Just yesterday, at a shop, I was standing among the throng of customers of multiple hues and colours and was waiting for my turn to pay for the medicine I needed. When I was about to do so after three persons before me, a course voice and a course hand both turned over me and reached the man at the counter saying, “take my cash first”, and the shop keeper immediately stopped his action for me and turned towards the voice whose hand was reaching over my shoulder to the counter. The shopkeeper took his money. It was a moment for me to cry out, “Man! Why you are doing this. He must wait like others.” But the shop keeper just smiled and then took money from me saying, “Sir, he is police and, you know, we have to take care of them.
Without the purpose of launching a complaint, I just want to highlight that we have become a nation, who would do things in a crowd sort of manner rather than doing it while standing in queue and waiting for one’s turn. I remember in my childhood that people used to buy cinema ticket by pushing, pulling and thronging one another and there used to be some very ridiculous scenes of getting ticket by a walkover type of flight of some smart young man. I hope this is not less than a horde mentality and the struggle of making a fight at each point of business. This happens everywhere in my country and, like getting foods at the marriage parties and otherwise, it is the ‘might is right’ or the ‘one who can, may get’ attitude. This may be a favourite game and show of tricks for proving one’s cleverness and the style of manipulating the situation, but it is no way a sign of civility and cultured-ness.
I remember that in my school, a special teacher was deputed daily to keep us students in lines and queues while walking from one place to the other inside the school’s premises. And he would punish very severely if we somehow violated the queue. I hope this good training is still in vogue in our schools. But the same students failed to follow the same as soon as they were out of the school and even named those as ‘mad’ and ‘stupid’ who would insist on making queues. Why do we forget the hard lesson learnt at schools? It means schools are doing their duty but the overall social culture is still competitive as if we were still in emergency and so anything civilized can be winked at or just done away with. No, it is not. we are now at least 71-year-old nation and have earned a place in the comity of the nations and we need to keep our good name up in the list of the civilised and cultured nations.
I remember that in my school, a special teacher was deputed daily to keep us students in lines and queues while walking from one place to the other inside the premises. And he would punish very severely if we somehow violated the queue. I hope this good training is still in vogue in our schools
I have been frequently forced to stand in a queue and wait for my turn during my foreign visits. The devised system is automatically guiding the people to be queued and wait till one reaches the counter on the airport, on railway/bus stations or super stores or any place where more people may appear. This makes one feel about oneself not only dignified citizen but also proud of the system devised. It also provides an equal opportunity basis for the strong and the less strong both. Denise Winterman in his write up on BBC webpage, July 4, 2013, claims that the queue culture is essentially a British culture. If, so, why did the British not leave the Queue Culture in their former colonies in South Asia, when they have left so much of their baggage here.
Well I am not against the fact that sometime, because of the elderly and the sick, we may break the queue and let them take the privilege first but in the general stream we must make an attempt to teach Queue culture to our people. In fact, it is very easy to do so because our people learn good things very fast and take pride in adopting them as well, leaving aside a few of the feudal mindsets. Even these mindsets can be taught; after all, they follow queues when they are travelling via airports.
On the part of the government too, some encouragement is needed that they, just by spending a little amount of money, may install queue making structure at the leading office and it may be made mandatory for private institutions, superstores and for business centres that they will install queue lines and in no way, will entertain anyone out of the queue other than the sick and the elderly. At the end of the day, I would simply say, “Lets queue up, folks!”
The writer is a professor of English at Government Emerson College, Multan. He can be reached at [email protected] and Tweets at @Profzee