Q

I was 5 when I noticed for the first time people in front of me changing parallel queues to be a part of the 'line' which was moving faster. This was not an isolated incident. I kept on observing the same behavior over and over, irrespective of the venues. Very soon, I was one of those people observing for the minutest of movements in the queue next to mine and changing places before you could bat an eyelid.

Have you noticed when you are stuck in traffic, the other queue always seems to move faster? And then you hesitate and finally manoeuvre your vehicle to that queue, when suddenly your original 'line' starts moving faster? How many times has it happened that you are stuck in a snake-esque queue during immigration? You watch frustratingly as the officer in the other counter quickly stamps everybody's passports with a smile, while 'your' officer is as grumpy as ever taking as long as ever to stamp even one passport? You decide to wait it out a while but the queue doesn't seem to be moving at all. You decide in a flash of a second and you are in the other 'smiling' queue the next second. But to your dismay, the smiling officer goes for a break just at that moment and is replaced by an equally grumpy looking officer as your first queue?

After experiencing this a host of times, last year I decided to stop this behavior once and for all. What I started practising is looking at the absolute time taken and not measure it relatively. In traffic, I started noticing the cars around me at the next red signal. They were mostly the same set of cars which had outmanoeuvred others to snake into the next queue. Surprise, surprise! They had not gotten ahead by much. Surprisingly, this held true in the immigration counters as well. The people who seemed to move ahead faster were still stuck around the conveyor belts, same as me.

Very recently, I have begun to extrapolate this in my professional context as well. This truly is a rat race and unless we are careful, we get entangled. We measure our success not by what we achieve, by what others have achieved and we have not. We are happy if others look at us the way we look at more privileged people than us. That truly does not seem like an attractive proposition and leads to maybe a little bit more wealth but an immense amount of stress. At the end of the day, it's up to us whether we find the trade off to be worth it or not.