Mind wars rage in serpentine queues

The queues spewing out of colleges’ admission counters are really tense coils of ill-will and anxiety. Prospective students in the queues are crushed by relations of other prospective students.

And the heat of the crush seems to  bring the human propensity to intimidate other human beings to a noxious boil. “How many colleges have you applied to?” the aunty will ask the overwrought boy next to her at a suburban college. “Only three? That is so sad! I sent my cousin’s elder sister to DY Patil in Vashi so that my son’s chances are enhanced.” The boy will then bemoan his blighted luck Why oh why, he will ask the gods, doesn’t his mother have cousins and elder sisters in Vashi.

It must not be thought that only middle-aged relations of college aspirants play mind games. The youngsters themselves seem to be addicted to Schadenfreude. For example, the aunty who frightened the poor boy had her come-uppance delivered by a dishevelled weakling with pallid stubble and jeans from the Wyatt Earp era. “Arre aunty, my uncle is logistics manager. So he had ten people deployed for major college zones,” the proto-punk said. “Last morning, my forms were submitted in most colleges across the city.”

Aunty was shell-shocked for a second. Then she brightened up: “If what you say is true beta,” she said, “why are you here today? All that logistics is bull, na?” The boy moved three-sixths of an inch as the queue moved forward, and let his put-down rip like FedEx’s passing shot: “Na na, aunty. The chicks here are kewl.”

The anxiety, the anomie, and the confusion no doubt triggered the survivalist mind wars in the queue. The line-up of stressed souls at the college, in fact, was so long that it crisscrossed another formation of frazzled line-standers at the far away local-train station.

And in some cases, people reached the counter wanting a form for a BA course in Economics and found to their dismay that they could manage only a second-class ticket to Wadala.