I'm all for a celebration or three, but we have way too many special days
Dear women! Happy Women’s Day! Or as they call it in Haryana, Crickets Chirping. I hope you enjoyed all those free-drink offers at bars last night while dancing to Beyonce. I also hope you enjoyed Happy Well That Didn’t Last Long Day, which began right after you came out of the club and got stared at by all the usual suspects in the street.
Women need and deserve to be celebrated. Nobody is more deserving of their own day than women. Pic/AFP
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I’d like to use this public platform I’ve been given to address a social evil that’s been worrying me, in these troubled times we live in. And I can’t think of a better day than Women’s Day to bring it up. It’s time we took a good hard look at ourselves as a culture and owned up to something; this whole “Happy INSERT RANDOM CELEBRATION Day” is getting out of hand.
I don’t mean Women’s Day, of course. Women need and deserve to be celebrated. Nobody is more deserving of their own day than women. You are beautiful, radiant, amazing creatures that make us men look like dirt, and I am of the opinion that you should have many more days in your honour. In fact, every day should celebrate women. Men should be slaves to women. Women are amazing. Women invented bacon, air-conditioning and The Pirate Bay. Women are Jesus. (Kids, this is why you should not write columns while your girlfriends hold a gun to your kitten’s head — Ed)
The truth is that special days are like quotas in Indian colleges; everybody wants one, and everybody gets one. And this needs to stop. Now. This is India, we don’t exactly have a shortage of celebratory or memorial days to begin with. And now we’ve got a bunch of other ones to observe. According to an international calendar over at Wikipedia, March alone has 25 different special days, so work off that Women’s Day hangover because the 14th is the International Day of Action For Rivers, where we can all go look at what used to be the Mithi River, and maybe if we cry enough, our tears will restart the damn thing.
If that’s not your thing, the same day is also Pi Day, because it’s 3/14. I’d also like to propose that we celebrate this as “Can We Please F****ng Decide Once And For All Whether We Want mm/dd or dd/mm Date Formats?!” Day. If you’re busy on 3/14 though, fear not, because you can re-celebrate this day (I’m not making this up) in July, on Pi Approximation Day, on 22/7.
But we’re not done partying in March yet. The 20th is World Day of Theater for Children and Young People. It’s also the International Day of Francophonie, which celebrates the French. Or you could celebrate the 20th as The International Day of Happiness, which is odd, because if you’re stuck with either the French, or watching an amateur production of the Panchatantra with a four year-old who needs to pee, I don’t hold high hopes for your happiness.
Or maybe on the 21st you want to celebrate World Puppetry Day, or as Manmohan Singh calls it “Tuesday”. On the 23rd, why not party down to celebrate World Meteorological Day? Or International Cigar Day (31st), which is where you tell people you’re throwing a CIGARS ONLY party, and when people show up excitedly, you set the place on fire and rid the genepool of them.
In April, everyone but Pritam can enjoy World Intellectual Property Day, and in May, we can do a Twilight marathon and slit our wrists on World Goth Day. In July, there’s World UFO Day, and August brings my two favourite celebrations; The 5th, which is International Beer Day, and the 15th, which, as everyone who went to school knows, is World Internet Appreciation Day. In India, we also celebrate it as 59th Re-Run of Border Day.
The list is endless, and I haven’t even paused to consider those poor college students, who somewhere in this packed calendar, have to figure out Rose Day, Chocolate Day, Ribbon Day, and all those other things we thought were an amazing idea in college.
I, for one, cannot wait for the point when multiple celebrations on the same day result in a full-blown riot and Lok Sabha walkout between their supporters. I’m placing my bets on October 20th, when the people celebrating World Osteoporosis Day hobble out into the streets and throw their collars and walking sticks at the guys celebrating International Day of the Air Traffic Controller, while the guys celebrating World Statistics Day sit on the sidelines crunching the airplane-crash numbers that will no doubt follow.
Rohan Joshi is a writer and stand-up comedian who likes reading, films and people who do not use the SMS lingo. You can also contact him on www.facebook.com/therohanjoshiu00a0
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