Holiday

Last Sunday was a holiday. Of course, it was a Sunday, which is normally holiday, but apart from that, it was again a holiday for Keralites as it was Vishu, the start of a new year. Invariably it comes every year on 14^th of April and this year it was unfortunate that it came on a Sunday. Because it came on a Sunday, Keralites lose a holiday.

Baisakhi (which is start of a new year in many parts of North India) came a day earlier, on Saturday. Keralites who work in north India in 5 days-a-week offices lose two holidays.

Again, 14^th of April is Ambedkar jayanthi, the birth anniversary Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar who was the architect of our constitution of India, which is a public holiday.

So, you lose one more holiday?

Of course, problems have solutions – so, in a situation when the holiday happens on a Sunday, one method had been to give a compensatory holiday. But how many compensatory holidays can one take for a day that happened to be two or three holidays?

Or you can convert the holiday into cash. If the important day was not a Sunday, I could have got a holiday but now I worked on a day which could have been a holiday. So I should get paid for it, shouldn't I?

Now, I understand that today is again a holiday. If I can take a compensatory holiday tomorrow, I get a long weekend, right?

But what do you do on a holiday? There are people who use holidays to go to market, wash last week’s laundry, go out to play golf or simply do nothing. Some would even sleep the whole day. I would prefer to make sure that my bar is well-stocked and have a few like-minded friends over.

But to enjoy a holiday, the first and foremost requirement is that you should have a job. The famous dialogue of one of the movie says, ‘this job hunting is getting on my nerves. After getting a job, I really want to take a couple of holidays and enjoy …’