The Story of Every Long Weekend Ever

Every group of friends has that one guy who keeps track of every single calendar (including the Hindu, Umma, Chinese, Attic, Mayan, etc) and unleashes havoc with the three most dangerous words in holiday history: “Let’s plan something!”

“Let’s plan something!” opens a Pandora’s box that could mean anything from a night out to a stressful four-day trip to Ladakh in the middle of October where the temperature drops (on a good day) to -1 degree. One can tell how excited someone is in the group based on how quickly they reply to the message, “Let’s plan something, bros.” The person who replies first is the only one really looking forward to it, while the rest just don’t want to be spoilsports and play their role in passive agreement. The occasional “Awesome” and “Let’s do it” need to be dropped to indicate you are game but may later back out due to unavoidable excuses.

Planning always begins big because planning doesn’t factor in reality. “Why don’t we all just take a holiday on Friday as well? That way, we have Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday off!” quickly goes to “Let’s take an off on Tuesday as well, maybe we can go to Bangkok.”

Eventually, like Rome, all roads lead to good old Goa. The Goa trip has now become the vanilla ice cream of getaways. It’s the default word that gets registered in the brain the moment someone says vacay. If there is a four-day break and you haven’t planned anything, your car begins driving itself toward Goa. The brainstorming on the logistics begins. “How much will it cost? Will we go by flight? Or train? Where will we shack up?”

As soon as the conversation starts to get serious and the recommendations start pouring in, one braveheart announces that he will not be able to make it. Apparently, he has a “family function” to attend. This is secretly the moment a couple of others have also been waiting for. The guy has taken one for the team and the floodgates have opened. Suddenly everyone starts finding flaws in the plan and why it is a not the best idea to execute right now.

If it’s just the three of us, then there’s obviously no point going ahead with the plan, everyone wisely concludes. Plan A has failed and it’s time to now move on to the next one, a slightly more realistic idea. One hiking enthusiast will invoke the idea of a trek and everyone will start celebrating once again. A day’s trek makes infinitely more sense because the first thing that comes to mind is “Sleep!.” You need to go out for just a day and have an entire day to laze before you resume with your hectic office routine. This, allow me to warn you, is the first sign of aging. The day you stop planning trips that have you landing early morning and then rushing to work, it’s time to read an eulogy to your youth. From here on, your whole life will be centred around the idea of sufficient rest.

Once the destination for the trek has been decided, the next round of 897 Whatsapp messages begins: The debate over the meeting point. You argue furiously to make sure that the meeting point is closest to your house. After all, who wants that additional stress of travelling to the meeting point and then travelling to an even further destination. It is very important to define the radius of how far you are willing to travel from home in terms of kilometres during the holiday. Once you have won the battle, you may retreat back into silence.

As you get closer to the day, the only person looking forward to it, posts the dreaded message: “What time are we meeting tomorrow guys?” Every single person reads the message instantly, but there will be complete silence for the next six hours. This is the time for the smart one to emerge. The guy who makes a last-minute excuse to ping the planner privately and tell him about his “emergency” (the cat got stuck in a tree). Now even the enthusiast has reached his limit. He rattles off a series of abuses and leaves the group.

Everyone who didn’t want to be a part of this plan heaves a huge sigh of relief. No one wants to admit it, but secretly they’re glad he’s gone.

In your head you now start to calculate all the things you are going to do at home with three full days of free time, most of which will be spent between three-hour naps and telling yourself you deserve them. On Day 2, you will finally leave your bed after guilting yourself into at least watching a movie or reading a book, and you will do this keeping in mind that you have another day to nap. This day now seems like the dream sequence from La La Land.

The final day of your much-touted weekend is a horror show — you realise that the three days got over faster than the stock at Big Bazaar on “sabse saste teen din”. Anxiety takes over.

Just thinking about the fact that you’ll have to go to office the next day stresses you out. You know that with every new email that loads, there will be inexplicable sadness in your life.

This is the reality of every long weekend. And when it is all over, you desperately look up the calendar for the next one, promising yourself to make the most out of it. But there isn’t a long weekend or even a public holiday in sight for the next couple of months.

Which, upon reflection, turns out to be a good thing. It turns out that a couple of months (or more) are exactly what are needed for the scars of the long weekend to heal. That’s enough time for your WhatsApp group to slowly convalesce from the twists, swerves, and heartbreak of planning the last weekend. It also takes that much time for you to decide that the avalanche of emails and to-do lists the Monday after is a worthy tradeoff for the daily drudgery that is the work week. And so, after enough time has passed, we give ourselves a case of voluntary amnesia and start making plans for the next epic getaway.

Goa, anyone?

“Hey Ram, My Son’s Nastik!”

Iwas watching Harry Potter on a lazy Sunday afternoon when my dad said, “This is so stupid, no one flies on a broom.” Now, I’m no Potterhead to take offence, but I felt like I just couldn’t let it go. “Well, it’s fiction. I know it’s not real.” I then paused for a moment and with a lower tone let this zinger fly: “I’m not the one who believes that a monkey flew with a mountain in his hand.” My dad stared me down until he exited the room.

Born in a Gujarati family, I was raised Hindu, but I went to a convent school and lived in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood. My upbringing was so secular that if I were in politics, the Congress party would have already offered me a ticket by now. My mum must have done some “paaps in her previous life” (her words, not mine) that I turned out to be nastik.

Being an atheist in India can be confusing. There are multiple religions, hundreds of prayers, crores of gods, and millions of controversies surrounding us. I know only the Gayatri Mantra and it’s what I whisper in my head when I have to pretend to pray, regardless of whether it’s a temple, mosque, church, or gurudwara. As a nastik, you are not invested in any of the rituals and traditions, but you sure as hell are interested in public holidays. Nothing breaks your heart like finding out that Bhai Dooj will fall on a Saturday this year. Holidays know no religion.

Another thing that does not know religion is dance and food. Whether it is the ghaati dance during Ganpati, feasting on delicious food during Durga Pujo, kite-flying during Makar Sankranti, or playing with gulal during Holi, the celebration is hard to resist, even if you’re nastik. One has to be a sadist to not notice how beautifully the streets are lit up during Diwali and Christmas, but one has to be careful about making these observations. You don’t want to goad mum into asking, “Are festivals just about having fun for you?” This is a rhetorical question. Obviously, she doesn’t really want an honest response from me.

Over the years, I have mastered the classic Indian trait of adjusting my belief system as per my convenience. I visit the Ganesh temple near my house because I really love the kheer they distribute as prasad. I would accompany my Catholic classmates to church just so that I could bunk lectures, and on Diwali, I keep touching the feet of the elders in the family because each bow is rewarded with a cash-filled envelope. To be honest, I’m not different from religious leaders. Like them, I too exploit customs for my personal benefit.

This attitude, while profound, does cause a bit of tension at home. Diwali for instance, is fraught with arguments. My mum looks forward to waking up early, bathing, dressing up in all her finery, and performing puja, while I look forward to getting up in the afternoon, doing nothing all day, feasting on farsan, and scamming relatives for fat envelopes. Patakhas may be banned in parts of India, but fireworks are guaranteed at home.

The stress of waking up early and getting dressed is followed by the expectation of participating in the house puja with enthusiasm. One has to wear a clean kurta and stand with folded hands at least for two minutes when mum is around. What’s the point of praying if mum’s not taking notes? Over the years, I’ve mastered yet another trick. During the Diwali aarti, I indulge in such furious clapping that I could give a seal from Antarctica a run for its money.

While my parents have now gradually come to terms with me being nastik, they try to keep it under wraps when interacting with relatives. Courtesy, India’s classic “log kya kahenge” syndrome. Most of our relatives aren’t as casual about faith as my parents. As Gujaratis, they are very passionate about two things: God and Narendra Modi. If they find out about my religious orientation, they’d go into a state of shock and give me look you’d reserve for someone who’d just called NASA’s Diwali picture fake. They’ll then move on to condole with my parents: “You’ve not done a shoddy job of raising him, it’s this whole generation that has no values.”

Perhaps, it is indeed is a generation thing. With more people refusing to believe in any sort of god than ever before. My mum’s biggest worry right now is that my “shameless attitude” will rub off on my younger sister and she might also grow up to be nastik. In her worldview, that could be the new plague, a world full of people who don’t believe in god but still enjoy all the free food and booze that comes with celebrations of him.

Being nastik in a religiously charged country like India, where you have faith on steroids, can mean that there are seven different kinds of hell that you can go to, all in one lifetime. Until that moment, dare I say, “God bless you!”