Temasek Engineering School, Singapore

i find it strange (and ridiculous!) how people are assigning a special “Day” to commenorate anything from occpuations to diseases, and now, in fact, any trendy topic is given a “Day” of its own!!

Haven’t we already have enough of man-made festivals / events to observe?  Father’s Day and Mother’s Day are fine.   So are Teachers’ Day and Youth Day.  Of cousre, Valentine’s Day is recognised and celebrated worldwide.  But we started having Bosses’ Day, Secretaries’ Day, Lawyers’ Day… and soon, unbelievably, even Postman’s Day and Chef’s Day. 

I have nothing against these occupations.  Every job is a professional and respectable occupation.

But I cannot understand why they should assign a special “Day” to every occupation?  If every occupation is going to have it’s own “Day”, then we will run out of days per year to celebrate.

Now, even illnesses have their day in the sun.  We have TB day, Diabetes Day and even Eye Glaucoma Day!!  Please, there are thousands of diseases in the world, how can we finish assigning a “Day” to every one of them??  (By the way, how come there’s no SARS Day?) 

Next we have hot topics that also get their own “Day”.  There is already Human Rights Day, International Left Handers Day, Health Day, and even Intellectual Property Rights Day.

Seems like we have a ridiculous habit of coining a special “Day” for any and every trendy “flavour-of-the-month” topic!  We have an Earth Day, everyone knows that.  It’s part of the environmental drive to save the earth.  OK, we’ll accept that. 

But in a sign that we are indeed running out of “Days” to assign to some event or topic (without overlapping and using the same day twice), we have now zeroed in on the HOUR !! 

The world ridiculously observed an “Earth Hour” two saturdays ago.. on 29 March 2008.

So paranoid “Day-coining” folks are celebrating the fact that they now have 24 times the number of days to assign to some silly topic, occupation or what not.  (24 X 365 days = 8,760).  

In a day, the foolish will have 24 hours to celebrate, or do what not.  But in just one hour????  What can they possibly do in one hour?

How much electricity can we save in just one hour?  Even if the whole world shut off all power for 1 hour per year, it’s only for one hour.  And it’s only once per year.   That’s 0.01% of annual electricity consumption!! – It ain’t going to bring oil prices down.  And it ain’t gonna make any difference.  It’s just so stupid.

Let’s STOP this silly assigning of Days (now, hours) to every damn topic or issue that exists in the world.