One morning early March this year, I woke up from a dream: Manmohan Singh had announced that a developing nation like ours just cannot afford to have the number of holidays that we now enjoy. He had replaced the existing arrangement with a fresh one and issued a government order rationalizing holidays. The whole army of employees in the public and the private sector (In other words, organized working class) was up in arms against it.
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The new dispensation said that apart from the weekly holidays and the national holidays, there would be no other holiday. A hundred days (yes, a hundred!) had been declared as restricted holidays and an employee may use any ten of them. There is no cut in the leave the service conditions provide for, for personal reasons and rest and recuperation, and sickness.
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Our friends indeed have a reason to protest. Right now, Ashraf and Dinesh Menon and Tejinder Singh and Joseph have holidays on account of Guru Purnima and Good Friday and Onam and Makar Sankranti. The holidays declared to mourn the demise of leaders come as a bonus.
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With a steaming cuppa in hand, I open the newspaper. A letter, apparently from a group of bank employees, leaps to my eyes. It contains a request to declare the 3rd March this year a holiday for banks, like several other establishments. What is special about the date? Attukaal Ponkaala is performed on that day.
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True, devotees hold up traffic in a major part of the capital of Kerala for twenty-four hours from the previous evening, rendering movement from one point to another extremely difficult. True, schools are given a day’s holiday and some government offices are let off a couple of hours earlier than usual. And so are banks, one hears.
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The authors of the letter certainly know that a holiday for banks can be declared only under the Negotiable Instruments Act and would ordinarily cover the entire State. Imagine the entire state enjoying a holiday because of a festival in a temple in one corner of a city!
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Once ceded, other religious groups too will assert their right for a holiday on the days festivals are held in their places of worship. Our politicos will lose no time in allowing this in their bid to appease them and to deny the opponents a chance to champion their cause and gain access to that vote-bank.
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This will certainly give rise to similar demands from other centres. And sooner than later, we will have more holidays than working days! Can we not have enough of holidays?
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And about the practice of declaring a day’s holiday to mourn the demise of leaders, the less, said the better. It is mostly an opportunity for great rejoice because of the holiday it provides. It is only if the death occurs during a weekend that it is really mourned, because the chance for a holiday is lost!
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Let Dinesh Menon, Ashraf, Joseph and Tejinder Singh take a day’s off on whichever ten days out of the 100 restricted holidays they choose. This is not to say that Ashraf cannot take a day’s off on account of Guru Purnima, Menon cannot have a day off on Good Friday or Tejinder on Onam day or, for that matter, Joseph on Makar Sankranti day. The employees can thus celebrate the festival of their choice and the users of the public services can get their work done on any working day (including a restricted holiday).
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That would be a far cry from now, but then, will it happen? Even the most optimistic wakes up from that dream because the powers-that-be want to keep the vote-bank happy – to hell with productivity and progress!
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