I stepped back, looked towards both sides, trying to figure
out not which is the smallest queue – as most of the queues had 3-4 people in
it – but which is bound to make me reach the counter the fastest. Now there are
a lot of factors which are required to be considered for this – i) the amount
of stuff people in the queue ahead of you have accumulated in their shopping
baskets, as this is directly proportional to the amount of scanning time for
that individual, hence increasing the waiting time of that particular queue,
ii) the apparent quickness of the guy/girl at the counter – to be judged in not
more than 3 seconds, iii) the queues nearer to you are of higher priority as
you don’t want to criss-cross between so many queues of people to reach the row
at the other end, and moreover, you don’t know how well do that factors i) and
ii) above apply to the queues farther away, and iv) other miscellaneous subtle
factors like the anxiousness of the people waiting in queue, as it is directly
proportional to their desperateness to get the billing done quickly, which may
be important.
So as I stepped back, I made a quick judgement about the
smallest queue and joined it. That’s when I saw the gigantic guy. He was not
very tall, though definitely at 6 feet. He seemed shorter because of his
enormous circumference around the waist. He was bulging from every end you can
possible call a corner in the human body. If you could pump air into a huge
piece of ginger, it would look like him. Though I did not have enough time to
analyse all this before I saw what he was buying. There in his basket I saw
three jars of Organic India Green Tea! Hello! No way was he going to lose any
apparent weight by drinking Green Tea! For heaven’s sake! He needs to stop with
all the namkeen packets he had stacked up in his basket, waiting to be billed.
He needed to move around a little to lose weight, not have Green Tea! I mean
goodness! I almost laughed out loud!
Then with a jolt, I got the answer to the question - What is
the easiest thing for us humans to be? It’s being an asshole. I was passing
judgement on that person without knowing an ounce of information about him. I
was showing a typical conceited attitude that constitutes a typical asshole.
And I caught myself in the act. All this happened within 15 seconds, but those
15 seconds shook me back to reality, brought me back to the ground. We do not
know what goes on in the lives of others, we don’t know what compromises they
have made, how much hard work they have put in, how much adversity they have
faced in life. We don’t know jack about anything for that matter, yet we strut
around, handing out judgements to people like candy to children on Christmas.
To top it all, we have the smugness to be defensive about it if someone else
points it out to us. Truth is hard, but so is an asshole. So everyone, I would
suggest whenever you find yourself making an opinion about someone, any opinion
whether big or small, turn the mirror towards yourself and just see the look on
your face while you are at it. It may not shame the piss out of you, but it’ll
at least wipe that smirk off your face.