Last in, First Out?

04Oct09

In which we learn about the various stages and elements that make queuing for railway tickets in India an experience in itself. Okay, make it Bhubaneswar. The post was inspired by a recent adventure by the author, on an otherwise innocuous Saturday, in his quest to get an elusive TATKAL ticket.

The Crash: This stage is not directly involved with the queuing but is actually responsible for you queuing up. The Crash, in mention is that which makes you wince like never before and it occurs with unerring accuracy on every morning at 8:00 a.m and stays on for half an hour and sometimes forever till you start banging your head on the keyboard with a hope that some sort of a divine intervention would happen and you would be able to see something other than the dreaded “Service Unavailable” on your monitor. But given the sucker you are, it would not happen. You would end up cursing the fate, the railway minister, the government of India and every living was trying for the online reservation. As you would have already wasted a lot of time, you are filled with a rage, unseen and unheard of. You decide to go to the Railway Reservation Counter, the other day, decimate all opposition and stoop lower than anyone to get that ticket. You sleep sharp at 11:00 pm that day and proceed unconsciously to the next stage.

The Wake Up: The irritating buzz of the alarm wakes you up at 5:30 a.m. You search for you mobile phone in futility with eyes closed, to kill it before it mutates into an atomic bomb explosion. The mobile phone, unfortunately, is far away from you bed precisely for this reason. You wake up in anger, go near the mobile and just when you are about to throw it away, you see with your partially closed eyes, “TICKET – STN” blinking harmlessly at you. Your anger suddenly evaporates and is you are filled with pride, for the ingenious inventor who invented the concept of reminders for mobile phones. In one flash that will run a speed in excess of 24 frames per second, you would remember all that happened yesterday and you are filled with the same rage that you experienced less than 24 hours ago and you leave for the station immediately. You enjoy a great drive on the majestic roads of Bhubaneswar that lead up to the Railway Station, amusing yourself with the thought that you would be the first one at the queue and while you are nearing your destination, most suckers are sleeping.

The Horror: You park your vehicle exactly at 6:40 a.m and when you reach the counter…Counter? What counter?? You are reminded of your insignificance at the sight of at least a thousand people swarming the gate like bees. Okay, a hundred. You are horrified and your heart sinks to new lows which you surely wouldn’t have reached. What could possibly have gone wrong with your planning? You curse yourself at not listening to your Dad, who advised you to reach there by 5:00 a.m and you ignored him. You want to cry, but the situation demands men, hardened by standing in innumerable queues. Movie theatres, School bus, Prayer Hall during the morning assembly and you take control of your emotions. You eye the opposition as Sachin Tendulkar would eye the fielding Aussies in the MCG.

The Humanity: Bongs, Biharis and UPwallahs, fellow Odias. Everyone is there before you, everyone. Do people not sleep anymore? Why do so many people live in India? While you are pondering important questions like you see something that shakes your inner core. The immediate entrance of the Ticket Counter. Near the closed shutter you would see at least forty (yeah forty) people spread-eagled on newspapers near the counter. Immediately behind them you would find the other sixty who share your horror, but there is no looking back now. You have entered the war zone. The Bongs suddenly start talking aloud in English thinking they are the only ones there with the gift for languages. The Biharis and UPites shout loudly “Kuch Nahin Ho sakta, Kuch nahin ho sakta!!”. The Odias, as always, have only lovely abuses to offer. Though amused, you detach yourself from the humanity with ‘one thaing and one thaing only’ on your mind.

The Snake: You join the Snake, which is the shape of most queues in India. You forget all hopes of photography and listening to the ipod. You make yourself suffer and harden yourself with a steely resolve of a kind which reminded you of sitting through the two and half hours of Himesh Reshammiya’s Karzzzzzzz…You join in. There is no time for emotions now.

The Misdirection: You would find a few people standing near the door away from the queue with another agenda. You have to make a decision now. Whether it is going to be ‘them’ or ‘us’. You choose ‘us’ despite a history of doing the exact opposite. After all it’s just a day past Gandhi Jayanti. What would Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi do? You take pride in your decision and wait thinking the cops would be just round the corner.

The Wait: You wait. You check your mail in your WAP enabled cell phone. Regularly checking Facebook for interesting status updates. You read about the awesomeness of Ricky Ponting and Shane Watson against the hapless Poms. You wait forever.

The Sucker: Thirty minutes in the queue and you would be approached by ‘him’, the protagonist in question. He would come from nowhere, as if he just teleported from a portal, and initiate a conversation about how desperate people have become and how futile it is to stand in queues nowadays. Since you still remember Bapu, you would give a smile. Like any Hitchcock character he would shadily tell you how he is going to start another queue near the door and ask you to join him after a few minutes. Never ever talk back to that sucker. You have been warned! Don’t leave the Snake. The snake is everything that matters now.

The Push: About fifteen minutes to touchdown and you would feel it for the 1^st time. The Force would be upon you instead of being with you. It could come from either direction. You would be woken up from your slumber with incomputable Newtons of Force. With one hand tangled in the helmet you muster all your strength and remember your past academic performance at such things. You remember that you have been a champion and like a champion you don’t give up, you fight back. You push. You push with all your might. You forget about Bapu. You remember Chuck Palahniuk. You give your loudest war cry and exhort others before and after you, not to give up and push forward.

The Contact: After five minutes of stooping lowness and giving the choicest abuses to everyone you hold on to your position. The reality is, you are held by the snake. You have been sucked into the gigantic snake. You feel molested. Unmentionable body parts touch unmentionable body parts. You can feel the warm breath of everyone. Oh, the stinking armpits. Stinky farts bombs. You life force has been sucked out of you and you can’t do anything now. You are one of the cogs in the wheels of nature. You wait for the inevitable.

The Suck: At exactly 7:57 a.m (You can see the time by your watch, that’s the only thing physically possible now) the shutters open. You can only hear the sound and suddenly you feel ‘it’. You are sucked into a vacuum created by sudden disappearance of men before you. Before you realize anything you are in the next stage.

The Run: You see people running. The snake has disintegrated. The cops have appeared somehow as if on cue. You remember John Anderton in ‘Minority Report’. You say to yourself in a muted tone “Everybody Runs”. You see the narrow entrance of the now open counter and you run. You run for your life. You see the cops hammering everyone but stopping no one. You are not in a position to think and react anymore. You just run, hoping to somehow survive the wildly swinging swords of the cops. You run like Vijay Dinanath Chauhan in Agneepath. (“Ek din apni maan ko Yeh gaaon waapas karne ka hai, haain”). You survive the sword and now you are inside the sanctum sanctorum and the situation demands more from you. You have to decide quickly, and by quickly I mean picoseconds, which queue to run into. You do a John Nash type thing from ‘A Beautiful Mind’ and decide upon the 1^st queue. Skidding through the last five meters, you pull yourself back just in time before you are about to tumble into the ladies and senior citizens counter.

The Futility aka Despair: In the heat of the moment you forgot one vital fact and that is “you suck at maths”. You always have. Your heart sinks again. There are at least 15 people in front of you and all other queues are as long. You remember the status of the tickets yesterday as you still had the guts to check irctc after 9:00 a.m. You remember “WL/47” in the non-Tatkal category (Tatkal is activated only 2 days before the date of journey and that day is this very day). Now, you look at other people, not like Sachin at MCG but a Venkatesh Prasad batting at Faislabad (Has he ever, but you get the drift anyway). You become a believer. You start praying. You again do a probabilistic calculation as to how many people before you are going to travel to the same destination and you multiply that number with infinity keeping in mind all the other counters in the country. You are filled with torturous thoughts such as the irctc website functioning today and crashing. You curse yourself again. If only you had stayed at home. You wince at the thought of going back empty handed and logging into Cleartrip and shelling out unmentionable rupees through your credit card. “The horror, the horror”. Thinking these thoughts you move ahead in the queue which has now transmuted into a snail. You surreptitiously peek into the reservation form of the previous person and check for the train no. It reads 8449. You breathe slowly and wait for him to finish his ticketing.

The Moment: Finally the moment arrives. You are in front of the glass pane. The final frontier. You look at the person in the counter. The other person looks at you like Harry Callaghan in ‘Dirty Harry‘ thinking “Do ya feel lucky, punk? Do you?”. You give the form to him. He looks at it and starts hammering away at the keyboard. Your eyes are transfixed at his desktop. Then it appears ‘AVAIl-23’. Your heart is filled with infinite joy. You want to sing, dance and shout. You restrain yourself. You pay the money and get your ticket of joy. You come back home and sleep.

N.B: The stunts mentioned in the post have been performed by trained personnel and are not to be replicated by others without proper training.

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Tags: Agneepath, AMitabh Bachchan, Bapu, Bhubaneswar, Chuck Palahniuk, Crap, Forcs, Gandhi Jayanti, Hitchcock, India, Indian Railways, John Nash, Life, Mahatma Gandhi, Maths, Minority report, Odisha, Sachin Tendulkar, Tatkal booking, Venkatesh Prasad