day be a violence free day.

Dr. A.H. Jaffor Ullah is a senior research scientist .