George Mikes, the Hungarian-born British humourist wrote about the Englishman’s love for queues; or lines, as we say here! We have not inherited the love for queues for sure but we love lines. In fact, “line” is an integral part of Hinglish – line maaro, line pe aagaya, bhaisahab line me aao and so on. And there is also the Lakshman Rekha, but more about that later. This one is about the lines that we all stand in almost every day of our lives; and can be quite fun actually!
Of course, the Indian line is in great contrast to the one that Mikes observed when he wrote in his book, How to be an Alien: “an Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one”. An Indian line is far from orderly. Two Indians can’t form an orderly queue – it would be un-Indian to do so! And this is true across the country, thereby completely rubbishing the claim that many make of India not being ever being a single nation but a geographic coincidence.
If you hit the Patel Chowk Metro station at 5:00 pm, you will see a long line that begins at the top of the stairs and worms its way to the security point. The numbers in Patel Chowk greatly exceed one and it is far from orderly, because everyone wants to see what is going on ahead! This is a characteristic of the India line – you want to know what is ahead! So your body stays in the line – roughly speaking – but your head peers over the shoulder of the person in front. And the person behind peers over your shoulder and so on. Uday Menon, a friend from IIMC who was – is – a great stand-up comic, brilliantly described an Indian line from the perspective of the person on the other side; he said all the person would see is an Indian God – multiple heads and arms all around the one head he is speaking to!
The other characteristic of the Indian line is it is never straight. It meanders. And is has distinct discontinuities. It certainly has to do with the fact that not only is looking at the head of the person in front of you is frightfully boring, it also keeps you away from all the action in front. But I suspect that it also has to do with the need to be defiant and different. So, you don’t stand behind the person in front but slightly to the right or left. So, the line staggers, for want of a better word. This realisation solved one of my great traffic mysteries – why cars on Delhi roads cannot stand one behind another at a traffic light!
One of the constants of lines in India is the Slimer, the guy who wants to sneak in when he thinks no one is looking. Some may have good reasons – airport security lines are full of people running late to catch their flights. But mostly, they just think that they are smarter than the sods who have been queued up for so long. Over years, all of us have developed a keen sense of recognising them and their tactics. Mostly, they just try to sidle in but on occasion, they try the oldest gambit in the book by opening with “bhaisahab, zara kuch poochna hai”! Women try another one – they move confidently to the front and declare that ladies don’t need to stand in line, thereby thumbing their nose on all the women who are in the line; and at those feminists fighting for women’s rights! But the most irritating thing is the Slimer who gets caught who will then try to brazen his way through it or simply look at you, sometimes even bow, and say, “bhaisahab, aap aage chaliye; aap ko kaun rok raha hai?”, thereby making you the villain of the piece!
But I recently discovered the root cause for us crossing the line between the orderly and the disorderly. It dates back to the Ramayana. The most important line in Indian folklore is the Lakshman
Rekha, the line that Lakshman drew with his bow and told sister-in-law Sita to stay behind as he
hunted the golden deer. Now, this LR is the line between right and wrong, the line between good
and evil and so on. In other words, it is sacrosanct! Yet, Sita crossed the damn line! Imagine, if she
hadn’t, we wouldn’t have a Ramayana and what a loss that would have been. So, crossing the line is
good as then we all have a story to tell…