Weekends? What are those???

I had just run to the local supermarket late evening on a Sunday. Normally, I never shop on a weekend evening close to the beginning of the month. After all, who wants to bump into your neighbours discussing the merits of buying daliya over Oats for breakfast or meet a your kid’s friend’s mother well ahead of you on the checkout counter… But this time I had to get my daughter’s preferred Horlicks flavour or risk a mutiny in the morning before they leave for school on a Manic Monday.

As my luck always, I was in the last in the long line of the checkout counter and there was no express counter that was working. And much like Murphy’s law, the other two checkout counters were definetly moving faster than mine.

That gave me time to reflect over what I had done on a supposedly Lazy Sunday. Well for a start I woke up a whole two hours after my normal weekday wake up time and then rushed to get a heavy brunch ready, got lots of stuff done in the kitchen as pre-preparation for the week, gave my daughters a quick oil bath and ran to get my vehicle serviced. Came back home, helped my daughter prepare for her Maths exams, ran out with her to her library and then stopped by to return the DVD of this neat Tamil movie (more about that later) and then stopped by in the supermarket before heading home. Whew…..

Well, my turn was still long time away so I was thinking back on how things were when I was probably 9 years old. Well those days all of us (Dad and us) had work and school 6 days a week. There was no concept of a weekday. Sundays meant lazing around, eating elaborate lunches and then seeing some lovely programs on the TV. I think we had Star Trek in the mornings and then we had time to go visiting in the evenings. We had no car back in early eighties so we used to walk to the nearest bus depot a good 15-20 minutes walk from our place, take a 30-40 minute bus ride, visit and come back home well in time and be fresh for the next day. The way life was those days was definitely more relaxed and easier on everyone. I don’t remember my mom fretting over her shopping not done on a Sunday, and to think they used to go to different wholesale markets to buy things right from veggies to masalas!

Not so these days, we rarely go beyond a 10-12 km radius over a school weekend. Anything else is postponed for three day weekend or vacation time. Weekends are no more for relaxing. Weekends are for supermarket errands, bank work and all miscellaneous items that we never get time to get done on weekdays. Saturdays is probably when we have a little more fun; kids go for their weekend activity classes or we get some shopping done or probably catch a movie. But these 48 hours just fly past our eyes.

So here comes another week and starts the mad run again….Have a great week folks…