Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side

Tajamal unlocks the mystery of the unfathomable

(Mr. Tajamal Hussain, 53, was born in Safakadal area of Srinagar. He graduated from the Sri Partap College, Srinagar, and completed his MBA from the Andhra University in Waltair, followed by a post-graduate diploma in International Trade from the prestigious Indian Institute of Foreign Trade in New Delhi. He is currently working in Srinagar. Mr. Hussain in his leisure time writer for local dailies and electronic opinion borads.)

Waiting in the Queue

You can be standing in front of a door of an ATM machine. Someone will brazenly walk right in front of you as the previous person exits the vestibule. He or she will pretend not to see you…until you stop him! The fellow may express his sorrow. He who does not have any idea about allowing personal space to the fellow citizen does not also care about his privacy while the latter operates his bank accounts to draw cash from the ATM. He will simply be on your head within the vestibule flouting the privacy required for operating your bank account and would pester you nonstop to either surrender your turn in his favor (irrespective of whether you finished with your transaction or not) or in an avuncular tone advise you as to how to operate your transaction and even suggest the amount of cash you should draw. Tell this fellow to refrain, and he will simply be with his hackles up to dismiss your request with scorn.

Standing in a queue requires patience, discipline, self respect and respect for others. It calls for a strong belief in the existence of good and fair play. The hatred for standing in the queue is some thing that perhaps unites India and Kashmir. Every one amongst us has had to go through the ordeal of standing in the queue at some point of time or the other. It is an everyday story once we wake up in the morning and are off to catch a bus to college or office. When we get into the bus, to buy a ticket, we are again waiting in queue. The same process haunts us every where in the canteen or on our way back. According to Advanced Gerontcrats enterprise, Indians on an average spend 12% of their lives in the queues. This however does not include the time that takes in commuting before they reach the tail end of the queue. The world records in the queue whether the longest, the fastest, the most patient queue, all belong to India. Queuing is such a national trait that the Indian athletes are invariably found in the queue to finish. Whether it is the union cabinet standing in a queue to welcome the President or Prime Minister, the queue is every where. The 3.2 kms long queue in Delhi to collect MTNL bills a decade and a half ago is a record in itself. The fastest moving queue in India was recorded at a movie theatre showing the film ‘Hot Nights’ in Hissar, Haryana. It took a mere 5 minutes and 40 seconds for 581 people, all men, to buy tickets and enter the hall.

During college days one of my friends (he is now holding a senior position in the government) dared to stand in front of a cinema in the city to buy a ticket. In the maddening rush as the unruly cine goers jostled each other, the hapless fellow managed to elbow his way through the crowd to push his hand into the ticket counter. The ticket seller seated behind the grill handed over the ticket to him. As he pulled himself out of the crowd after a great struggle, to his astonishment the sleeve of his shirt covering his right arm, was torn asunder to leave no trace thereof. Imagine the plight of the poor fellow!

In past the rare exception nevertheless was the claustrophobic queue forced upon us 3rd class cine goers in our childhood in the famous iron cage of the Palladium cinema, right in the centre of Lal Chowk, Srinagar. No sooner did the ticket vendor open the window to sell tickets than a dozen or so of mustachioed hooligans (with lot of muscle) suddenly appear from some where to leap across heads in the cage to worm their way atop tens of the queued heads in the cage to the counter to walk away with a wad of tickets to be later sold in ‘black’ to the same disgruntled lot who were imprisoned for several hours in the narrow cage. It was not many minutes before, much to the disappointment of the people waiting in the queue; the shutter at the ticket counter would suddenly and unexpectedly close down.

The turmoil that a person goes through, while standing in a queue, is unmatched. When you see your life going at a glacial speed and to know that even after hours of patient waiting, you are still not the first in line, all hell wants to break loose. But then the sanity prevails amidst all the pushing and shoving, or else one may lose the privileged spot that he occupies and may be sent back to square one. Life is a cruel thing for everyone in the queue and the willingness to get over with it is what gives people the strength to stand in it for hours while the discomfort one is facing is rising with the minute. And that too when one is made to stand in a queue (the analogue of what in the automotive world constitutes "bumper to bumper" traffic) without any personal space that has evolved over the ages to keep at bay transgressors, looking for breaks in the queue. Multiple queues follow the Murphy’s Law, “Whatever queue you join, no matter how short it looks, will always take the longest for you to get served” and thus, it is safer to stay put in one’s queue rather than go around looking for a quicker way to get to your goal.

In 1979 Dr. Kuabakoonam Balasubramanium of the University of Quebec, using a handsome grant, did some pioneering research on Indian queues, the laws and the paradoxes thereof. Bala laws, that he devised on the basis of this extensive research, are capsuled here under for us all to remember and brave the turmoil of standing in the queue;

1. The length of the queue is inversely proportion to the time you have to stand in the one.
2. You discover you are in wrong queue only when you reach the counter.
3. You always reach the counter at lunch time or closing time.
4. When you reach the counter on time, the tickets are over.
5. When you do get the tickets they are the wrong ones and therefore; a) you have to go to the tail end of the queue to get them changed or b). You have to go to the refund counter where 1 and 2 apply
6. When there are no obstacles, the queue moves quickly and when you buy the right ticket the teller has no change.
7. The teller always has his say.
8. The other queue always moves faster.
9. When you switch to the other queue the original queue gathers momentum.
10. When you are finally the second person in the queue the guy in front of you develops a complicated problem which takes half an hour to sort out.
11. When others jump the queue no one says anything. When you jump the queue hoots and jeers follow.
12. Every one in the queue will want to borrow your pen; when you want a pen no one will have one.
13 You are always caught napping when they open an extra counter.