Going to the Wash Room? Be Warned!

I don’t know who said it, but I kind of agreed: India is a vast latrine. Everywhere you see across the nation, there are people relieving themselves in open spaces, on railway tracks, at the boundary walls of ill-lit bungalows, near drains on the roadside or just about anywhere they feel they must go.

Of late, however, there has been a shift in the way Indians, especially urban, well-to-do Indians, obey the call of nature when not at home. Thanks to a growing number of restaurants, malls, multiplexes and other concrete contraptions where you can now find toilets, people finally have alternatives to open spaces. In fact, sometimes, it seems too good to be true. Toilets in public places? For Indians?? Wow!!!

But when I look at how the toilets are constructed, and how they are maintained and serviced, the wow factor goes down the flush. Let me give you some examples.

There’s this restaurant I went to one of those weekends when you go to a restaurant to eat out. After a while, I felt the urge to pee and went in search of the rest room. Now, this was a fairly upmarket restaurant with upper-class clientele. But look at their toilet! Soon as I pushed open the door, the commode blocked it from opening fully. One way to get inside the toilet was to clamber onto the pot – there was no space around the pot – and shut the half-open door right back. But there were two dangers in doing so: one, I could be seen in this funny position; two, I could break a bone if I slipped. Neither option appealed to me. So what I did instead was slightly open the door just so to squeeze behind it beside the wall, and then close the door from this spy-like position. I did what I had to do and hurriedly maneuvered my way back out.

Why is it so hard to find a decent sized and utilitarian rest room when you are away from home in India?

Consider another wash room, this one at a spanking new mall. They had done up the toilet nicely, with starry floors and expensive-looking bath fittings – only, they didn’t know how to fit them. Take the faucet of the wash basin, for instance. The curvature of the faucet was so elongated that it jabbed into my face as I lowered it down for washing. “Why can’t they keep things simple if they don’t know how to do it?” I remember cursing under my breath while rubbing my bruised nose.

Another time, as I used the loo at a multiplex, I found that there was no waste bin kept for the toilet paper. Had the builders resigned themselves to the fact that most Indians don’t use the bins anyway and flush the toilet paper down the drain (often clogging it)? And the spray tap they did provide was indeed weird. Because when I pressed the tap, water came out with such formidable force that I nearly drenched myself in the squirt. By the time I trained myself to use the tap with considerable self-control, I was already looking like I had performed the miracle of getting wet in the rain inside an enclosed loo.

The rest rooms are supposed to be places where people can relieve themselves comfortably. What we normally get, alas, are ill-conceived pissing holes.

But part of the blame for the sorry state of affairs should go to the toilet users as well. We Indians don’t really know how to behave ourselves in public places, even if those places are as private as toilets. So maybe the builders and restaurant owners try to beat us at our own habits. I remember seeing this notice next to a soap dispenser in a restaurant toilet: 'Push once gently for enough soap.'

“What a cleverly contrived message,” I thought. In one go, it communicated to people about two of their nasty habits: of pounding too much on the push button and of making a mountain of soap on their palms. I have seen many soap-starved chappies collect more than their fair share of soap. Enough soap, in fact, to make do for a whole bath. Not that I ever saw anyone take a bath at the wash basin, but you never know what can happen in the world’s largest democracy! Anyway, I have witnessed far too many people supply themselves with ample soap – and then wash it off their face vigorously by spreading their personal wetness around. One of my most pressing thoughts at such moments: Get out fast.

One novelty that seems to have emerged as a result of toilet users’ nasty habits is the push-type water tap that spits out water for a split-second - often making you wonder if it was indeed water or a bolt of lightning that kissed your hands. You have to push the darned thing several times if you are really serious about achieving any washing. On second thoughts, it gives you an opportunity to exercise your muscles. But should you be doing so in the wash room? I doubt it. Useful tip: if you do not want to die of irritation at pushing the tap two hundred and forty three times, keep one hand constantly pressed on the tap and do your business with the other one.

Nothing beats the stupid infrared, however, when it comes to inducing irritability in the rest room. I’m sure most of you would’ve noticed infrared-activated flush systems installed in several places. The moment you walk close to the urinal (this one is for men specifically, and I don’t know how or if it works for women), the sensor gets activated in a hurry. Before you know it, water from the flush pipe, which is often funnily positioned and perforated, sprinkles onto your clothes in addition to spurting down the ceramic wall of the urinal. It looks as if the system is peeing at you before you get to pee into the system. This problem is so severe that very few automated flush systems ‘get it right’ – causing me to develop extreme anxiety each time I approach one.


It’s going to take a little while before I either become tolerant of toilets or there’s some sort of revolutionary change in the way toilet makers make toilets and the way people use them. Until then, going to the loo is certainly going to be a pee-vish thing. Hey, can you stop splashing it around, please!

Twittering out the Social Media Thingy

Okay, I won't begin with how Twitter-beat-Facebook-beat-Internet-beat-TV...quicker and quicker in terms of popularity or user base -- we are now beyond that stage.

I'll begin instead with how everyone is perplexed about this "social media thing". As I write this, new social media agencies are being set up, articles are being written about this *phenomenon* (including this one, if you can call this post an article), and the marketing pros are figuring out whether to suck at the Vampire widget or indulge in a Mob War to reach their target group.

The point is, the buzz around social media (btw, did we have anti- or un-social media before that?) is growing.

At the same time, some are even beginning to wonder if we could indeed be outgrowing Facebook. Lane Wallace of The Atlantic magazine says, for instance, that we might be at a stage where our initial, teenager-like fancy to FB may give way to fatigue or boredom. Still she admits that sites like FB and Twitter are growing and becoming increasingly popular with 30-plus folks and not just teeny-boppers.

Something doesn't gel, isn't it?

I think if we look close enough -- at human behavior, not websites or widgets -- we'll discover that the process of social evolution takes a long time (Darwin already told us that anatomical evolution takes even longer). In contrast, the breakneck technological evolution of the past decade or so has thrown up numerous tools and twitgets (note that!) for humans to play around.

So it's a playground out there, all right. But unlike earlier, when people played in more segregated age groups, in the virtual world we now have a whole smorgasbord of pre-teens, teens and umpteens 'behaving' in unprecedented ways. Combine this with the fact that this interplay goes on in several handshakes of connected gadgets, irrespective of where the players move across the globe. (We even have extreme cases in which people are being de-addicted for being too connected!)

Personally, I feel that the new tools of staying connected and sharing have brought out the kids in adults and allowed younger people to acquire wisdom or knowledge at an accelerated pace. If anything, the contours of our age-tied and time-bound behaviors are being pummeled into newer and more possibilities -- of what communication and sharing in this or the next digital world (Web x.0) will be really like.

So it's only natural that there's so much complexity and perplexity. I guess it'll be a progressive case of profusion - confusion - infusion (until more things come up and the cycle repeats).

Keep your fingers clicking...