At the cusp of the millennium, I romanced a man over long distance ‘trunk calls’ that had to be booked through an operator. My soon-to-be husband didn’t have a landline at his rental so he would walk to the neighbourhood phone booth and stand in line, sometimes for hours, where conversations unfolded jerkily, in temporal multiples of three.
As the three minutes ended, an irritable voice would interrupt our call to ask if we wanted to speak longer.
Callers had to shout their deepest kinks so they could be heard on the crackling line; code words were key in this zero privacy era. Both of us grew up in a country whose citizens waited years to get a gas connection or to buy a scooter. This place trained us to be ready for the long haul from the word go.
Absurd Essentials
All these years later, as we Instagrammed our way into the New Year, so many of us clicked a button to order grapes so we could eat 12 at midnight for good luck, quick delivery app BlinkIt said orders for the fruit shot up seven times on 31 December. We barely noticed that gig workers were on a nationwide strike to ban 10-minute deliveries.
It doesn’t surprise me that we don’t care about the exploitation of gig workers or their demands for fair pay. We don’t see why there should be an end to the unsafe (for them) 10-minute mandates offered by a slew of startups that cater to our every whim.
But I will ask you this: How did we—a nation that literally dies waiting in queues—commodify speed into entitlement. “I want now,” we say through the day, as we regress into the language of toddlerhood that fuels the beast of the ultra-fast delivery.
‘10-9-8…Your order is reaching.’ Hang in there, baby.
Now that we have developed the desire to live with ultra fast delivery for grapes, chocolate-flavoured condoms, double-sided tape and every other ‘essential’, I feel it’s my responsibility to remind you of the things that really do need an ultra-fast response in this country that has different delivery timelines for different subsets of its population.
10 Minutes to Good Governance
So here goes:
We need a quick-commerce response time for accident victims. Enough of hit-and-run victims dying on the road because the emergency response was too slow or the ambulance failed to show up. No more ambulances that break down en route to the hospital or stop for VIP motorcades.
No more dying in hospital waiting rooms because nobody shows up to take you into the emergency room. We need faster turnaround times for organ transplants please. And let’s save the 12,000 Indians who die every day as they stand by for blood transfusions.
No more waiting endlessly for bail for crimes you did not commit.
No more waiting months to get a reserved train ticket to go back home. Stop this waiting for packed commuter trains where there is a constant fear of falling off and dying, as six people did every day in Mumbai last year.
No more waiting to hear about jobs in a country that has so many aspirants and so few open positions. No more youth scrolling endlessly for government exam results while their futures hang in limbo.
No more students languishing years for college admissions or scholarship approvals. No more waiting for a teacher recruitment exam for seven whole years. No more dreams deferred.
No more delayed darshans and dying in queues of hurried, harried pilgrims.
No more dying while you wait to procure fertiliser or rations. No more farmers ending their lives in despair over delayed crop insurance claims.
No more endless waiting, not knowing whether or not this country will consider you its citizen or deport you. No more dying as you wait to be deported. No more refugees or migrants trapped in paperwork purgatory.
No more waiting for your dear one’s bodies to be brought home from another country as you navigate the bureaucracy. No more families begging for months to retrieve remains from disaster sites or conflict zones.
No more waiting decades for justice. India’s oldest pending case was finally settled on a technicality after 72 years in 2023.
No more waiting for laws to be implemented, and for the Constitution to be followed.
Let’s not declare instant gratification the new fundamental right of privileged India, even as the vulnerable navigate interminable delays. Let’s demand speed from elected representatives, and relearn how to purchase grapes slowly.
(The author is the founder of India Love Project and on the editorial board of Article 14. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)