It's August 15. Independence Day. Time to reflect on one of my favourite topic. Toilets!
Why toilets? Before we go into that, I have news for you. I'm back in GOC
(abbreviation for Mallu-lala-land currently in vogue among my friends),
or God's Own Cakkoos. You might be wondering what Cakkoos is? Well, it's
the word for toilet in Malayalam. I made up the spelling knowing well that
some people might prefer a K instead of C. Hope you don't have any problem
with that.
What set me off once again on the toilet trail was my latest return trip to India. After almost eight years I came back via Madras (or whatever they call it now) and it brought back memories of my first trip back after going abroad. Madras airport then was filthy, but the toilet was in a different dimension altogether. I remember going into the toilet to do wee-wee after arrival and finding the three dirty piss-pots filled with, what else, smelly urine. Many people were peeing outside for fear of the urine plopping back on to their faces. The stink was otherworldly, which means quintessentially Indian, and you immediately felt at home.
This time around the int'l airport looked brand new and clean, though still a work in progress, and the toilet as viewed from afar looked in a much better shape. The domestic terminal was still the same old story.
Continuing with toilet stories, just before my trip I had gone to my favorite
tempura (Japanese fritters or bajjis) shop with my cobra (refer May 15, 2007 for cobra definition). Though it is a tempura place, I basically go there
for the delicious basashi, or raw horseflesh, that comes with the chef's
choice tempura course. The owner/chef had recently built his own place,
moving out from his old run-down shop, and had installed a funny piss-pot.
This I found out when I went in to relieve the pressure of a few beers.
There was a small poster above the pot that asks the pee-er?? piss-er??
(what do you call a man who is urinating?) to aim at the small sphere on
the bottom of the pot where the urine falls. Well, I am obedient and did
as I was told. Lo and behold, the sphere turned its colour from a dark
grey to a kind of fluorescent blue. Impressive, though I don't know what
its purpose is. To give you the blues, maybe.
Usually, after the tempura we go to a snack. A "snack" in Japanese
is not what it means in English. A snack is a place where men (mostly)
go to pay slightly exorbitant amounts of money to drink and be entertained
by women. Entertainment generally involves only small talk and perhaps
karaoke and does not involve anything else, though there are some places
that do go beyond the general services. Not this snack I'm referring to.
Now, this place has a toilet (not a piss-pot, but a regular western toilet)
with a small flower at the centre of the toilet bowl. When you come back
from the toilet the girls drinking with you will let you in on the secret
behind this flower. One is that most men aim at the flower and second is
that if you can properly aim at it, you're still good for another couple
of rounds. Then they would ask whether you aimed at it. Hmm!!! Nice way
to fleece some more because no Japanese salaryman worth his salt would
want to admit that he tried and failed and peed all over the floor and
crawled on it even if urine is dripping off his necktie.
Well, that brings an end to this edition of toilet chronicles. I sometimes feel I should bring out a book titled "My experiments with toilets", something akin to "My experiments with truth" by the Papa of our Nation and similarly profound. Considering we're celebrating the shashtiabdapoorthi (60th year) of our nation's independence, it'd be an ideal time for such a venture. It'd also chronicle our nation's development as measured in the number of cheap, toxic Chinese toys stored in shops across the country, development as measured in centimetres of motorable roads, development as measured in GQ etc.
Note: GQ, or garbage quotient, is something which I developed a few minutes
ago and is the average distance between two nearest garbage piles in a
city. The shorter the distance, the smaller the GQ and hence the more developed
we are. Right now we're close to achieving the highest ever rating and
moving into the extremely developed, super power category with the average
distance rapidly decreasing to a few metres in most major cities. Jai Hind.