It washes, it rinses....

Back in the land of toilets with electronic control panels. After a brief sojourn in Tokyo catching up with friends, I reached Kitami two days back and today I finally got my gadgets hooked to the www thingy (not the toilet, at least as of now). Nighttime temperatures are still hovering around 11 degrees below zero and days are much warmer (?) at 2 to 3 degrees. The best thing is that the house is warm enough for me to loiter around in a lungi and t-shirt and also my toilet seat is warm. The toilet seat I have here is one of the earlier models but it still has more digital displays and buttons than an Ambassador car's dashboard panel.

First thing I did after reaching here was open up the toilet seat panel, set the seat and water temperature to warm and the water pressure to medium. (The water pressure sometimes has to be set to high depending on the previous days intake.) I think I've mentioned this somewhere before. The old washing-machine jingle always comes to mind whenever I see these toilets. "It washes, it rinses, it even dries your ...." This is one gadget I'm pretty sure won't become popular in India any time soon. Not a good idea to have an electric gadget (even with a voltage stabilizer) near the family jewels in a land where the voltage fluctuations vary from 0 to 400.

I read somewhere that TOTO, the company that makes these toilets and one of the leading manufacturers in the world, even has plans to make toilets that would give you a small health check every time you take a leak. Scary, isn't it? The idea is to collect a small sample of the urine and do some quick tests and give a print out of your latest diseases. Not my idea of starting my day.

Well, back in Japan and I'm getting ready to tone down my Indian habits such as blaring the horn when driving etc. Driving un-insanely is again a difficult thing to do after coming back from India, but today I managed to drive to the supermarket and back without touching the horn or shouting at some idiot (because nobody came into my way). And I remembered to put the seatbelt!

After coming back, I was having tea and munching on some Bhujia Sev (a snack manufactured by Haldiram's) when I noticed the "Export Quality" seal on the package. This "export quality" thing has always bothered me. It implies that somehow people outside India deserve good, quality stuff and not Indians. Indians deserve and get only second or third-rate stuff. Why is that? Why don't they make stuff for Indians that is of the best quality and then sell it to foreigners saying that this is especially made for Indians and boasts the highest quality?

It's the opposite in Japan. Anything made in Japan is considered to be superior to imported stuff. Whether it is fruits, vegetable, meat, electronic gadgets or even talking toilets. Long time back when there was a rice shortage here, Japan imported rice from Thai and some other countries. People didn't buy the rice. They paid exorbitant amounts for Japanese rice and foreigners like us benefited as shopkeepers were practically giving away excellent Thai rice.
I hope one day soon, I'd be able to see Haldiram selling the best-quality bhujia sev to Indians before selling it to foreigners.

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