of queues and tokens

you know there are times when you are doing something, and you come across things that remind you of a time in the past totally unrelated....the mind is an amazing thing, it can connect things totally unrelated and still make sense of it.....something like a pipe.....like a portal that transports you from one place and time to some place else altogether

i had one of those moments today. i was watching a movie which showed these long lines of people waiting to get something....(dont know why the movie triggered it......and not the insane line outside an electronic store which me and my friends stood in, all night, to buy something a couple of years back.....the magic of the word sale!!....drives sane people nuts)....somehow i found myself walking arund this street close to home in delhi....back in the late 80's and early 90's...before the times of liberalisation, the availability of packed food, wonderful consumerism that brought everything one wanted on to aisles close to home.....one had to stand in lines for getting ration and to buy milk.....we had this mother dairy booth in our neighbourhood(white and blue as always.....strangely clinical colours....different parts of india call the affiliates of operation flood by different names....they are different cooperatives......its the symbol of the drop of milk that unite them:)....its called mother dairy in some places....nandhini in others...those are the ones i know of......the story of the operation flood by the way is one of enterprenural genius that changed the lives of millions in india......something i will go into some other time i guess).......the entire neighbourhood got its milk supply from a single store.....consequently if the truck carrying the milk supply was late....or the booth was undergoing a power cut(which was common back then)....you would end up having long queues...serpentine lines that went round the corner off the booth all the way around the park behind it and a bit into the colony....you would wait for an hour to get to the head of the line.... where the gentleman at the counter would hand you tokens(coins with the drop symbol) for 5 rupees each(hmmm was it 5)...and you would go and put it in this coin booth.....which would fetch you half a litre of milk.....on days you had to buy in liters you could ask the milkman to put it on the automatic booth....you placed your steel container(most milk containers were steel with a handle around it) in this ledge in the wall with a drip on top for the milk to fall through....the milkman would turn on the machine....and lo and behold you would get milk without the tokens!!!....one liter at a time!!....was magic back then!!

i remembered (on seeing the queue in the movie) for some reason one such evening where me, my brother and dad stood in the line for an hour to get milk on a summer evening as the sun set.....the glee to get to the front of the line is pasted in my memory:)......things have improved so much now.....i mean we have packed milk, milk in tetra packs available through the cities...everything is so readily available......i guess its more a touch of nostalgia to remember those lines and that milk booth tucked away in a colony back in delhi....