Tag: people

A May Day I never knew

It’s May 1, and where I live, today is a public holiday celebrated as May Day, Labour Day, or Workers’ Day. No matter what they call it though, for most people today is just a second Sunday. They wake up late, display fantastic gluttony for lunch, and spend the rest of the day on the couch, switching through channels on the television.

Every TV channel has special programmes lined up for today. They’re not motivational speeches and documentaries about how the labour laws came about, but movies, and interviews with film stars about what they like to eat at movie sets. And after a heavy lunch, people love to lay back and watch film stars flash their teeth at the screen.

It’s weird that we spend an entire day relaxing when we should be commemorating the efforts of the working class. However, for as long as I remember, May Day has been the same in my society: once in a while, a bunch of activists would organise a peaceful rally, and all shops will shut down for the day — because the cost of not doing so would be a hefty fine.

So when I woke up this morning, I expected nothing more. However, for the first time in my life, I was curious to know what May Day meant for the rest of the world.
May Day is an ancient spring festival in Europe, I realised with gloom. It’s a tradition where people celebrate soil fertility with social gatherings and games.

And here I thought the first of May was Workers’ Day. I dug deeper, and found out that the spring festival combined with many other seasonal festivals throughout Europe, to make May Day a popular holiday. It had existed for years before the International Socialist Conference decided to declare the same day as international workers’ day.

Workers’ Day is nowhere related to May Day — and that came as a shocker. We’ve always referred to the International Workers’ Day as May Day. As for the actual May Day, we’d never even heard of it.

Even my school book taught me that May 1 was for workers, when in fact, it’s something else altogether. We had learnt to appreciate the labourers amongst us, but we hadn’t learnt that the law came into practice only in 1904 overshadowing a centuries-old custom. I was appalled, but it wasn’t the first time that our education system had hidden parts of facts. The result? An entire generation of more than half of the world grew up oblivious to the fact that May Day traditions were older than Labour Day celebrations. It’s no big deal, you might think, but in a way, this makes me question everything I’ve studied in my history classes.

Part of the deal

David drudged inside. A long day had grown longer with the traffic jam.

“Honey, I’m home!” He yearned to call out, embracing his love. He was knackered, however, to even open his throat, let alone arms. He walked into the bedroom, wondering if she had slept already.

She wasn’t there. Only his laptop lay on the bed cold and uninviting. It was their date night, and a frown would’ve appeared on her face when he hadn’t.

“I’m sorry, Hon.” He sent a text.

She understood his work, but not why he lived five timezones away for a job he didn’t enjoy.

Don’t study English literature

Quora has become a place where you can ask weird questions without worrying about sounding foolish. For instance, I was surprised when I saw that someone had asked why they should study English literature at all.

Having just completed my bachelor’s degree in English literature, I almost laughed out loud. When it comes to studying literature, there are more reasons to avoid it than there are reasons to embrace it.

Literature, like medicine and engineering, isn’t for everyone. When you study literature, you become the dorkiest person in your social group. Friends and family make all sorts of assumptions. Your friends think you’re scared of sharp tools, bad with numbers, and worried about sun exposure. They judge you as introverted and that you’re lazy to leave the couch. Oh, and you’d love your coffee black and might be a good chef, too.

You didn’t get enough marks to enrol in engineering. You can’t get an equation to equate. You’re just a smart mouth who plays with words and thinks they’re cool. You’re too dumb to memorise clinical terms or understand chemical reactions.

You like the smell of old books, instead.

Lots of graduates nowadays don’t get jobs, but as a literature grad, you won’t even find a job description that matches your expertise. No employer thinks that someone who’s spent years poring over Shakespeare and Coleridge and Yeats could offer anything valuable at brainstorming sessions inside corporate cubicle farms. Good luck finding a job and keeping it for more than a week. And retirement is a luxury you can’t afford.

That’s how most of society sees us literature majors — that we’re too weak to live in the real world because they dabble in the glories of the past.

Humanity hates us Humanities folks because we look back and ponder on the evils we’ve etched in history. Nothing much has changed since the Victorian Era. If you’ve studied the Humanities, you should know that in the real world humanity crushes humanity.
That’s why you shouldn’t study literature. You have nothing to gain from it. You get a zero return on investment, unless you count the glasses you’d be wearing by the time you graduate and the social awkwardness that clambers onto your back every time you leave home.

To everyone wondering aloud why they should study literature, I’d say don’t. If you must have a solid reason, reasoned out, mapped out, and planned out, you shouldn’t be studying literature anyway. Because no one should study literature unless it calls out to them. Remember, literature chooses the student.