Taking Hindu Holidays Off at Work? Sometimes You Have to Ask

By Aarushi Gupta

Toronto, Canada (CHAKRA) Requesting faith days off at the work place has become a common practice, especially for government positions. However, Hindu holidays are rarely seen as pre-identified dates, which can be taken off.

While searching through a list of pre-identified religious faith days at my work place to book off a day for the Hindu New Year, I realized something. Although Navratri (which leads up to the New Year) was mentioned in the government Calendar, neither it nor the Hindu New Year, were listed as one of the dates, which could be taken off. The only conclusion I could come to was that no one had ever requested such a day off. This meant that I had to start the process and give a description of the religious holiday, how I celebrate it and why I wanted to take it off. There is a waiting process for the date to be approved whereas, the pre-identified date requests receive a response in a more timely manner because further research is not required by the HR department to validate those holidays.

This leads to the question of whether the lack of faith day requests from the work place serve well to Hinduism and its survival or not? Can an observation like the one I made allow one to make an educated judgment that Hindu practice is on the decline? On the contrary, have Hindus always been devoted to Hinduism as much as they are today but never requested faith days because of their devotion to work and their career as well?

Furthermore, to those of us that celebrate Hindu holidays, we are felt left out and isolated and have to triple think whether we should request such a day off because no one has heard of it. Could our bosses assume that we are taking part in a hoax because we would just like a day off? If they were to ask other Hindus about the holidays that we want off, more than likely other Hindus that do not take the day off will respond with, “No one takes those days off. They are usually not even celebrated until the weekend when everyone is together and able to get together.” This may be true but it takes away from my ability to want to celebrate the holiday on its actual date as Christmas, Easter, Eid, The Jewish New Year and so on are celebrated.

All in all, a tougher request process, suspicions and isolation are the reality for a Hindu who would like to sincerely take a day off to celebrate his/her faith. I’ve done my part. Navratri and the Hindu New Year are now listed as pre-identified religious dates that can be taken off at my work place.