Summer Holidays Essay

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Education experts every year pose the question, do children really need such long summer breaks? Apparently, such a long break disrupts their development and comes in the way of their learning process. But perhaps educationists aren’t really aware of what all do children do during their vacations these days. A plethora of courses, classes, camps and workshops involving swimming, art, personality development, music, coding (few years back it was just general computer studies) and the like has given rise to a new seasonal industry of sorts. Even the trips taken in the name of the holidays seem laden with exotic destinations and customized experiences packed into a short period of time. We can ‘do’ Europe in ten days and Australia in a week, and come back with overflowing suitcases and digital memories which have already been shared real time, and commented upon. Holidays are, in some ways, no longer a break but an intensified search for experiences not normally encountered in everyday life.
It is a far cry from summer holidays one experienced growing up. In India, summer vacation every year meant one thing and one thing alone- we went back to our ‘native place’, logged in with the emotional headquarters of our extended family and spent two months with a gaggle of uncles, aunts and ‘first and second’ cousins. The happiest memories of childhood of a whole generation of Indians seems to be centered around this annual ritual of homecoming and of affirmation. We tendered tacit apologies for the separateness entailed in being individuals even as we scurried back into the cauldron of community and continuity represented by the family. Summer vacation was a time sticky with oneness, as who we were and what we owned oozed out from our indi...

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...t only is there a big difference in the experience of the holiday- the location, the duration, the people or even the memories. But even the purpose of the holiday has undergone a dramatic change. Today even a short trip to the beach requires sustained effort from our end so that work life doesn’t impinge on our ‘me-time’. We put our mobiles on silent, ensure that the vacation responder is set to auto, and try not checking other people’s vacation pictures on Facebook, but anything more than a week and we start twitching. We seem to be embedded too deeply in the main business of our lives for a disruption that overstays its welcome. In any case, it becomes exhausting to holiday for too long. There is a constant niggling feeling that we might miss out on something important and urgent. The ultimate irony is that a normal work day, in contrast, seems far more relaxing.

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