Queues.

(29 Aug ’10)

            I stand in a queue patiently waiting my turn. The guy behind me is so close that I can feel the moisture of his breath upon my neck. He’s not checking out my dandruff. He wants to know whether I have wax in my ears and given a chance he’d check for gold in my nostrils. Right now he’s squinting to read what I’ve marked on my reservation slip. Is he a stalker? Nah. Is he depraved of mind? Nah. He’s a normal Indian. If it were a woman, she’d be even closer, with a hand on my shoulder, the oil in her hair rubbing off on my sleeve.

 I turn and do the unthinkable. I request him to leave some space between us. Everybody stares at me. He reacts: Then move ahead, he says. Am already within a centimeter of the person before me. What does he expect me to do, climb on his shoulders?

I shrink. Within myself, inside my skin. Keeping a distance between people is a concept alien to Indians. Any and everyone knows you have to join the end of a queue. Which end is a point of debate. Some go straight to the counter and sneak into the cluster of people craning and crowding around the six-inch gap in the metal mesh that divides us from the staff behind the desk. It’s pretty obvious that the guy can issue just one ticket at a time, that until he completes his transaction, he can’t take another, but we love to shove our palms through that little window, waving money or reservation slips or chits of names in front of his face in the futile hope that all work will happen together in a couple of seconds flat.

At least in Mumbai, electricity bills are paid without crowding, with people standing in a queue. This is noticeable as an exception to the rule.

            There are places like banks and airports where there is some semblance of decency. Some semblance. At the international flight queues, people actually listen to the security and stand behind the line (which is painted the world over, I’m told, exclusively for the benefit of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Ok, maybe Indians, also, who knows.) a metre or so from the counters. A chain and a guard holds back the queue which is deliberately made to curve several times around banisters and flimsy rope barriers. A simple growl from one of those uniformed fellows and we whimper where we are. The same fellow at a bus-stop would be battered by heaps of abuses. At cafeterias and where things are distributed ‘for free’, the Darwin theory rules: survival of the fittest.

            If you think this trait is restricted to those who use buses and trains, you have another think coming. In five-star hotels, at the buffet, even at private functions, high-flying corporate types and well-certified doctors, engineers, CAs race to eat like they’ve never seen food in their lives. They are no different from the creature that was breathing down my neck, just better dressed.

When the queue system is tweaked, then Indians are up in arms, demanding their rights.  In Casualties of large hospitals, where the gravity of a patient’s condition takes priority over who came first, quarrels and fist-fights break out over ‘why did you take that patient first when I was here before him’. The logic that the other guy was bleeding profusely, or in respiratory distress or had severe dehydration or a couple of badly crushed bones doesn’t work. I came first reigns supreme. In the past few months, doctors in hospital emergency areas have been beaten up over this but I came first issue. When we’re indisciplined in all walks of life, why do I expect something different here? Because people are in awe of hospitals? Because they’re in need, in trauma, afraid?

Or perhaps in the land that invented meditation and advertises Art of Living and yogas of different kinds, where most don’t work at optimum speed or potential, we haven’t learnt that we have to wait our turn, that grabbing isn’t the answer.  We are an ancient civilization: but today we have a long way to go before we can call ourselves civilized. Ponder over it: Goa is much better in many ways than other Indian states. We have a pehle aap  culture in most places… you agree?

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