Less Working Days
A reason for making a lazy society
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: January 08, 2010 -

The Minister for Information and Public Relations, Mr TN Haokip, known to be a man for a few words, who always tries to resist the temptation of delivering long and tedious speeches at public functions, hit the nail right into the senses of the people when he said that Manipur could undoubtedly be the only place in the whole wide world where the number of working days in a year was the least.

Mr Haokip, while speaking as the chief guest during a function held to celebrate the XXXVIIIth foundation day of the Manipur Press Club in Imphal on Wednesday, very rightly pointed out some facts which are very pertinent in the present day Manipur society.

Though his displeasure at the late start of the function was quite evident, he was polite enough to express it in a mild way that didn't hit the audience-all journalists- as a kind of admonition for their late arrival, yet did certainly hit their senses. The Minister pointed out the truth that we, the people of Manipur, have a typical habit of never keeping time.

We are habitually late in almost everything that we do.

Almost every function, be it meeting or cultural programme or feast or whatever, can never start at the scheduled time. There is no difference whether it is government organised function or non-government organised function, every function always begins late.

A few Governors in the past had also expressed extreme displeasure over the habitually late start of programmes/functions in Manipur. Thus from this habit of the Meeteis being late all the time, emerged the sarcastic joke of Meetei pung (Meetei hour).

Then the Minister also pointed out that since the people of Manipur are wont to call bandh, blockade or general strike at the drop a hat, the number of working days in Manipur is very limited. Moreover there are too many holidays.

Apart from second Saturdays and Sundays, there are holidays for all kinds of festivals- religious and traditional- for almost all communities and religions. Then there are sudden agitations of a section of people or civil society organisations over incidents of violence committed by either state or non-state actors leading to a grinding halt of normal life for days or weeks or even months together.

Examples need not be cited as people are too familiar with such incidents to be reminded. Counting all these incidents which act as disturbances in normal life, the number of working days in a year becomes too less and too limited just as Minister Haokip rightly observed.

His statement that nowhere in the world, there could be any other place like Manipur where the number of working days is so minimal deserves to be noted. The Minister's appeal to the journalists to launch a campaign against three things, people's habit of coming late to public functions and bandh, blockade and general strike, and spread awareness among the people to reduce as many holidays as possible is significant.

The journalists fraternity may take note of it.

But the irony is that there are many among the working journalists who are still grumbling over the joint decision of the AMWJU and the newspaper distributers' association to reduce the number of holidays. In this backdrop, it's hard to predict how seriously our fraternity in the profession of journalism would take the Minister's appeal.