Taking a break

(bdnews24.com, February 11, 2011)

Everybody loves a holiday, more so when there is no real reason to have one. Many working professionals do their thing through the week, looking forward to Sundays or even two-day weekends, while some who work in government organisations get breaks more often, as the bank or office or department takes time off whenever the local authorities declare it to be a time-out. And of course, especially on the sub-continent, play day is, logically speaking, time to take a day off and...err...play! Like next week, on February 19, when Bangladesh plays India, and next month, on March 19, when Bangladesh will play South Africa in the World Cup lineup. On those two days, it has been declared - or so I read in the local newspapers – that “all educational institutions in Dhaka and Chittagong cities will remain closed”. This decision presumably has prime ministerial approval, since Sheikh Hasina was the chairperson and chief patron.

Holidays are always welcomed, but can sometimes make life more difficult for the ordinary citizen. In India, a country trying to deal with the multiple whammies of inflation, recovery from a recession, overpopulation, underemployment, hunger, poverty, corruption and the aftermath of terrorism, all of which makes it very much like so many other nations across the globe, a day off generally means a day when business slumps, where profits drop and where nothing works to par. It is a day when banks do not update accounts, credit checks and permit withdrawals, meaning that the local ATM or any-time-money machines are functioning overtime. It is a day when the plumber will not come to fix that leaking tap, the electrician cannot buy the new fuses he needs to make the power go on in your home and the quick run into town will not happen by car because the gas stations are closed so you cannot fill up the petrol tank. Mercifully, in my home city of Mumbai, there will always be a grocery store open to deal with emergency needs, the trains run smoothly for the most part, rain, shine or holiday, and the electrician does work holidays if coaxed to, though he may charge overtime.

When I was much younger and in school, I would often wonder why I never got mid-week holidays. During the monsoon, when things were soggy and nasty and no one really felt like sloshing through the puddles, which occasionally grew into satisfying floods, we walked wetly to school and back, or were ferried there by cars or buses that seemed to have become boats. The best part was that the school was situated very close to the beach, which meant that flooding was a given during the heaviest part of the monsoon. But, for some reason we resented without knowing it, we never got a day off, even when other schools did. We even had to go to school on national holidays like Republic Day and Independence Day, when we stood in the assembly hall, sang the national anthem, raised the Indian flag and then ate a small celebratory snack of cake and chips, finally going home mid-morning to watch the parade in New Delhi on television. It was a holiday, really, but never felt like one, since we had to get up early, get dressed in uniform and spit-shined shoes, trudge down the hill (I lived in a building on the very top of a hill) and go through the prescribed routine.

These days, from the very grown-up and adult perspective I have now, holidays seem to be more easy to get from the powers that be. While I do not remember holidays being declared for reasons as trivial (may cricket lovers forgive me here) as a cricket match, the working person does get a day off for national celebrations, deaths of important people, strikes, go slows and the occasional flood. Even terrorism, as experienced by a shocked and horrified city in 2008, when a team of allegedly Pakistani villains sneaked in to our city and massacred innocent people, could not stop us working, with no declaration of holidays or indeed any time off. The same thing happened so many years ago in 1992 and 1993, when riots and then bombs ripped through parts of Mumbai – the city refused to stop and take a break. This, many journalists with a stock of clichés and little originality call the “spirit” of the city. But it is actually something else, something that I needed to grow up to understand. It is the drive to survive, not any kind of ‘never-say-die spirit’ that we as citizens of the city that is Mumbai possess. We need to go about our lives in order to live, to keep going, to feed ourselves and our families. We cannot stop and smell roses, even on the cricket pitch.

But we can, of course, make sure that there are televisions in the office to watch the cricket match on!