One of the vows that I had taken, subconsciously over the years, is not to buy groceries from supermarkets on weekends.
The frequent sight of couples, children in tow, pushing carts full of groceries — and almost an equal amount of junk food — on a Saturday or Sunday evenings made me resolve that that is not how I am going to spend my weekend evenings. I am perfectly fine with sitting at home reading or doing nothing in particular, or even working in office, but not with standing in an hour-long queue in a grocery store.
But today, a Sunday, I found myself in the neighbourhood supermarket picking up things I had been planning to buy. When I walked in, there were hardly any empty baskets or carts available. The place was crawling with people. Supermarkets, like malls, have become the recreation centre for the urban middle-class. Children, for the lack of actual playgrounds, run around screaming (the very small ones also get lost and start bawling); adults consult their cellphones — “Do you want the durum wheat penne or the spaghetti?”; the aisles are as hazardous as jaywalking on the highway, you never know who or what is going to ram into your shin while you are picking up something from a shelf; you feel a human being rubbing past your rear end, and spin around furiously only to see it is a kid pushing past; and tempers are as frayed as in rush hour traffic.
And, despite all these warnings, I waded into the store, filling my basket and telling myself that it is not too bad.
And then, I had to move towards the tills.
Serpentine queues wound through aisles, around shelves and themselves. It took me a bit of time to realize that every till had equally long queues. Almost everyone had carts stacked with groceries, and for every one cart, there were four people standing around it. Supermarkets have ensured that shopping for atta and vegetables becomes a family outing, not a mundane household chore.
I squeezed past people and carts and found, what I thought, a relatively shorter queue. Someone was talking on a phone close to me and said, “It looks like this is going to take an hour.”
I looked around. It was a Sunday evening, I was in a supermarket, with a basket of things to buy, squashed amid singles, couples and children with loaded carts, with at least 45 minutes till I reached the till.

I stepped out of the queue. Kept my basket in a corner, and walked out.
Outside, I bought myself some popcorn.

It feels good to have made some vows that you know make sense to you.