Do we dislike queues?

Ever been to a post office, a movie hall in India? Or for that matter, ever been a part of a queue? Have you realised how the queue really resembles the delta of the river right before the sea? I realised this again yesterday when I had gone to send two speed posts. One was a deposit to the MBA program I am enrolling in, and other was a denial letter to the second program I had got an admission to. For the time I was there, people kept coming and telling the counter clerk to do their work first because mine was going to take some time. What kind of bs is that? Mine was going to take time, so I had come early and waited patiently. Now it was the turn of others to wait, wasnt it? People kept coming from all sides of the counter to ask for little stuff like stamps, moneyorder forms and the likes. Why cant we wait for our turn? Its even more of a problem with high society types, because they believe that since they know a union minister throught third cousin of their wifes cousin sisters grandpa, they have a kind of right to break all the rules. When would be grow up? At all queues in India, at least in Delhi, there will be at least one guy standing smugly because he is at the head of the queue, and at least five of six standing parallel to him to see if they can get their work done and they dont have to get in the queue. It will always be a kind of pyramidal queue at the start. It seems we have total disregard to any kind of civic behaviour. All we care about is if we can get our work done in the least amount of time. We dont care how much time of others we waste as long as ours is not being wasted. Some poor folks feel guilty, some try to remain oblivious to this, but surprisingly NO ONE protests. Have we become so spineless to not be bothered by our lack of civic sense? This behaviour manifests itself everywhere. If we have a traffic jam on one side, some enterprising being would definitely jump the gun and go on the wrong side of the road so as to beat the dumb folks in the jam. Soon enough, many more will follow, clog the road and then everyone will wait endlessly. The cost benefit analyses will show that we wasted more time collectively, but who cares? It will be good if we start analysing such stuff and have at least our younger generation adhere to norms, or else we will end up as a developed but uncivilised society.

Delhi: a village or a developed metropolitan?

I visited the post office in sector 7, Rohini today. I had gone there because the post office at sector 9 where I live is too small and doesn’t do speed posts. This one surely was much bigger. But the location was what hit upon me. Located in a Delhi village, surrounded by cow-dung, dusty lanes and by-lanes and a sewer drain, this location was truly amazing.

None of the PCs was operational because they had had a power failure!

I went in, after standing in the line for 5 minutes I was redirected to a counter located outside where stamps were sold. After another 10 minutes of wait in the sun, the guy at counter informed me that they didn’t have stamps worth Rs425! This ended my little journey to the post office but set me thinking.

Most of the Delhi is like this. I am not talking about the infrastructure such as PCs not being used but about places in Delhi. Once you move away from the main roads, you are confronted with dusty lanes that will get a traffic jam if two cars come from opposite ends. Cows are obviously sitting pretty oblivious of everything. These places seem almost untouched by the IT-BPO boom that has hogged all the headlines. Even the posh areas of south Delhi have their share of dusty un-maintained roads, Kotla Mubarakpur, Jia Sarai being prime examples. If this is the state of affairs in Delhi, how can you even hope for anything better at smaller towns like the one I come from, or at even the second rung metros like Lucknow and Kanpur?

Its a study in contrast, the Malls and Metro on the main road on the one hand and the road less village within half a kilometer on the other. From the hustle bustle crowd trying to get to work with laptops and state of the art phones, to sleepy underbelly, cowdung and serpentine lanes made for bicycles only. When will this change? Or will it, and do we want it to change?

We Indians have become oblivious to such things. We don’t care if the roads are broken, cows are roaming around or drains are open. We are content with earning our own share, more and more of it. Environmental concerns, hygiene and maintaining a place are a few things best left to NGOs and arm chair activists.