Unwanted Holidays

I have nine compulsory holidays this year. I'll be spending them sitting in the tiny room I have, and given Bangalore, won't have power or water or both for the major part of those days.

Doesn't sound much like a holiday, right?

I could spend those nine days at my hometown or somewhere in a hill station, and in turn might have helped that place's tourism economy by a very tiny margin. But my government decided that I must celebrate the day. Even though I don't want to. Nobody wants to. Because we don't really care about the day Gandhi was born. Most of us have no clue about details of his work or ideals either.

Why can't we have those days added to our paid leaves? For most part of the developed world people get close to 30 or more days of paid leave. We don't. We're IT sweatshop. Can we at least have the liberty to spend the leave at our own time? We make so much fuss about freedom. Is freedom supposed to be only "freedom of protest" or "freedom of shoddy journalism"?

We forget the main reason why freedom is attractive. It's called CHOICE. And we drive it straight out of the window in our excitement to force other to celebrate.