Hemantha Kalam - 57 'The Time Stealers'

Have you ever come across a ‘time stealer’? No? Well, think again! I would venture out saying that 95% of our people are ‘time stealers’. Not convinced? OK follow me for the next few minutes.

The other day I was waiting my turn at the bank's counter patiently. After about some 10 minutes of waiting, my turn came in and I was explaining my issue to the bank’s lady staff member. Even when I am just about half way, a gentleman, well he has to be a gentleman, for he is wearing a safari dress, interrupted, no intercepted our business.

In India, if someone wears a Safari suit, he should either be a Police official, the secret type or the high echelon body guard type, or a person trying to appear as a gentleman. Interestingly most of the hunters do not seem to be wearing safaris in India, not that I encountered any hunter. I had always been the hunted type but psst.., please don’t tell my wife about me, being hunted. This is just between the two of us.

Anyway, this ‘gentleman’ (because he is wearing a safari suit) butted into my conversation waving an account passbook before the staff. Apparently the lady staff member found the figures in his passbook more interesting and started attending to him confirming very clearly that I am now past the age of being hunted any more. Their conversation took no less than 15 minutes, all the time while I was waiting, huffing and puffing and making protesting noises. The ‘gentleman’ in the safari suit just stole 15 minutes from me. When I pointed that out to both the staff member and the ‘gentleman’ (because he is wearing a safari suit) neither of them were apologetic at all and said just one word, ‘can’t you adjust’? Worst, the lady staff supported him. In fact they didn’t steal my time alone but also that of those waiting their turn behind me. The gentleman walked out nonchalantly and in fact, I suspect, triumphantly.

There are times, when you are standing in a long queue to buy your platform ticket at the railway station and have already unwound in the queue for about 15 minutes and the guy/gal at the counter closes the counter, just when you reach it, to run to the loo. After s/he returns you have noticed it was after about a 20 minute gap. S/he just stole your 20 minutes.

There are also possibilities of others putting their hands into the same counter by swarming around you in the queue and stealing all your waiting time. This used to happen in cinema theatres of yore but after online bookings came, this has significantly reduced. Only in India, our excellent discipline enables us form any number of queues in any whichever way, out of just one queue.

You go to the ATM and the person before you in the ATM doesn’t come out in a jiffy. One wonders what ever these guys ponder in front of those machines. There were a couple of times I had to tell the guys that these are ATMs and not fortune telling machines. You lose time.

You would see this happening in lifts in public areas. When you are law abiding or disciplined and are standing in the long queues in front of a bank of lifts in large complexes, people pushing you back and getting into the lifts is a common practice.

You are not spared even in the airports. When you are trying to organise your mobile, phone, belt, watch, laptop etc into the trays, suddenly someone snatches away the tray in front of you and gives you a nasty sheepish smile showing his one up-manship. Then if there is no stock of those trays, you need to wait till some are brought as replenishment. This means the guy with the sheepish smile has just stolen your time.

The worst thing and time to happen is when you park your vehicle and by the time you finish your work and return you see that your vehicle is surrounded by indiscriminately parked and locked vehicles when you need to rush out. This could happen to you in parking spaces, in front of your gate or even in your apartment / condo complex. Like the Murphy’s law, only when the security guard ducks his head, the expert ‘time stealer’ parks his/her vehicle haphazardly and vanish into one of the myriad apartments. After that a hunt is to be mounted to find the ‘thief’.

Some people casually park in slots allotted to others and walk away. In our own apartment there were people not at all belonging to our apartments parking in our spots. Especially those idiots parking in front of gates don’t even appear to be thinking that there could be a medical emergency and vehicles need access to the roads. Regretfully, most of the new generation kids do not even seem to be applying their minds as their mind is ‘viced’ in between two earplugs almost all the time.

One of these weekends, try to figure out how much time has been stolen from you by these undisciplined, unabashed wretches of ‘time stealers’ and calculate the same with your average earnings so that you would know how much you have lost in life so far. And also try to estimate the total ‘time stolen’ from all citizens in the country for a day. You will go bonkers, I promise without hesitation.

You would note that for a change I have not mentioned the havoc brought in by and time lost due to activities on the FAWNG (Facebook, Amazon, WhatsApp, Netflix and Google) out of which Facebook and WhatsApp could steal other’s time but the rest only their own time which anyway is their own business. I am sure that some smart alec would say that even tormenting with blogs is stealing time! While I have to reluctantly agree, one always has a choice of ignoring and saving one’s own time and senses so to say! J

These ‘time stealers’ are more dangerous to our country than the most hard-core economic offenders as due to this endemic, the time of the entire country’s citizens is lost. There are times when people missed their buses, trains, flights and lost their opportunities in a fraction due to such characters.Now tell me, have you ever come across such ‘time stealers’?

There should be stringent laws, I wouldn’t hesitate suggesting caning as well, against such indiscipline. Discipline, has never been an average Indian’s forte. It’s about time the scenario changes and people start identifying the value of their time first and the other’s time next.

My vote would be for such a party who not only promises but shall take action against such ‘time stealers’.

Well, what about yours? Pray tell me!

Till then, 

Krutagjnatalu (Telugu), Nanri (Tamil), Dhanyavaadagalu (Kannada), Nanni (Malayalam), Dhanyavaad (Hindi), Dhanyosmi (Sanskrit), Thanks (English), Dhonyavaad (Bangla), Dhanyabad (Oriya), Gracias (Spanish), Grazie (Italian), Danke Schon (Deutsche), Merci (French), Obrigado (Portuguese), Shukraan (Arabic), Shukriya (Urdu), Bohoma Sthuthiyi (Sinhalese) Aw-koon (Khmer), Kawp Jai Lhai Lhai (Laotian), Kob Kun Krab (Thai),Asante (Kiswahili), Maraming Salamat sa Lahat (Pinoy-Tagalog-Filipino), Tack (Swedish),Fa'afetai (Samoan), Terima Kasih (Bahasa Indonesian) and Tenkyu (Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea).

Hemantha Kumar Pamarthy

Chennai, India