Jumping the line

His academic training has given him an ability to think logically and express himself clearly. This has helped him significantly in writing whatever he writes. Be it Locks, Mahabharata and Mathematics or his latest fiction The Good Indian’s Guide to Queue-Jumping, V Raghunathan’s foray in the industry brought him closer to many Indian realities to which he was quite insulated from his academic world.

His latest book The Good Indian Guide to Queue Jumping is a tongue-in-cheek focus on our propensity to jump queues, irrespective of our educational, economic or social background, which frequently shows utter disregard for fairness and civility towards others. But in the process, the book does introduce available international literature on queue jumping to the readers to help them become ‘better’ queue-jumpers!

“The genesis of the book is all our lives as Indians, where for virtually anything and everything, we have to wait in queues, and we witness or are victims to queue-jumping all the time, from municipal taps and ration shops to airports and railways stations.”

The 62-year-old author believes that queue jumping is an ugly wart on our character that needs to be shown a mirror. The idea was to draw attention to this ugly aspect of behaviour. “Most experiences in our queues are bad experiences. You simply cannot follow lanes on our roads because someone or the other is always jumping ahead of you; you are jumped routinely at the airport queues at the X-ray machines, or even as you are disembarking. The bad experiences are not limited to municipal taps and ration shops. Very often, queue-jumping is worse where the so-called more educated, and socio-economically better off function.”

The book introduces how queue-jumping happens in other parts of the world; what the researchers have found about it elsewhere; the sociology, the physiology and the psychology of queue-jumping and in short, everything you ever wanted to know about queue-jumping — you have plenty of takeaways.

So, what’s the message “The message is that queue-jumping of the kind we see in our country is ugly; we need to moderate the propensity and understand that it is a trivial attribute of our behaviour but shows a serious lack of consideration for others, for systems, rules and shows a lack of concern for fairness. Interestingly, queue-jumping does have its positive side and we can engineer systems to make it a socially more useful phenomenon (for example, queue-jumping is socially useful when we allow a sick person to get ahead of us in a hospital queue),” says the author, whose favourite book is Napoleon by Emil Ludwig and he read the book when he was 15.

The Good Indian’s Guide to Queue Jumping also has suggestions for service providers about what they can do to make queues structured so as to minimise instances of queue-jumping.

V. Raghunathan, whose forthcoming book is a story set at IIM, Ahmedabad, says, “My mantra for writing is ‘just write’. At least two hours a day. There is no substitute for regularity.”

“The biggest challenge in India is that the culture of book reading is changing rapidly. Book shops are disappearing. In the fast paced world of social media, people read much less than they used to. How many Indian book awards can you think of In how many categories If you are a poet, where can you publish your poetry ” he questions. So the challenges are many. “The scholarly culture of celebrating literature is missing. My book The Corruption Conundrum & Other Paradoxes and Dilemmas was highly reviewed in the New York Journal of Books, and I was even asked to give a talk about it at the Harvard University Club in New York; but hardly reviewed in India,” says the largest collector of old and ancient padlocks in India.