I copy/pasted your script, and don't get the same result. Perhaps you have an incorrect quote or space somewhere which got lost in translation when you pasted the script here? (Running Ubuntu 8.04 / bash.)
For what it's worth, the duplicated date commands are redundant; you can simply omit the calculation of Present_Date and even the cut with date +%a (or if you actually want the full weekday name, date +%A)
No, it's not related to the kernel. It could have to do with the version of your shell, but more likely it's something like an invisible or incorrect character in the input which you cannot easily copy/paste here.
If you copy+paste back what you posted above, do you still get the error?
If so, can you run it with sh -vx scriptname and post the result here?