Check your weight

You climb on to the 1ft by 1ft metal platform. A coin poised ready in your hand. The white-red disc rotates. You wait, because the instructions painted in calligraphic hindi read

“ लाल-सफ़ेद चक्कर का घूमना बंद होने के बाद ही सिक्का डालें”

You look at the bright LEDs, shining in crazy spirals and concentric circles. Red-blue-green. The disc has stopped rotating. You insert the coin in the slot, an audible clunk registers into your auditory senses. The machine comes alive. A shaft moves to extract a small 1in by 3in cardboard ticket from a stack in front of you, behind the glass. The LEDs explode in a flurry of colors. Switching on and off, making crazy lit up circles; as if driven into a furious frenzy to hypnotize you. The printing head comes down with a thud and the ticket falls in the cup below the light storm.

There is not one chance that the coin might have been returned as well, but you still run your fingers through the coin return cup, nursing a mad hope of getting the coin and the ticket as well. Disappointment meets you. The dejection is replaced by curiosity as you pick up the ticket. It is as if it holds the answer to ‘life the universe and everything’.

My ticket read 84, that’s twice the expected answer (42 that is).

But it is not just the weight figure that is important about the ticket. With childish curiosity you turn the ticket around, to face a smiling Priety Zinta embossed in a 50*50 pixel resolution and below the marvel of printing is your predicted future “Friends will rescue you from the financial perils you face”. A smile spreads across your face, as if this scrap of cardboard is your destiny. And you hop off the platform, giving way to the next person in line who’ll go through similar motions.

India is clearly a country of weight conscious individuals. Machines similar to the one I mentioned above can be found on all (I do not say almost all, I state with conviction all) bus stands and railway stations. I do not know how much revenue these machines contribute to the annual railway budget, but I bet it’s substantial. I can even go as far as thinking that the recent turnaround of the railways can be attributed to Mr. Prasad’s decision to service all the existing weight machines, install newer machines and provide an inverter to each machine in case of power failure.( and obviously the chai in clay cups)

We are a country that does not have an obesity grant in it’s national budget; the average number of overweight people is much less than developed countries and McDonald’s is not scattered as densely as the paan shops. But if I ask why people are so anxious about their weight, I am faced by expressions that read, “It is the most closely guarded cosmic secret (after the answer to the question of ‘life the universe and everything’, obviously)”

I cannot let you in to the secret ( I found it out by traveling to the Vogon colony that runs the super computer which has answered and harbored all the cosmic secrets), but I can make you think, the next time you stand on one of these machines and see the lights.