Does this happen in Pune alone?

I am sure it does happen in other places as well, but I picked up these two instances from two of my friends.  I hope others will write in their experiences as well.  After I wrote the last post, these two instances jumped up from some corner of memory and asked to be posted up here.

The first one pertains to the period after Pune was flooded with Panshet waters in 1961.  Bank of Maharashtra had a branch at Deccan Gymkhana.  It is still there standing proudly.  This branch was flooded completely and all the ledgers were washed out.  Those days there was no system of back up.  The branch accounts must have been consolidated and carried to the higher office, say, Regional office.  But these gave the overall picture of the branch as a whole.  After the cleaning up was over, branch operations had to restart for individual customers.  The Bank management issued an advertisement and invited account holders to submit an application stating the last known balance as per their passbooks and subsequent transactions if any.  If at all, discrepancies could arise with regard to the amount deposited by way of cash and where the counterfoil was not available with the customers.  Withdrawals could be checked from the passbook entries.  Of course, there were customers whose houses had been submerged and had lost their passbooks and other records to the fury of the floods.  At the end of a laborious compilation of individual records, the Bank found that the discrepancies were very marginal.  In other words, customers, by and large, had stated the balances with their honesty intact.  This happened almost fifty years ago and one can say that things have changed for the worse now.  This instance was told to me by my friend, Dileep S Kulkarni.

The Deccan Queen that runs between Pune and Mumbai is an institution and not a mere train.  Regular travellers have strong emotional attachment to the DQ and they have evolved a strong bonding among themselves.  The regulars are known as Season Ticket holders.  There is a first class and also a second class Season Ticket.  Both classes of regulars have their own codes and norms.  My friend Pushkaraj Apte tells me that the first class Season Ticket holders have a system of forming the queue on the platform.  They come before time and form a queue at the spot where the first class compartment is usually parked.  Once the train arrives from the yard into the station, they enter the compartment strictly according to the queue.

It so happened once that the Station Master had to change the platform from which the DQ was to depart.  Already the regulars had formed the queue on platform no.1.  There was an announcement that the DQ will now come on platform no.3.  It was open to the regulars to rush to the new platform and form a new queue or to grab the seat that they liked.  What happened was that the whole queue moved like an army column from platform no.1 on to the overbride and down to platform no.3.  No one left the queue and no one jumped it.  I think this happened about 10-15 years ago.  To me it shows that not only can we follow externally imposed discipline, like the one seen in Akshar Dham, but we are also capable of self-discipline.

And as they say, everything opposite is equally true in India.  So we are capable of stampedes, chaos and trampling, as well.  It is our choice, what we want to do.