Queues, crowds, and the fear of missing out

The fear of missing out and not getting a spot on a bus or a train can leave us pushing and jostling. | Photo Credit: ANI Many months ago, I came across a social media post that highlighted the collective Indian lack of “discipline”. The post showed two videos side by side — in the first, people were maintaining a proper queue and boarding a train in Japan while in the other, people were jostling, shoving and attempting to enter an overcrowded suburban train in India. I jumped right in and commented that this was not an apples-to-apples comparison and that the creator of the post should have posted a video of people boarding a metro train in India and not a suburban train. I went on to add that the two sets of people shown in the post, came from entirely different socio-economic and educational backgrounds and it just wasn’t fair to compare them and make such a generalised judgement about Indians as a whole.But as soon as I had posted, I felt less certain about my opinion. It took me a while to understand why. Recently, I made a fairly long distance trip by metro, having to change trains at the busiest station in the city. It was a working day and at peak hour, but the crowd was much more than what I had anticipated — so much so that there was slow-moving human “traffic” at the entrance to the platform, before I could even make it to the queues. Published - October 11, 2026 05:00 am IST