Desire to serve.

I recently happened to visit the Railway reservation counter to get a 'Tatkal' ticket. For people who don't know, 'Tatkal' is a system of ticketing in which tickets can be obtained for a journey just 5 days before the travel by paying a higher premium.The 'normal' railway tickets in India usually get over lot earlier.

The 'Tatkal' system works quite efficiently. The booking starts sharp at 8 AM nationwide at booking counters and normally tickets get over by 8.10/8.15 AM.

My visit was to the booking counter at Alappuzha, a town in central Kerala.Fresh from my US visit and anticipating a huge crowd, I was dot on my timelines. Ireached the counter by 7 AM only to be greeted by closed gates of the building. But as I had guessed, soon about 50 people joined the queue behind those closed gates. I had nothing to worry as I was still standing first in the supposedly FIFO queue.Or so I thought.

The gates opened around 7.50 and before I even got ready to make a move into the building, almost everyone behind me was gone ! Yes, they were all running into the building in what was supposedly the 'next queue' ...this one, the more real one - The one at the booking counter itself. I suddenly realised the heightened necessity to unlearn a lot of my recent learnings in the US. And the need to do that a lot faster.

It was almost sure that I won't get a ticket for my journey this time as almost 30 ppl were in front of me.A processing time of 1 min per person would make it 30 mins.But then I had nothing better to do going back home, so I gave it a try. And stood there 31st in the queue, alert of course at what's happening around me this time around.

The person responsible for issuing those tickets came in at 7.55. A young chap in his early twenties.He went inside , booted up the computer and readied himself for the task that was to start in the next 5 mins.

The clock struck 8 and I saw something very strange happening.The guy's turnaround time for each person was less than 10 seconds.I was getting amazed at the speed , in fact a bit jealous as I was damn sure that I could ne'er manage to operate a computer faster than that.I reached the counter before 8.04 and told my destination, date of journey and handed the booking request slip with my name on it. As I began to take out the cash, he was already asking the next guy his destination. And that's when the whole big idea struck me !

He was not taking money at all. He was just putting a block on the tickets and asking the person to move out of the queue so that he can block tickets for the next guy. You should have seen the sheer speed of his operating the computer, he had done the job even before you could complete telling the date of your journey.

The entire crowd was served in under 10 minutes.That was the need of the hour too as the tickets would have gotten over in another 5 mins anyways.

Then he started slowly calling out each person & started printing tickets one by one after taking cash at leisure. Brilliant ! I couldn't but marvel at his desire to serve and the method with which he optimised the entire process. The 'tatkal' system itself was devised as a process improvement method coupled with the idea of eliminating brokers/middlemen by having a uniform 8 AM reservation system.But needless to say, when sound processes get coupled with efficient people, results can be awesome.

I have to admit here that it's also a little bit of Indian ingenuity. It's very difficult to imagine such a thing happening anywhere else in the world.