I had a pretty long and a tiring day but the best part was 3 hours spent in the tiny post office at sahakar nagar. I was waiting for the guy to get my parcels done and in the mean time, time travel happened. When you enter this post office, you can see big framed pictures of Mahatma Gandhi and Ambedkar on the wall hanging high up with their respective malas. And there’s this fan which moves so slowly that you feel as if a slight nudge would make it move a little bit faster. The place has three steel almirahs stacked with papers of all kinds and a huge bunch of keys hooked to one of the almirah’s keyhole. There’s another door leading to an inner room, where you can see stacks of paper which makes you wonder if they would ever be opened again yet they sit on the shelves for years together. In the background plays the radio with old hindi songs which was quite surprising to find in this part of the country. The post office has a total of four people working. Two on the front desk and one lady with real soda glasses skimming through papers and money and snail’s pace. The fourth one looks more like one of those silent characters of a charlie chaplin movies. Throughout those 3 hours, I kept looking at him wondering who exactly does he resemble. Now that I sit to write this, a voice inside screamed ‘CHARLIE CHAPLIN’. He even walks slower than the working pace of the lady. And again n again he ends up at the wash basin behind the almirah’s to wash his face and keeps wiping it for at least ten minutes. In between that wiping, the lady passes on some books and files to him and he takes it at an equally slow pace. Nobody seems to be in a hurry nor wee bit of impatience exhibited. Then there’s an ante room sorta thing separated from the main office chamber by a curtain. Our charlie chaplin character just slides into that space only to emerge when his name’s called.
Lets come to the front desk people. One of them probably has worked long enough in this particular branch. He is quite efficient yet doesn’t complain of the laid back attitude of his colleagues. If there is any problem, he is the one approached, though it looks like the lady is senior to him but for implementation purposes, his advise is looked upon at. And now the other guy who was dealing with my business. He is a perpetually irritated guy who loses his temper at every other person and thing. The moment he looked at my pile of parcels, he said WAIT!!! I didn’t know the wait was gonna be 3 hours. Occasionally I kept flashing a smile at him and then he probably thought he’s made me wait enough and sidelined all the other people so that he could get my stuff outta the way. Around 1 pm came this guy who picked up parcels and registered posts and blah blah stuff in a gunny back with the India post logo on it and then after he had sorted it out into three packs, he had a wax seal done for each of them. Now this is something I had never seen nor knew. I wonder if it was the registered posts and all or also the money orders and stuff.
Then comes our ‘aam janta’. There was a constant flow of people in this post office. Mostly senior citizens who had all the time in the world to get their work done and probably had ‘post office’ as their destination for the day. All of them knew our happy efficient front desk guy and he knew them too. So the friendly exchanges took over the distance of the front desk and the waiting space. There were old men who would just walk into the space behind the desks and take a seat opposite the lady to get their work done. She would hear them out and work at an even slower pace. But somehow before the day ends. all the work is done. It took a while to get my work done but the time travel experience was worth all the wait. 🙂
Neurons gone bonkers 