Image for representation.
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Umesha has picked up your order! There can be no words more thrilling when you’re hungry and tracking your order on the food delivery app.
But you don’t just settle down patiently for your brown paper bag to arrive. You continue to watch the red-and-black motorcycle icon on the map as it inches its way towards you. You cheer for Umesha when he makes a nifty U-turn, and wait nervously as he nears that troublesome traffic bottleneck. The tracking experience brings a little excitement of its own, and you’re not alone if you indulge in it.
When you’re famished and impatient, it’s a natural urge to see how far away your food is. But people often track even when the reason is not so urgent. A consumer habits survey found that people liked to track their orders every day, even if delivery wasn’t expected immediately.
Some do it, apparently, because of what Urban Dictionary calls “pre-parcel anxiety,” the state of nervous apprehension you’re in until you have your hands on the thing you’ve paid for. But I find that there are far nicer reasons to track a package, especially if it’s to reach you after a long journey: the romance of all those far-off, unknown places it touches on its way, the images it conjures of early-morning trains and cargo trucks on dusty roads.
If you’re into old novels, you’re aware of the delicious thrills that await a sentence like this: “Early that morning, the ship dropped anchor at the port of Aden.” The tracking enthusiast feels a similar rush on seeing “5:30 a.m.: Package left Sonepat.” There’s a flutter of anticipation for the thing that’s arriving, of course, but to check on it during its journey is a delight in itself.
The order update shows me that my Tangail cotton saree was picked up in Santipur, West Bengal, but it has to stay overnight in Ranaghat before it is sent to the regional facility at Howrah. And the bell metal box from Sirohi must rest for a while at the Abu Road Junction in Rajasthan. They both arrive at the Hoskote sorting hub on the same day, and travel together to my Bengaluru home.
And having followed their adventures, I picture dotted lines crisscrossing all over the country, connecting my life with the lives of innumerable strangers who played a role in bringing me something I desired. I think of someone, somewhere, folding and packing my saree, someone else loading it onto a rattling truck in the predawn hours. Tracking a package isn’t just watching its progress; it’s imagining the invisible hands that are all part of this unspoken adventure. In the quiet, overlooked romance of e-commerce, there’s a joy not just in what you get, but in the story of how it found its way to you.