The "queueing" industry
Always seeking for opportunities, sometimes I salute these indians. But well, who can blame them, in a land where if you do not step up and fight for yourself and earn your next meal, who will do it for you ?
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The other day at Delhi (DEL), I was a New Delhi Railway station and thanks to the flight coming in late, I missed my reserved seating train from DEL to Agra (Land of the Taj Mahal). So, well, my 300INR just flew like that. So well, next was to find a train to get from DEL to Agra again. Went to the New Delhi railway station, saw the HUMONGOUS (did I spell this correctly?) queue there in the booking queue. Amidst figuring out whether this was the place where we should be buying our tickets and trying to hear an offer from an indian man who just turned up beside us offering a "package" of going by car instead.
So yea, after a while we decided to take a walk around. Then we saw this "reservations for foreign tourists" - wah not bad, I think they must know that we stupid tourists will be kanna chopped by the illegal service providers around, so they set up this counter for us. Went in to the place, nicely done up, train schedules and all, saw the train we want to take, then there was this "chair queuing system" and one caucasian woman told me, albeit rudely as I was about to sit down "Actually the queue starts from there" (point to a place about 20m away).
Ok, there's no way we were going to catch a train leaving in 20min time if we were to join the queue (err, more about the punctuality of trains later!) so we decided to leave the "foreigner booking office".
Went downstairs, saw this "unreserved seating counter", as usual was packed with lots of people trying to get a ticket. Was also in the midst of wondering, d*** have to endure like close to an hour of queueing again ! Then this man comes up, says, "ok, I'll you tickets, it's normally 65INR per person but I'll charge you INR200 for 2 persons"
I said "OK!" (INR200 is only SGD8 just by the way)
He takes our money, jumps across all the queues, goes up the counter, hands over a portion (he and the ticket counter staff have a deal going on I'm sure) and comes by in 49 seconds flat with tickets !
Amazing !
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Money works. It works better in India.
posted by Globetrekker @ 6:08 PM
1 Comments:
Haha, that's really amazing. Looks like you are having fun observing them :)
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