I love the BB for its quirky articles. An eclectic discussion on toilets makes my day. I have plenty to say on the subject folks because I am originally from India, the kingdom of public urination and public excretion in general. Not that I want to disparage my mother land, where I grew up impervious to the smell of urine mixed with the pungent odor of sweat and masala but I am an authority, as are many other Indians I know, on pissing (un)gentlemen, their flies open, no fussy phlush to distract them from their bladders’ call. A compound wall is a wall that surrounds bungalows in many Indian cities, and this is where gentlemen most urgently distressed by their overflowing bladders relieve themselves. They are the bane of the aristocratic Indians, these shameless exhibitionists. I loved them though when I was a teenager; those rotten Indian apples, the ones with no manners or civic sense as my grandmother used to say. They were so nonchalant then as they are now, oblivious to the hostile stares of the sophisticates, the giggles of the children and the curses of the women who had to step over the puddles of urine that formed on the sidewalks from their fountains shed over compound walls. The compound walls made of bricks and cement, white washed and beautified by the rich folks behind them, usually crumble prematurely under the chemical assault. This is the revenge of the have nots against the haves, an unintended but delicious side effect of the act of public micturition, the laying to waste of the symbolic separation of the classes, compound walls eroded by urine to heaps of astringent dust! In the good old days, my grandmother was a monster for public health and hygiene. In a land where the odds are stacked up against sanitation freaks, she always placed herself like a head rearing cobra, between our compound wall and the urinating adventurers. We had a dog then, a mangy bark worse than bite creature called Monte Carlo, and commanded by my grandmother he would spring to action and put on an attack mode drama to scare the crap out of men in mid micturition. How I defended those men against my grandmother! I imagined myself a champion of the poor in the throes of my teenage rebellion and my grandmother with mangy Monte Carlo by her side, represented for me, all that is reprehensible in the Indian upper class. I told her that I would relieve myself too on the streets if I were poor, because there are no public toilets worth using in Chennai where we lived. I accused her of being a sadist, because only a sadist would interrupt a urinating man in mid flow with a rudely barking dog. I would challenge her to explain to me what she would do if she came from the lower classes, where she would go to relieve herself. But the woman was an adamant defender of her compound wall. She consigned me to the ass kind with a wave of her hand and after each successful thwarted public micturition, she would strut toward our home with the bearing of a queen, Monte Carlo frisking behind her for approval, written all over her plump face the triumph of a mission accomplished and a street battle won.. This grandmother of mine though had never visited an Indian public toilet as I had. In my teenage years I did everything I was not supposed to do–by today’s standards these forbidden fruits were innocuous–I was not supposed to go to the slums near my home–I always walked through those slums. I was not supposed to check out public toilets, edifices from which the stench of human excrement emanated to foul the city air, and I checked out those toilets more than once. In fact I checked them out in different areas of the city, and never did I find one bearable enough to navigate or use. No wonder the men in my true story found the compound walls in the city most inviting. There are countries in the world folks where a clean toilet is not to be seen for hundreds of miles. All that stuff you read about how advanced India and China are, the stuff that Thomas Friedman writes about, that these two countries are the giants that will spring on all paws to strike us down; do not buy it. I can safely bet that Thomas Friedman never visited a public toilet in India or China. I can also safely bet that India or China or both will wrest the title of superpower from our hands only when their public toilets get better and ours get worse. The power of phlush is far more potent than the power of plush. Amen! Usha

Public sanitation is important. It is kind of disappointing if there are no public toilets out there.