Of festival holidays

The best part of a holiday is the break from early-morning routine.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Everybody loves holidays. They provide a welcome break from the dreary routine of work days. However, for some holidays have their own routine. You get up as late as you want, have a leisurely breakfast followed by a snooze, if you wish. Then there is lunch with family or friends, at home or in a club or a restaurant of choice. This again is followed by a siesta. In the evening one can go to a mall or a movie. The possibilities are immense and depend on the mood.

Holidays come in different shapes and sizes. There are regular weekends and sometimes ‘long’ weekends with other holidays getting prefixed or suffixed with the regular weekends. These long weekends may stretch to three days or more and, occasionally, with a day’s leave thrown in. There are seasonal holidays such as Christmas and New Year, Navaratri and so on. For children, schoolteachers and judges, there are summer and winter breaks to boot. There is also a system of casual leave, special casual leave, earned leave, sick leave and half-pay leave.

In India, we have a plethora of holidays linked to various festivals and other auspicious occasions such as Holi, Deepavali, Dasara, Ramnavami, Janmashtami, Rakshabandhan, Id, Chrismas, Guruparva and so on. Then there are restricted holidays, including some of those mentioned above, a limited number of which can be availed of during a year. Some of them are common to the whole country and others differ from State to State. Even those which are common to the whole country are called by different names such as Makar Sankranti, Pongal and Lohri. The Hindu New Year is also celebrated under different names in different parts of the country such as Gudi Padwa, Ugadhi, Bihu, Baisakhi and so on, sometimes on different dates.

There are national holidays on August 15 (Independence Day) and January 26 (Republic Day). There are also holidays associated with important personalities such as birthdays of Mahatma Gandhi and Ambedkar. In some States, there are additional holidays associated with other dignitaries.

To top it all there are unexpected holidays. I remember walking to the school (there were no school buses in those days) with an umbrella heavily drenched in water only to be told that it had been declared a ‘rainy day’. In recent times of course, the glee in the children’s eyes is seen to be believed when after reaching the school in the bus it is discovered that the authorities have declared it a ‘rainy day’. However, half the fun of such an unexpected holiday is marred by the fact that the early morning routine has already been gone through and there is no time to wake up lazily and relax throughout the day. Of late, there have been more sombre reasons for unexpected holidays such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the natural disasters such as floods, cloudburst and landslides.

It makes one wonder whether in India we work at all. We do work; otherwise we couldn’t have become the fifth largest economy and aspire to become the third very soon. There are also great achievements in the field of space and technology which vouch for the hard work that the people of India are capable of. Indian diaspora is very successful abroad and remits billions of dollars of foreign exchange back home. Actually on the downside, some of us have to work during the weekends too and do not get holidays at all. The Friday evening email telling us to produce a report or some other assignment by Monday morning is a dreaded phenomenon. Unlike Australia and France, in India we do not have the ‘right to disconnect’ after office hours.

The holidays, particularly the festival holidays in India, are a curse for the common man. Nobody reports to duty. The maidservants do not come. The sweeper does not come to clean the driveway or the road. The driver doesn’t come. All of them have unexpected holidays too and are absent on French leave as well. Actually one is practically confined to the house. The newspaper too doesn’t come on certain days because it has not been printed on the preceding holiday.

The next day, however, to rub salt on the wound, everyone turns up and expects to be tipped and given a box of sweets for the festival holiday which they have celebrated the day before.

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