MUMBAI, India - There is a feline quality to standing in line in India. Certain parts of the man behind you - you don’t know which - brush against you , the better to repel cutters. But the cutters hover near the line’s middle, looking lost in a practiced way, then slip in somewhere close to the front. When confronted, their refrain is predictable: “Oh, I didn’t see the line.”
But in a churning India, the line has new resilience. Businesses are becoming vigilant about enforcing queues, and a growing middle class is often less eager to cut. In this way, India’s experience seems to feed into a tradition of seeing line etiquette as a marker of modernity, of graduating from chaos to order, brutality to gentility, scarcity to abundance.
But the reigning idea of modernity involves not just an evolution into queuing but also an evolution out. As scrums succumb to queues, queues are succumbing to the free market.
The story of the scrum, the queue and the market begins, in most versions, in a Hobbesian state of nature . People got what they got based on their ability to push and pull, maim and slaughter. It required new ideas - of fairness, equality and the like - to replace scrums with lines.
But the line also stands for dysfunction: dole lines in depressions; lines in the Soviet Union to buy basics like meat and toilet paper; lines to get driver’s licenses worldwide; lines in which slum-dwelling women wait to defecate behind closed doors.
The modern solution: the free market. Why wait? Just pay.
Today, Russian malls rise on the ground where Soviet lines once wound; affluent villagers in developing countries buy key-locked portable toilets to avoid the morning queue; governments issue “rush” visas so that business travelers can jump the line for a few hundred extra dollars.
You see it here in India. The famous Hindu temple in Tirupati, in southern India, now has a regular idolviewing tour and one for those who pay. Many nightclubs sell premium memberships that let you skip the line. Markets have much to offer over lines. They are more efficient. They work well for those fortunate enough to have more disposable money than free time. They mop up much of the daily agony of waiting.
But the market also changes a culture. A line conceives of people as citizens, presumed equal, each with an identical 24 hours a day . A market conceives of people as consumers, presumed unequal, with those who can pay in front of the others. It allocates efficiently, but it eliminates a feature of line culture: the idea that, in line at least, we are no better than anybody else.
In a way, the market’s spread is a return to another kind of scrum, one in which financial, and not physical, might means right. Perhaps one day lines will be remembered as antique, a quaint system in which things were granted simply for having shown up early, an interlude of relative equality between the scrums that reigned before and after.
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS ESSAY
FAROOQ KHAN/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
Lines can represent a triumph of civilization over chaos, or societal dysfunction. Men wait for free food during a curfew in Indian Kashmir.
