Flush with failure

With embarrassing revelations coming to light about the insanitary state of toilet facilities at the Commonwealth Games Village in Delhi, the human excrement has truly hit the ceiling. The stink has risen sky-high, and the ‘gutter press’ has revelled in and gone to town with it. And at least one man who has made no secret of his desire to see the Games fail is rejoicing in the toilet humour possibilities thrown up by the latest embarrassing disclosures. With trenchant potty-mouth humour calculated to piss off the Games organisers, Mani Shankar Aiyar noted that “we have fallen not only on our faces, but on our faeces!”

Photographic evidence of the soiled state of the Games Village johns clearly points to the inadequacy of toilet training when plebians ascend the porcelain throne to carry out their
alimentary activities. That dirty secret is something that international airline stewards on most Indian routes will
attest to, which points to a widespread Indian unfamiliarity with ‘dry toilet’ protocol.

The general inability or unwillingness to abide by socially acceptable standards of water-closet hygiene is particularly striking for the descendants of the Mohenjodaro-harappa civilisation — which, historians record, had perhaps the most advanced sewage system for those ancient times. It’s worth recalling also that Mahatma Gandhi himself used to clean his toilets — as part of his social campaign against the practice of untouchability.

At the Toilet Museum in Delhi, set up by Sulabh International founder Dr Bindeshwar Pathak, are recorded the elaborate details of the “toilet code” that Indians were required to abide by in an earlier time. Pathak, who has done as much as one man can to get large masses of Indians to forgo the pleasures of alfresco toileting in favour of hygienic pay-to-use public toilets, notes that these included the recitation of toilet shlokas and the proper manner of ablution.

Curiously, that tradition has much in common with the Japanese value system as well, where there are Japanese toilet ballads: in the Japanese pantheon, which has many common elements with Hindu traditions, there’s even a Japanese ‘toilet god’ — perhaps intended to reinforce the importance of personal hygiene. Perhaps there’s a case for bringing our own commod(e)ious traditions out of the closet — and into the water closet.

The toilet door has been flung open exposing our lack of lavatory etiquette to the great wide world. We may never get a chance to be flush with success over these Games, but we can yet retrieve what’s left of our chamberpot honour. But that needs a sincerity of purpose — not the clogged-drain mentality that says: “We have our standards of hygiene and you have yours”.

But when you pull the flush handle, the gushing sound you hear will be taxpayers’ money going down the drain…