We, the Queuetiyas! |
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There is a particular kind of peace that washes over an Indian the moment they spot a line. Peace. A deep, instinctive recognition, like a commuter finding the only working fan or charging point on a crowded railway platform. The shoulders relax. The chappals adjust. The phone comes out. We have found our people. We have found our queue.
We are the Queuetiyas. And we are magnificent.
It began in childhood, as most of our lifelong habits do. We watched our mothers rise before dawn, clutching a worn ration card like a sacred text, joining a line outside the fair-price shop that stretched so far into the morning mist it seemed to disappear into mythology. Our fathers and elder siblings stood in queues for kerosene, for LPG cylinders, for railway reservations at counters that opened at eight but whose queues were populated by ghosts who had arrived at five. We grew up understanding, bone-deep, that the queue was not an inconvenience. The queue was the destination.
Then we became adults and the nation handed us our own queues, one glorious crisis at a time. We Indians know exactly what it means when the government says there is no need to panic and that everything is normal; it means the queue is already forming.
Demonetisation. Overnight, five-hundred- and one-thousand-rupee-notes became decorative paper, and the entire country – lawyers, labourers, grandmothers clutching life savings in steel trunks – joined the same democratic queue outside ATMs and banks. For once, we were truly equal: equally confused, equally cashless, equally certain that the man three places ahead had somehow cut the queue. We stood for hours. We swapped news, rumours, phone chargers. We made friends. Some of us, sources suggest, fell in love and also got married.
Aadhaar: The biometric identity card that promised to simplify our lives required us, first, to stand in a queue to prove we existed. We got it. We were relieved. Until, the same government said, Aadhaar is not proof of existence.
It was a dark, bureaucratic joke. Descartes said I think, therefore I am; Indians said, “I queue, therefore I am.” Enrolment centres overflowed. Iris scanners malfunctioned. Fingerprints of the elderly, worn smooth by decades of labour, and those of freshly baked children refused to register. We stood and waited and tried again. Eventually, the card arrived. We laminated it immediately and joined the next queue to get it updated.
Covid brought us the vaccination queue – arguably our finest hour. We downloaded CoWIN, refreshed it like devotees refreshing a temple website during Diwali ticket booking, booked slots at facilities three districts away at 3 am, and arrived at 7 am to find a queue already forty people deep. We wore masks, maintained questionable social distancing, and still somehow managed to share pickles and opinions with strangers. We are, after all, the only people who can develop a lifelong bond of trust with a stranger in exactly four minutes.
You hand over the guardianship of your spot to a person you didn’t know existed until moments ago with a simple, “Bhaiya, zara dekhna,” and head off to find a loo, knowing that your place in the universe is safe. The virus feared us not because of our immunity, but because it could not figure out where the queue began and ended.
People queue up for cooking gas cylinder refills at NOIDA, Uttar Pradesh, March 27, 2026. Photo: PTI.
And now, the LPG and fuel queues have returned like an old raga – familiar, almost comforting. We stand at petrol pumps with the serene expression of people who have done this before and will do it again. We have brought water. We have reels playing on one thumb and a Candy Crush level to beat on the other. We have already mentally calculated that at the current rate, we will reach the pump at approximately 6:47 pm, which means we can still make it home for dinner.
But here is what separates the Queuetiya from the mere queue-stander: we do not only queue out of necessity. We queue out of love.
The moment a new iPhone launches, we are there, hanging outside Apple stores at 3:00 am – sleeping bags, camping chairs, the whole drama – outside stores for a device we could pre-order online in twelve seconds. We queue for Shahrukh Khan films at six in the morning, not because we couldn’t get tickets later, but because the queue itself is the opening act. We queue for nursery admissions with the desperate intensity of a family trying to book a Tatkal ticket, spreadsheets tracking which school has how many seats, alliances formed between parents, and intelligence gathered about interview panel preferences.
There is a sociologist waiting to write a thesis on us. We will make them stand in line.
The Western world discovered queuing during the pandemic and called it a revelation. We watched their news coverage with gentle amusement. You think this is a queue? We have been stress-testing queue theory since before your grandparents were born.
We have developed an entire parallel economy – the professional line-holder, the strategic uncles who “just need to ask one thing” at the front, the WhatsApp group that updates queue length in real time and the pop-up markets of tea-wallahs and coconut water sellers who appear the moment three people stand in a row. If there is a queue, there is a chaiwallah; it is a law of physics.
Other nations build statues of their heroes. We build queues. Long, winding, patient, occasionally chaotic, always human queues that somehow, miraculously, mostly work.
So the next time you find yourself behind forty people waiting for a gas cylinder, do not despair. Straighten your back. Smile at the stranger ahead of you. Check if they need phone charger.
You are not stuck in a queue. You’re at home.
Founding Editor at ArchitectureLive! and Unbuilt Ideas.