By Dr. Mrs. Mareena Thaha Reffai Vanderwert Place, Dehiwela.

We have been having too much of holidays and they are more like imprisoning days than holidays. If we are to build our nation from the war savaged destruction we all have to change our mentality.

ƒÆ’-¡ƒ”š‚ It is a well known fact that if a poya day or a holiday falls on a Thursday everyone takes off the Friday and sometimes even takes the Monday off. The roads will be empty of vehicles and the people will be away from offices. So it is not only the people who take the leave who do not work, but even the most of the rest of the country because hardly anything gets done during the so called long weekends.

We are the nation with the maximum number of holidays in the world I think. That is because we have the weekends off, the poya days off and all 4 religious holidays off as well.

If we are to build our nation we have to change this mentality of doing the least. Rather we have to learn to do the most of whatever we can for the country and for our own selves, albeit enjoying the perks of holidays entitled to us.

We should give up either the poya days or the weekends. For example, Saudi has the religious holiday of Friday so they have the weekend on Thursday and Friday and they work on Saturdays and Sundays. They do not fall prey to the habit of aping the west. Let’s have either the poya days or the weekends as holidays -not both.

We should also do away with the Independence day as it is more of a reminding day of the colonial imperialism rather than of the freedom. May be we can celebrate the day we won over terrorism as our true and worthwhile independence day. Similarly May day as a workers’ day is a farce. It is a day for the politicians – the non working category and the workers actually stay home, more imprisoned as the roads are all closed for the pela paliya for the politicians.

Let us re think of what we can do in our lifetime – not spend most of it lolling around boozing and sitting in front of the idiot boxes.