Mysql Setting Indian TimeZone (Asia/Calcutta)

Problem : 

The following query : 

select count(1) cnt,date_format(from_unixtime(absoluteTime),'%D-%M-%Y') as date1 from a,b where a.id = b.fid and b.col2 = 'xyz' group by date1 order by absoluteTime asc

Gave different results on my local machine as compared to the server hosted on EC2.

When I did : 

mysql> show variables like '%time_zone%

I got : 

+------------------+---------------+

| Variable_name    | Value         |

+------------------+---------------+

| system_time_zone | EST           |

| time_zone        | SYSTEM |

+------------------+---------------+

Which means that mysql is picking the system time zone which is EST(some US time zone).

Solution : 

1. I checked time_zone* tables in mysql db - they were empty. So I did 2.

2. mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo | mysql -u root mysql (Source)

3. I edited /etc/my.cnf file and put this line there : default_time_zone=Asia/Calcutta   

now service mysqld restart