Saturday and Sunday must not be the weekly holidays if the Government does decide to add a day to the weekend or we will end up with a weekend of not two but 2½ days, the longest in the word.
Because of the Juma prayers, Friday has always been a half working day (when it was not a full holiday). The Government can never make it a full working day. This is the unavoidable starting point. That gives us three options.
a) We are already the only country in the world to break up our weekend by having a full working day (Saturday) between a half day (Friday) and a full holiday (Sunday). The ridiculous practice can be abolished by having Saturday as a full holiday, giving us a proper weekend of continuous of 1½ days. The combination of a full holiday on Saturday with a half holiday on Friday will give us not just a proper weekend but also save more energy. Sunday, in any case, has no religious sanctity for us.
b) If the bureaucrats in the federal government get too tired during the weekdays and are keen to have two holidays, a weekend of two full holidays on Fridays and Saturdays may be introduced as a trial but only in Islamabad. The savings in energy there, if any, may be reviewed after a year.
c) The rest of the country (including Provincial and Local Governments) must have the free option to have Friday as either a half day or a full holiday. We have to go a long way to develop our country economically and must use every minute for productive purposes. Two full weekly holidays for every organization will be too much loss of time.
If some large companies, both in the public and private sectors, want to have a two-day weekend, they can simply have the whole of Friday off. Thus, all weekends, both public and private, will be confined to Friday and Saturday, whether a week is of 5 or 5½ working days.
Why should we prefer Sunday over Saturday? If Saturday is the Sabbath of the Jews, Sunday is that of the Christians, neither being sacred for us. Saturday will give us the best possible arrangement that Sunday never can: half day for the Friday prayer combined with a full holiday for weekly rest and recreation.
That leaves the people who claim that they will be out of touch with the international business community if the weekly holiday is changed from Sunday to Saturday. They should realize that Saturday is also a holiday in many countries. Having it as a working day here does not help them at all. They should also learn something about time zones that make it difficult to call the other party even on working days. When they start their day at 10am here, it is not the same time everywhere in the world. In America, it is already night.
No comments:
Post a Comment