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March 27. Aaah. I can barely wait for it. It's World Whisky Day, you know. Hic!
And September 19, too. It's the International Talk-Like-a-Pirate day. I can see myself shouting “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum” to my bureau chief. But I think he is a whisky man.
I have also started dreaming about August 21 — the International Day for Lucid Dreaming. Lucid? Good, because currently my dreams are anything but.
Actually, I am looking forward to the whole year — all days, without pride or prejudice.
No room for either, because there are no ordinary days left in the calendar now. Every day is a red letter day of some kind.
When we are not celebrating minor and major religious festivals, there are other celebratory days that marketers have invented or appropriated — Valentine's Day is a marketer's day, so is World Smile Day!
Even those minor festivals are getting bigger and bigger, intruding into the workplace, and into your daily life.
It never ends
Last Friday, in Delhi, for instance, people were dashing off early from work to attend Lohri festivities — the simple bonfire of yesteryear which began very late in the evening (well after the work day) and was a low-key affair in neighbourhood colonies has now sparked into major conflagrations, with DJs, dance, and tamasha .
Next thing you know, it will be a national holiday. Already schools, sympathetic to their fasting teachers, are giving off days for Karva Chauth — and so are several workplaces.
But let's ignore festivals, which are part of our traditional heritage, so have some sort of rationale, thin as it might be.
What's fascinating is the number of zany ‘observance' days that have crept into the calendar — so many that even poor Wiki only captures half of them.
I have no bone to pick with the UN Days – I am all for World Heart Day, World Hand-washing Day, World Tiger Day, World Environment Day and so on.
Well, almost.
But just imagine when all sorts of lobby groups and activists stake out a particular day as theirs and hijack it on the calendar — there is a World Vegan Day for instance, staked out by one Louise Wallis, president and chair of the Vegan Society UK.
Wonder why the non-vegetarians are keeping quiet and not taking a day for themselves. Especially as if to rival International Women's Day on March 8, there's now a Men's Day on November 19!
World Ballpoint Day
Believe it or not, there is also a World Ballpoint Day, which stymies me. Given the rate of extinction faced by fountain pens, I think I will be more sympathetic to the cause of a fountain pen day.
On World Hello Day on November 21, you have to say hello to at least ten people. Then there's the World Smile Day, when I suppose you go around drawing smileys or grinning away. And hurrah for the Towel Day, where fans of Douglas Adams carry towels around to show their love for the author of TheHitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy .
But in all this, I feel sorry for the poor Saturday and Sunday, the most looked forward days on the calendar.
Oh, well, guess now we have to take every day as it comes.
As for me, well, like poet Philip Larkin I prefer to think of Days as “Where we live/ they come, they wake us/ time and time over/ they are to be happy in/ where can we live but days?”
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