My Turn: What Happened to the Weekend?
Looking back at 2020, I have been mourning the loss of the weekend. As a ripple effect of the paramount year that it was, days, weeks, and months merged into each and we lost track of where work started and where it ended. Or did it end at all? Weekdays bled into weekends and I don’t mean the lackadaisical state of idealistic college days submerged in artistic pursuits fueled by endless cups of coffee in seaside cafes. Those were the days! Now I envy such lack of schedule and would happily trade that with household chores and the ever-present, creeping snarls of working at home. Any takers?
In the pre-globalized India of my childhood, a weekend was a joyous, no pressure occasion. You could almost always rely on its regular occurrence except for an invitation to some extended family function, ceremony, or wedding. There was always a chance of an unexpected arrival of out-of-town relatives, which meant you took them sight-seeing over the weekend. But if weekends were lost to such surprises, no love was lost because most parents worked strictly from 9 to 5. Without arduous household chores due to household help, they were able to spend time with family. Gadgets did not demand their attention and magazines did not urge them to indulge in “me time.” As a result, the weekend was a lounge on the balcony in wicker chairs kind of affair, basically a non-issue.
In America, as a new immigrant, all the things one could do on the weekend were not only luring but titillating. The “Work Hard, Play Hard” motto was enthralling like a sprint until one crashed. In the days of pre-marriage and pre-children, even doing laundry on the weekend seemed like a chance wasted instead of being seen or enjoying what America had to offer. Globalized (aka Americanized India) followed suit pretty quick. With the pressures of multinationals, social media, and sixty-hour work weeks, a shrewd expectation started to seep into the laid-back Indian life just as road rage and fast food had some years prior. Along with expansion of opportunities, it was an innocence lost; a price we paid for progress.
So the weekend had triumphed. It was a world-wide phenomenon. We demanded it, we lived for it in a perpetual countdown state. Radio, TV, the internet, they all reminded us of how many days remained until the glorious Friday. We lauded the miseries of Monday. And somehow this state of being became normal, to live not in the present but at the mercy of two days that would perhaps be taken over by fixing the washing machine, but nonetheless were ours to call ours. Until the weekend decided to disappear. We found ourselves in Zoom meetings with our children crawling over our backs (thank god for the mute and video off buttons), statutory online education, early rising on Sunday mornings to meet unmet deadlines. Do we even remember the comforts of weekend getaways?
On the other hand, there have always been weekend skeptics, thoughtful pre-fad heroes and heroines. My Vedanta teacher Swami Parthsarthy always said, “Intense work is rest.” He proposed that we should derive so much satisfaction from what we do that it becomes reviving and rejuvenating, so that we are freeing ourselves from the confines of the dangling carrot over our heads called the weekend. And who can forget the classical statement by none other than Maggie Smith, the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey, who quite innocently asks of working men, “What is a weekend?” Years later, I am still laughing but this time I also marvel at her complex satirical rhetoric, echoing her brilliant question as an antidote to the existential conundrum of our times.
Preeti Hay is a freelance writer. Her writings have appeared in publications including The Times of India, Yoga International, Yogi Times, Khabar, India Currents, and anthologies of fiction and poetry.
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