Resolution to Realization!

Late to Bed, Early to Rise, Long travel and hours of staring at the flat screen monitors is what describes the lifestyle of the IT employees. So what do I do to stay away from high cholesterol and diabetes in my old age? I don’t have enough time to exercise or to go to a gym." Use stairs and avoid lift" is what my friend told me. I made this my New Year resolution. After all it is only 2 floors I thought. As usual when I went to the staircase with bubbling enthusiasm this morning, I saw a queue. "Did all the people in the building make the resolution?" I thought. I got reminded of hospitals which make patients wait endlessly as a strategy to increase the revenue by worsening their health during the wait. Government offices which make people go through 10 different queues to hand over a card that is not even 10 inches long. Long Queues in front of temples – Thayaar on Tuesday and Friday, Shani Mahatma and Hanuman on Saturday, Raghavendra on Thursday. Why don’t people go and see these temples on other days? God is available all the days but people wish to see only on the so called ASSIGNED days! Then the whole purpose is gone. You are more worried about who is barging into your queue than God you want to see or the prayers you wish to offer! After a brief travel in my thought world I increased my height by standing on my toes get a peek into the problem of the day. I could see thousands of A4 sheets forming a carpet on the staircase between the ground floor and the first floor.

Probably the guy who was carrying the same in a carton could not find a place in the lift of the decent managers of Multinationals and to add to that his bad luck- the smaller lift designated to such backbone workers was under maintenance. Could he have waited till that got sorted? Of course "NO". Would it not create havoc in the MNCs if there were no sheets to take print outs of the e-tickets, Bank account statements and last one – some work related docs which people in vain plan to read while traveling? So he decided to carry it up using the staircase for one day because his life style does not need resolutions like mine. He missed his breakfast hurrying to work and when his strained muscles failed to support him further, gravity took over.

So what was happening now? He is picking it up probably 20 or 30 at a time, forming bundles of hundred and placing them back in the carton. What are the people in the queue doing? They are watching him do it and waiting for it to get done so that they cane move up the stairs. Some at the bottom decided to break the resolution for the day. Some at the top could not help but give in to the steely resolution of the people behind them in the queue. The speed at which the worker was picking up the sheets can be approximated as 5 seconds for picking up 30 which makes 15-17 seconds to reach hundred and then 4 to 5 seconds to bundle it and place in the carton. So for around 3000 sheets he was carrying it would take 600 seconds! That is 10 minutes. May be the people watching all this did not do this elaborate calculation. It would have been much faster if at least two more people in the queue had lent a helping hand. What we need here is not probably Maths, we need to be human to understand it. All of us were born as naked babies in a hospital or a house. The difference could be the hospital bill or the house furnishing. But are we not equal as God’s creation? Is it ego that stops one from going ahead and doing some work that is meant to be done by a Level 5 worker? Would one not have jumped and grabbed an opportunity to do something that someone two levels higher does? In my view a person who can do his work as well as those of ones lower than him in hierarchy with pride has a much better caliber than the one who sits at the top and claims that he has the right to order because he has the capability to handle the job at any level.

I go ahead and make my way 10 steps through the queue. This is the only place where I was not stopped from barging into a queue. I start picking up the papers and bundling them and I realize my speed is much lower than the one who did not have his breakfast. My 50 Rupees breakfast or the IIT brand mind did not help me here. Still I was happy I did it up to my ability. My intention to break the ice failed. All I got even after that was a couple of quizzical looks and a set of people who were busier on their cell phones not to notice it!