Toilets

Well I have always wanted to write about the various toilets I have used during the past so many years. I kinda think that toilets tell a lot about the people who maintain/use them. Starting off with a public toilet in a shopping mall in Japan. Till date i havent see a cleaner toilet than that. The floor was so spick and span you could sit there and have lunch. The pot was even cleaner. In fact it begged the question, do the Japanese spent half their lives cleaning the damn things, or are they so "not-dirty"! But this toilet really didn't have even an iota of aesthetic beauty to it, it was just a plain ol' toilet which was extraordinarily clean. But one toilet which was complete with architectural finesse and interior designer made crockery was the one i used in a hotel in Mumbai. I mean such was the surprise with which i met the whole thing, i asked myself whether i had entered the right place. The sink was made of transparent glass, blown into a funnel-shaped article. The urinal was pretty basic, that is to say without any crockery, I leave it to your imagination to extrapolate.

One of the most ghastly of toilets i have ever come across was a battered, dungeon-like pigeonhole in the I.L. School(located in Kota, India). While i was a student at Bansal Classes working my ass off for IITJEE(which i cleared in my first attempt), we used to have bi-weekly tests at this school. At one of these tests I had to pee in between the tests. As bad fortune would have it, out of all the possible pigeonholes i could pick, i picked this one(it later turned out that other toilets of IL were better) and had the most disasterous of urinating experiences. After a while i realized i was pissing and vomiting at the same time.

Anyways, moving to a more pleasant experience, this one happened quite recently at a 7 star hotel in Bangalore(The Leela Resort). As one enters the toilet, you will be greeted (in an accent which seems a disconcorted, Karnatic-Englishish..really unique) by an attendant, do your business and he will offer you a towel from which to wipe your hands, that is in case you decide to wash your hands.

Well, talking about public toilets, the cleanest public toilet I have ever seen in India is the one right here in CC1 of IIIT-Allahabad. I mean i was so flattered to see it so clean and the crockery was so....what word do I use...glittering.

Among other toilets which i remember due to their uniqueness, one was the toilet on a gulf-air jet...yaar I tell u the flush was a vaccuum, and made a deafening sound. I got so scared, I thought I would be thrown out of the aircraft!!