Memorial Day Weekend

This weekend is a long weekend for most of the people living in America. Why most? Because I come in the second group of people who work on the weekends. In a way it is good that I have the weekdays to myself and I can do my school work then. But otherwise it's a pain because I can never do anything on the weekend. Yes, after 6pm I'm free, but can't really go for an out of town trip. Only if I had this Saturday and Sunday off, we would have decided to go somewhere, do something exciting.

The long weekend - as the Americans like to put it - is due to Memorial Day. It falls on the last Monday of May and is a day in the honor of all those who died on the battlefield.

This is something I really like about America. "What?" You may ask. Well, the idea that a national holiday falls either on a Monday or a Friday. There's no set date for them, only a set day - first or last Monday or Friday. Instead of two days to relax, people get three. I doubt that this could be accomplished in India. First of all, if something major - Independence Day, Republic Day, or Gandhi Jayanti - happens to fall on a weekday, schools ask their students to attend the "missed" classes on a Saturday. This is how it used to be a while ago. Eventually, Saturday's became another one of the "weekdays." So was the case at my school - Xavier's, Delhi.

Be it students or employees, everybody in India is pushed to their limits. And it starts early on. Why do they have to work so hard? Why can't they live like their American or British counterparts? I understand, the answers to these questions are Population and Competition. But that certainly doesn't mean that a human would be tested on every corner, in everything he/she does. Huh, and with the quota, things are definitely going to get worse.