Some years ago, I was at an Economic Development Board promotional event talking up Bahrain as a business destination when one India-based business lady asked curiously: “Why would businesses locate to Bahrain when the local market is so small?” To which a seasoned Indian businessman with varied interests in Bahrain replied: “Let’s look at the solutions to the supposed disadvantages – for one thing, my offices and factory turn out much more work in Bahrain than I was able to in my Indian base simply because my staff work better and there are fewer holidays.”
Don’t get me wrong – by fewer holidays, he didn’t mean that he overworked them. Rather, he meant Bahrain had far fewer public holidays for festivals and special occasions. And, he was right. India and Nepal top the list of public holidays with a minimum 35 days for festivals and patriotic occasions. Add a minimum 52 weekend Sundays – and many offices give alternate Saturdays off too – and the holiday list blooms into a leisurely stain across the work routine. And this mix is often exacerbated by labour issues, natural disasters like floods etc.
That conversation came to mind when I read that the government had rejected an appeal for the Bahrain workforce to change its weekend to Sunday and align with the rest of the world. Bahrain’s decision-makers were clear: the holiday should respect and mark the cause and spirit it is meant to serve and that means Friday in this Islamic nation. We do have Saturdays off for government and banks and many private firms too.
If you ask me that works fine because we get a full day off on Friday, a less busy Saturday even if we are working because many institutions are closed and then, if we work with overseas companies, Sundays too are not so crazy because they are closed. We can begin our Bahrain work week on Sunday, which is the weekday equivalent of the much-touted dawn wake up that I never get around to doing (habits that highly successful people swear by, I’m told) and hit our stride the next day when many countries are fighting off their Monday morning blues!
When my children were in school, they had Fridays and Sundays off to accommodate the Islamic and Christian spiritual schedules. Surprisingly, they loved the Saturdays because the mood was similar to Thursday and they felt their work week was shorter.
Giving days off to mark the birth or death anniversaries of great people is a peculiar Asian policy (although some non-Asian countries too have similar but fewer days off). More than a century after Mahatma Gandhi and India’s second Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s birth (it’s the same day, although 35 years apart), the day on which these two workaholic patriots were born is a useless holiday for us all.
Be thankful you’re not working in the Netherlands though, where they have only a maximum of nine public holidays or Ecuador with 12. The surprise in the list was Mexico – we all have a mental picture of Mexicans sunbathing and eating quesadillas while in a happy holiday mood all the time. But the Mexicans apparently have only eight public days off!
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