Why waiting well is an art worth mastering

If you are a Gen Z kid, you probably haven’t experienced standing in a queue outside the booking office of a cinema theatre for a matinee ticket that you might or might not get. The threat of not getting the ticket heightened the thrill of getting it. You had to arrive well in advance and loiter around as you waited for the ticket counter to open. And then be prepared to get knocked around a bit as the mass of humanity raced to the counter. There was a separate queue for ladies which was usually shorter, which meant that the men in your family could afford to smirk at you from a distance while the burden of acquiring the tickets fell on you. (Brownie points if you managed to get balcony seats.) If you think women are the weaker sex, try beating them to the ticket counter of a cinema theatre. 

Today, of course, modernity has radically changed this process. The latest blockbusters are just a click away on your BookMyShow app. If you don’t get a seat, you might be disappointed but it is nothing compared with the crushing blow of the man behind the ticket counter closing it just as your turn approaches. And it is not just a cinema ticket. Online banking and Instamart are making queues at banks and supermarkets redundant. Nowadays, the only queue that is unavoidable is outside an IndiGo check-in counter at the airport. 

However, in the world’s most populated country, just because we might be eliminating queues does not mean we can get rid of waiting of all kinds. If you are an Indian, the ability to wait is an essential life skill. You wait in traffic jams with everyone honking at everyone else; outside a government office which is the one place in India that looks exactly the same as it did 20 years ago; at the dentist’s for a root canal which is sure to set off a chain reaction of root canals. (A dentist is the one person whose expertise is in finding more problems than solutions.) 

Unfortunately, despite years of conditioning, we are still not good at waiting. Case in point: the people who queue up outside the boarding gate of an airport well before the gate opens. It behooves me why they must do this. It’s not as if the flight is going to depart without them. And then there are those who never seem to understand the concept of boarding in zones. If Zone B is boarding, their seats are sure to be in Zone C or D. 

As a race, we are becoming chronically impatient. Technology has not just reduced waiting times, it has also made us intolerant towards waiting, because we feel bored. Earlier, boredom used to be a side effect of life. If not for it, the world wouldn’t have discovered the genius of Isaac Newton, the Wright Brothers or Frida Kahlo. Gravity wasn’t discovered by brilliance, but by boredom. Personally, waiting cultivated in me a love for reading—whether it was the Feminas and Stardusts outside the dentist’s office while in school; Tinkle Digests and Archie comics at my cousins’ home, while waiting for my brother to finish playing cricket with them; or the Sweet Valley Highs I used to read in class, tucked inside my biology textbook, while waiting for the bell to ring. 

I hardly see anyone reading physical books on flights or trains anymore. If it weren’t for our phones and tablets—those portals to endless entertainment and mindless scrolling—waiting would have become unbearable. Whatever happened to those long hours of staring out the car window en route to a family holiday, Bryan Adams playing on the stereo, while you dreamed of a world of hope, mystery and adventure that had not yet been born, and now might never be.…