As I dropped my bag on the X-ray
belt at the entrance gate of my office, I noticed a small placard announcing –
Come in Q please. I was surprised that such a basic discipline was required to
be called out in a plush office employing well-educated people. But that also
took my memory back to the long-forgotten Q-culture of our everyday life.
My earliest memory and experience
of a Queue, and for that matter it could be for all of us, is that very first
inculcation of discipline in the school, while going to our respective classes after
the morning assembly. And surprisingly,
for whatever joy it brought, the very first act of disobedience also originated
from within those Queues, the moment that Queue took a turn, away from the
watchful eyes of the class teacher.
In the mid-seventies, I was too
young to understand the rigmaroles of life but the omnipresence of the Queue had
surely made an impression on my young mind.
It was so much a part of the social life that a popular Hindi movie of
Manoj Kumar had a song mocking this societal nuisance and those lines – Ration
wali line ki lambai maar gayi – used to rent the air so much that it
became a fulcrum of political revolution that had dethroned the de facto ‘Q’ueen of the country.
My tryst with the Queue continued
through my school and college days when I was handed over the chores of booking
a railway ticket, paying electricity bill or sending a money order from the
post office. There used to be just one or two counters for the whole city to
complete their business and hence one can imagine the length of the queue to do
the work that today we do at the click of a button from our cozy homes. And all
those hours that I would stand in the Queue, I would be worried about my cycle
that I would have chained with a pole or with the iron railing along the
footpath. The risk of losing my cycle in those days was as high as losing money
by investing in a volatile stock market today. But I had little choice.
Watching a movie in a multiplex
is a pleasure these days. Booking the tickets in advance and picking your
favorite seats on your mobile is a routine. Back in those days, one had to
reach the theater at least 2 hours in advance, as we do today for taking an
international flight. There would be long queues, that we all had been trained
for at the school, albeit with no teacher to watch over. So, leave aside the
pleasure, it was more of a battle to get the tickets.
In the post millennial world,
life has become much simpler. The widespread digitalization and easy access to
the computing devices has made these services accessible through thousands of
parallel threads. Most of the services
are available online and any maintenance or help is through a Call Center. It
is another matter that when you call them, on most of the occasions, you may
still find yourself ‘in the Queue’. So, despite all the automation and the
digitalization, the quintessential ‘Queue’ could not be killed. Amongst the
many things that we picked up from our erstwhile rulers this could be one as
well - Long Live the ‘Q’ueen.
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