Why is it that the “new India’s” BA and MA Comms and M Engineers (most swish 20 or 30 something males seem to be one or the other) and assorted other new India geniuses can build a 2000Rps/$40 tablet (to rather dismal if not downright disdainful reviews to be sure), fire satellites into the stratosphere, create cellphone systems that enable you to call anywhere in India (from the farthest mountain valleys to the middle of the Thar desert, this is a vast country) for a mere few rupees, put a several thousand dollar car on the road (yes, what India “definitely” needs is millions more cars!), staff the latest and shiniest (for a price) in everything medical and technical … but it can rarely, rarely (we’re talking three red stars ENDANGERED SPECIES here) make available a public, hotel, guesthouse or restaurant toilet or shower that fully works?
(Okay, okay – so we can recommend a couple in a land of how many millions … there’s a fully functioning bathroom in Room 203 at the Luna Rosa Hotel (not the Venice one but the one in Jaipur), there’s a pretty good toilet at Mrs Singh’s Falcon Guesthouse in Baratphur, and the woods are pretty thick on the track up behind Naggar. We’re backpacking of course, moving on the relatively cheap, so we cannot tell you what things are like in the Royal Taj Palace in Mumbai or the Holiday Inn Varanasi, but the odds seem better that you’d have a lot of gold, silver and glass in the lobby, along with, if you wished, turbaned Yes Sir, Yes Madame white-haired gentlemen on your leash than you’d have a functioning plunger on your toilet.)
And … continuing with toilets … why is it – in India and around so much of the world – your restaurant meal might be very tasty, your hotel lounge walled with spotless mirrors and blindingly gleaming door knobs, that just-opened bus station has ceilings high enough to fly kites, you can now lose yourself among glass and steel “malls” of globalized brand name shops so sanitized that you wonder if breathing is permitted … but bathrooms everywhere – toilets of the sit down, squat or whatever type, urinals, wash basins, taps, drains – are pretty well invariably combinations of the most dysfunctional, derelict and nauseating few square feet on earth?
Like that bathrooms in Shimla for example … the MEN’s attached to the Shimla museum, with its air sweetly, powerfully thick with stale urine, likely because of the absent pipe from the bottom of the urinal to any drain, or the WOMEN’S at the visitors’ reception centre at the Viceregal Lodge with seats requiring step ladders and cubicle-door combinations designed for Houdini’s sister, or the single bus stop on the eight-hour Dharamsala-Shimla run where “toilet” gets a pointed finger down the highway, or the countless wandering and collapsible toilet seats, the AWOL flush handles, those end-of-dark-stairway café squats with their crusted moulds, dripping slime and sidewalk ice slipperiness.
Life faces us with vital questions to which it is high time to add these two.
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