No, it's my turn!

It’s funny how it is the littlest things that breed cultural resentments, at least for me. I disapprove, in principle, of the numerous times during my day that rickshaw drivers and shopkeepers lie to me about what various things cost. But I don’t get worked up about it. And as for the tremendous human suffering of the children begging on Delhi’s street, I feel more humbled than outraged—I don’t know whether I should think of such poverty as part of India’s culture or only as something that is, at present, central to its economic life but might, in future, be eradicated without requiring any great transformation of public values.

On the other hand, I feel no sympathetic allowance for cultural difference when it comes to the subject of India and taking turns. No words are too strong for describing my disgust at the lack of a Indian taboo against queue-jumping.

I regard cutting in line as an act of the basest treachery. Perhaps this is my elementary school self reasserting itself—it occurs to me that the last time I really felt the etiquette of standing in line was worthy of a moral treatise I was wearing a plaid jumper and pigtails. (By the way, in Michigan we stand in a line, not on it. When I first heard “waiting on line” during my first week at college I thought it was a case of internet lingo being transferred to the physical world as a sort of hipster trend.) But I stand by my third-grade self’s overall impression of outrage at line cutters.

As I see it, cutting into line (or onto, if you prefer) is a brazen signal of the cutter’s contempt for his fellow queuewoman. It is a flat denial of respect for her personhood. Jumping into a queue where one does not deserve to be signals a devaluation of the principles of equality and justice that calls into question the cutter’s fitness for a civil and democratic society. In fact, it suggests strong fascist tendencies, if not actual votes for the BJP.

Say, for example, one is standing at a clerk’s desk in the Ministry of Home Affairs while the clerk speaks at great length to a friend about the injections she is having done in order to deal with pain in her wrists and hands. And someone else comes up to the counter and, instead of standing behind you in an orderly fashion, proceeds to stand beside you, at the counter, obscuring the order in which the two of you ought, by principles of fair play and sportsmanship, to be dealt with by the clerk. Then another person comes up and he, too, bellies up to the bar! And it’s a pan-gender problem, as a woman now walks to the desk and likewise stands at the counter as though she might very well be the most deserving of out of the four of you for the clerk’s immediate attention. Then, when the clerk has finished giving her medical history, she simply looks blandly at the panel of us, waiting to see who will most aggressively demand her attention. This is rather than using the powers vested in her by the Home Ministry, which executes the law of the land on behalf of the august Cabinet of India, to coldly stare down the queue-usurping rakes and deal with us in the order in which we arrived at her desk. I shouldn’t overstate this—the Home Ministry has developed an extremely complex number-assigning system to try to deal with its visitors fairly, but clearly this is the thin veneer of bureaucratic rationalism imposed over a whole culture of wanton line cutting.

My landlady’s daughter-in-law, by the way, drove this point home for me when she told me about going to Disney World and being absolutely dumbstruck at how many people were in the park, with none of them shoving or butting into lines. It had never occurred to me to wonder at this. Who would dare shove in the Happiest Place on Earth? The combined disapproving shock hundreds of Midwestern moms, all of them wearing outfits bespeaking great moral authority, like unflatteringly high-waisted shorts with tucked in t-shirts, would be enough shame even the most hardened social misfit.

Apparently, in preparation for the Beijing ’08 Olympics, the Chinese government is having once a month standing-in-line practice days. Now, that’s the kind of cultural engineering I can really get behind.

Yes, behind. Not in front, cutting in where I don’t belong.