PLEASE ADJUST -Longest Indian waits

PLEASE ADJUST

Longest Indian Waits

Ketan Tanna on how we are a nation that has got used to standing in eternal queues Apart from the dark blue passport, the endorsement of Indian citizenship comes from the inescapable anthem — You Are In Queue.

Indians are so many and human activities so few that most ventures in this country consign you to the dreaded waiting line. This is the story of some poignant Indian waits. School Admission In urban India, the birth of a child drives parents to the best schools to register their ward for admissions that are four to five years away. Meera Isaacs, Principal of Mumbai’s The Cathedral & John Connon School, says, “Yes, we are taking applications from the parents of a year-old child so that he or she can join the kindergarten when the child is five years old. We stop taking applications when the number of registrations reaches 500. Unlike other schools, we do not want parents to line up overnight outside schools or stand in a long queue.”

In Ahmedabad, Manish Mehta has been waiting for two years to get his son admitted into the Delhi Public School (DPS). The boy is now in the eighth standard in a local school and he has been looking forward to a better school since he passed the sixth. He has been taking the entrance tests and interviews for DPS but has been unlucky. The school turns away at least five students a day at the peak of the admissions season.

Club Membership

Even if one is willing to pay huge amounts for the membership of an elite club, the waiting period runs into several years. That is if there is a benevolent waiting period in the first place. Bombay Gymkhana, for instance, has stopped accepting applications for the life, permanent and ordinary memberships. Corporate memberships are open though. A manager at the Gymkhana, who did not want to be identified, said that life membership was last opened in 1998 and closed within a couple of months. According to him, ordinary memberships had opened in 1979-80 and every time memberships open, there are thousands who want to get in. The Delhi Gymkhana has a waiting list that runs into several years while getting a membership in the India Habitat Centre too can take more than a decade. The Karnavati Club in Ahmedabad started with a membership fee of Rs 5,000 for ordinary members which then went up to a lakh about five years ago. Now the figure is Rs 7 lakh but there are so many on the waiting list that the club has stopped taking in new members.

Justice, of course

 As of February 2006, 33,635 cases were pending in the Supreme Court, 3.34 lakh cases in high courts, and 2.5 crore cases in subordinate courts. The Bombay bomb blasts trial that went on for 14 years is among the faster cases. It is not uncommon for justice in this land to take decades. Thousands of farmers were forced to give up their land in Akola, Vidarbha, so that the government could establish the Panjabrao Deshmukh Krishi Vidyapeeth in 1969-70. In return, the government had promised a government job to a member of every family whose land had been acquired. Some 38 years later, the farmers are still fighting for what was promised to them. Trademark People who have applied for the grant of trademarks over a decade ago are still in wait. A lawyer who did not want to named said that one of the trademarks he applied for took 18 years to come, and another took 11. In 2004, he says, there were around 2,50,000 pending trademark applications. On an average it takes anywhere between 18 to 36 months for a trademark to be granted. The average for some categories of trademark is close to four years.

Salvation

Even if one were to get fed up of the materialistic world and hope to seek salvation, there is a waiting period. At the Tirupathi temple, between mid-April and mid-May this year, the temple saw 22 lakh pilgrims, a 30% increase over the same period last year. On some days, over 80,000 have thronged the temple. As a consequence, the waiting period for an economical Rs 50 darshan of Lord Venkateswara stretches to close to three days. If you decide today to do the Rs 50,000 Udayastamana pooja at the Guruvayurappan temple in Kerala, you will be able to do it only after 2050. “We are not accepting any new applications. The new managing committee will take a decision about the next round of applications,” says a temple official. A few years ago, when the then chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalitha, wanted to give a baby elephant as an offering to the temple following an election victory, she was told that she would have to wait for 38 years.

Art Galleries

If you apply today, the earliest you can hold an exhibition at the Jehangir Art Gallery is in 2012. The gallery’s secretary, Mrs K G Menon says that it can play host to only four artists in a week. “Every year, we get 1000 applications and I can accommodate only 250.” The gallery has acquired two new places on the first floor and the waiting list is expected to come down. The mushrooming of private galleries has helped ease the pressure on Jehangir but even private galleries these days are beginning to have a long waiting period. TNN (With inputs from Vasundhara Vyas in Ahmedabad and Abhinav Bindra from New Delhi)

Surviving Parents

Surviving Parents Singles who love their parents too much to abandon them suffer the quirks of the aged and sacrifice the freedom of adulthood, say Ketan Tanna and Meena Iyer  

A common perception is that singles enjoy considerable freedom. However, the truth is that many of them are forced by an Indian mindset to live with their parents, and as a consequence suffer the tantrums of the old. Caught between love for their parents and the madness of living with them, they go through a hellish domestic life. Every day, before the break of dawn, Meena Krishnan feels the gentle nudge of her mother’s elbow. “Wake up, it’s early morning,” her 76-year-old widowed mother Mangalam cheerfully announces. It’s another matter that Meena, an unmarried 47-year-old, had a late night and could do with some more sleep. But she gets up groggily and for the next few hours listens as her mother talks incessantly about this and that.

“All I want at that point is some peace and quiet. But I give in because she has nobody else to talk to,” says Meena. There are times when Meena snaps at her mother only to regret it for the full day. “She loves ice-cream and I assuage my guilt by taking home her favourite flavour.”

Sanjeev, a 35-year-old unmarried chartered accountant who does not want to reveal his full name, says that he moved in with his parents due to ill health. He is severely diabetic and has very high blood pressure. For some reason, his parents are very suspicious of him. They have locked all the cupboards except one and have refused to give him the keys. And, they do not believe that he is truthful about how much he earns. They accuse him of not giving them his full salary. They suspect that he is spending all his money on ayyashi (debauchery).

When they asked him for his passbook, he told them that the concept was outdated. “Wait for the quarterly bank statement,” he said, but that only deepened their suspicion. Obviously, not all parents exhibit abnormal behaviour.

An overwhelming majority are regular people, going through their twilight years watching their diet, recounting memories and basking in the gratitude of their wards whom they had given that invaluable gift called a normal childhood.

But even here, there is an inevitable clash of cultures. They do not tolerate the late nights of their adult children. They do not understand why their children need something called freedom. Single girls suffer the most.

A talented actress who lives with her mother often has to listen to uncomplimentary remarks about her late nights, even though she is just returning from a night shift. Thirty-one-year-old Sakshi, who is a director of a media-house, has an understanding mother, but there are rules at home. “I cannot stay out late without informing her, or bring home men in the middle of the night. Even those men who do come home to fetch me for an evening out aren’t allowed beyond the drawing room,” she says. Sakshi feels an acute lack of privacy in her own home. She cannot even walk around her home, mulling over her thoughts. “That’s not possible because my mom craves my indulgence. If I snap back, she reminds me that she is not a paying guest in the house. That’s how bad it gets.”

Single men who live with their parents have unique problems. A journalist who comes from an affluent business household says that unpleasant situations develop over finances. He is a salaried person in a creative field and his earnings do not measure up to the wealth of his siblings.

“There are times when one is made to feel bad about how your salary is less than the phone bill of the family.” But usually, single men face problems that are similar to what single women face. Thirty-year-old Mahesh (surname withheld on request) who is a media professional, says, “Earlier, when I had invited some girlfriends over and brought them to my room, I was told to leave the door open. It was so awkward. Also, my mom would come in on some pretext or another and try to make small talk. I have stopped calling friends over.”

Ashok Shah, in his late 30s, says that boy’s nights out are out of the question. And a conservative dress code has to be followed. Singles who live with their parents have to sacrifice the little joys of life for the grander purpose of being there for their elders.

Not all singles complain though. Film publicist Parull Gossain wouldn’t trade living with her mother for anything. “My friends tease me about it,” she says happily.