Do you suffer from “ friggatriskaidekaphobia” or A Fear of Friday the 13th?
We all know any day can be unlucky or lucky for that matter. In Hyderabad of all places surely a Friday is a good day. My friends ask me whether it is all right to wish me on “Good” Friday and I tell them in sensible Indian languages Good means Dukh. As for the now famous Black Friday it is the day when you can give birth to your own consumerism and buy stuff you never even wanted in the first place but surely its almost a crime to refuse such bargains as one gets on Black Friday. My poor “IAS” cousins in the US have to baby sit their grandchildren from 3.30 am as that is the time good young Indians start queuing up for the stores to open !
So what’s the worst that can happen today: Friday the 13th? Is it the fact that we don’t even know that a friend is celebrating or having fun on Friday the 13th? Never mind, like all the best concerts in town, we will read all about it the next day! The better the concert, and especially if its only by invitation, we will only read about it!
The RBS in London really made a hash of Black Friday when for some technical reason, as the airlines say ,they didn’t honour thousands of credit cards and therefore all the unbelievably priced electronics items stayed put in shops. Of course in India we would never have let that happen. We would have badgered the shopkeeper to somehow reserve it at the same price for tomorrow; frantic calls would have been made to friends and relatives and maybe the Managing Directors of the banks to somehow arrive with cash etc etc. But the British are not complimented on their stiff upper lips for nothing.
We just feel justified to ask for anything: “ kya farak padtha poochne par ” being our mantra. The most classic example I heard was in the lending library for movies: a vociferous young woman declaring that she was NOT going to pay for the CD because instead of the romance she was promised it was a horror story which incidentally she was able to prove as she had watched the whole film in horror.
Do we feel justified because our parents openly and unsubtly declared that their child/ren as the more deserving , most worthy of promotion, rank whatever? So it becomes a birthright that we are never refused anything?
Many Indians will not do anything on a Tuesday and in olden days you could not get your hair cut on Tuesdays and many others are vegetarians on Thursdays/ Saturdays leaving us as it is not too many days left? So let the western world worry about Friday the 13 shall we?
