3 seconds later...

Want to know the value of 3 seconds? No no... I don't mean this in the way that a fraction-of-a-second can make a difference- so don't go asking the accident victim or the people with big regrets from big moments. I am really only talking about something on the lighter side... like temple queues. Being in the land of a thousand temples, Kanchipuram, it was imperative that I visit a few on my yearly visits here to my parents-in-laws' house. And so we temple-hopped today. While a couple of them were deeply, spiritually satisfying, one of them was one of those thoroughly commercialized affairs where you had to pay for everything from leaving your footwear outside to getting normal dharshan of the God/Goddess. Mind you, this wasn't even one of those temples like Tirupati where the monetary collections were part of maintaining some vague decorum or strata of luxury. There must've been about 30 of us in a queue today waiting to get a glimpse of the main deity. Yet, everyone was in a hurry. Why would one come to a temple if they were in a hurry? Beats me. And I am sure that they weren't exactly in a hurry... it was just the way they were used to being in temples. Want to know the value of 3 seconds? Ask the sweaty woman who makes it her business to drip all over you and push you with all her weight from behind while if she just waited instead, she could still glimpse the deity in like 3 seconds. Or the man who's twice your size trying to elbow you into a corner so he can squeeze past you in the single-line file and be ahead of one more person (or how-many-ever more he manages to elbow past). Oh and I hate groups that are trying to move in packs. My philosophy is if you get separated, deal with it (unless you have kids walking by themselves risking a stampede). The line's usually so narrow that you are unlikely to evaporate or get lost. Have a reunion at the clearing after the dharshan for God's sake instead of squeezing past in groups or worse, holding onto one another to keep together. Perhaps, it's a mental victory of sorts for all these people who do it... that they caught sight of the deity 3 seconds before the guy behind them or say 3 minutes before the end of the queue. No, that doesn't make sense, does it? Why not then move in an orderly fashion and behave decently rather than stifle the already stale air in the waiting queues by huffing over someone else, or worse dripping perspiration over them? We'll never know.