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OPINION

Shihab Sarkar | August 18, 2019 00:00:00


Few people in the West can keep themselves free of the Monday blues. In the Western and many other countries around the world, workplace-going employees invariably suffer from this syndrome. After the 2-day fun-filled weekends on Saturday and Sunday, the Monday morning appears to them with all types of fatigue and dread for office work. In Bangladesh, the day falls on Sunday, the first day of work after Friday-Saturday holidays.

Whatever the days of holiday may be, the idiom that has found a permanent place in the English language is 'Monday blues'. With the holidays involving long-duration vacations, the 'blues' turns more heart-piercing. Some may compare the boredom of resuming work for a specific time to the doomed Greek hero Sisyphus' repeated attempts to roll a massive stone up a steep hill. Every time he takes the stone to the hill summit, it rolls down again from where he began his assignment.

Resuming work after a 2-day weekly holiday or a vacation becomes unbearably tedious for most of the people. The case for workaholics is different though. A lot of them loathe the very idea of workless days or a holiday. However, the workaholic category includes a number of great people. They are authors, artists, scientists or scholars. In Bangladesh, the post-vacation blues grip the nation with resumption of work after the two Eids.

Office-goers remaining absent from work even days after the vacation period is over is a common spectacle in the country. In the pre-independence days, the then central government would grant only one-day holiday during the two Eids. These days, in the age of normally 3-day Eid holiday, in years extending up to a full week upon addition of other holidays, many enter their workplaces quite reluctantly. The scenes of deserted offices shown in print and electronic media outlets have become routine. Many would like to call starting offices after Eid vacations simply post-Eid blues. Others might term the temporary aversion for office an irremediable lag. In spite of their Monday blues, people in the average developed countries do not normally make excesses with their short or long-time holidays.

According to social behaviourists, humans in general are lazy. Most of them would be happy if they are asked to work little for a living. Perhaps this trait has prompted man to device ways to cheat their offices by bunking office hours. In the sub-continent, the tradition of remaining absent from work during office hours has been at play since long. The tales like hanging the coat from one's backrest of the chair and going out, and returning to office just half an hour before the office-closure, have been rampant for a century. This cheating with one's job, especially at government offices, reaches its zenith during the Eid holidays. It's striking to find many local government offices outside the capital eerily vacant even 10/15 days after the vacations' end. All this has a lot to do with human nature. There are people who cannot survive without being engaged in one or another type of work. On the other hand, some people would be happy if they do not need to work at all to earn a living. The latter appear to be dominant in the segment afflicted by post-Eid blues.

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