Before Greenwich, India Measured From Ujjain: Aryabhata's Zero Line, a Spinning Earth Around 499 CE, and the 1884 Vote That Was About Charts, Not Astronomy

Let's go to a meeting room. The year is 1884. Delegates from several nations sit down at the International Meridian Conference and vote, an actual vote, on where "zero" is for the whole world's maps and clocks. They pick a line through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. That vote is the reason your phone can say "GMT+5:30". Now let me ask you something: was that line the first of its kind? No. Around 499 CE, an astronomer named Aryabhata was working with a meridian through Ujjain as a real zero point for real calculation, and in the same book he wrote that the Earth spins, about a thousand years before Copernicus. I will walk you through it from the very beginning, and I will tell you plainly why Greenwich won. It was not because Ujjain's astronomy was wrong.