If clocks do not stop on Sundays, life too shouldn't

Senior citizens may not see Sundays as fun given how difficult it is to avail essential services on a holiday. So, why not have a shift system for all Sundays and holidays so that no service is shut down. A robust weekend/holiday cadre can also address the case of unemployment

- Gopalkrishna Gandhi

Sundays, I dread. For me, they are an unmitigated bane.

Few are likely to agree with this, barring some fellow “super seniors”. Members of that fragile community know what I mean. Their experience of this most unkind day of the week has to be the same as mine. But most other readers of this column, the yet-to-become-senior majority of this column's readers, will say, “Who the hell cares? If he dreads Sundays, let him drown himself in one.”

This is a reader-reaction I have imagined, but it is surely real. Which reader of a Sunday morning newspaper will want to feel gloomy? Oldies are not for Sundays, nor Sundays for them. But the sun-kissed, young “under-sixties” — the Goldies — are. They are for Sundays, and Sundays for them. They can swim, swirl through their Sundays, play water polo in them, do the backstroke/breaststroke in them, the butterfly and the dolphin-kick. Goldies are meant to cavort on Sundays, oldies are meant to “go drown’ in them.

Let me explain.

‘A year has 52 Sundays. This is a factoid from calendric astronomy. Having lived almost 81 years, I have seen 4,212-plus Sundays — verily, an eternity. A smart statistician would say I have, by that count, seen the same number of Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and so on. Of course! Touché, true; point made. But so much is made of Sundays, such a mystique hangs over that last day of the week, that it cannot be regarded as just like any other day, no different from the rest.

Sundays are meant to be “something else”, a weekly festival as it were. For me too they are that “something else”, but that “something” — my “something” — is not pretty; not pretty at all.

To be sure, many Sundays have come and gone for me, uneventfully, un-memorably. Yes, some of those Sundays have been good enough, pleasant enough, like any other good and pleasant day.