By John B Monteiro
Mangaluru, Sep 27: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-hyped Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’s movement has ancient roots, perhaps going back to prehistoric times – and modern worldwide avatars too! If you believe in Darwin’s evolutionary theory, man’s predecessor was the monkey. The tiger family, with the cat in the lead, came before the monkey, followed by the carnivorous violent tiger itself. It fell on the cat to train the tiger in life-skills. The innocent cat did its task well, leaving the skill of climbing the tree for the last lesson. But, the tiger’s carnivorous instincts were impatiently waiting and, one day, it chased the cat to make it its dinner item. In the nick of time, the cat climbed up a tree and told the ungrateful and deceitful tiger that, henceforth, the tiger would not only not get the cat but not even its poo. So, observant cat-watchers of non-domesticated cats will see them scratching the soft earth with their paws, making a little hole in the ground, depositing their poo in the shallow hole and backfilling it. That’s because of its challenge to the tiger.
By the time Roman and Greek civilisations took root, people would have dealt with poo as a private affair and not a public show, as is the case in most of India which turned the land into an al fresco latrine and prompted the Swachh Bharat movement. How do I know? According to a legend, there was an aristocratic family in ancient Athens with its generations involved in public service and swathed in fame. But, the only son of the next generation showed no signs of rising to the occasion and carrying the family’s fame forward. A worried father called his unpromising son and recited the long litany of the services his forefathers had rendered unto Athens and the fame they had accumulated. Then he asked his son how he would take this fame forward. The son said: “I will defecate and urinate at the main city-square, at the confluence of four roads, and people will talk about me and I will become as famous, or even more, as my high family predecessors.”
Beyond the twisted logic is the fact that, in ancient Greek civilisation, urination and defecation were a private affair. In Biblical times, the desert-based people used to follow the example of the cats noted above.
Our Swachh Bharat movement has two components – providing infrastructure in the form of clean, usable toilets and getting people to use them properly. You can take a horse to the water but you cannot make it drink. The good news is that in Daijiworld’s host city, Mangaluru, the city corporation (MCC) plans to build pay-and-use Namma Toilets at 52 places. A team of officials from MCC went to Chennai and has prepared a plan to introduce toilets, at a cost of Rs 15 lakhs each, using FRP (Fibre Reinforced Polymer) and metal. Now MCC is looking for sponsors. Who would advertise on toilet walls? But, hope lives eternal in the human breast!
On the national level, the Indian Railways are set on a pan-India Swachh Bharat revolution, with a beginning already made as per recent media reports. According to a Delhi-datelined ANI report (18-9-15), the Development Cell of the Railway Board has come up with a design that combines the advantages of vacuum toilets and bio-toilets to create a new design of a hybrid vacuum toilet. One such toilet has been fitted in the Dibrugarh-Rajdhani on a trial basis. The concept of a hybrid vacuum toilet is a first ever system of its kind to have been developed and built by any railway system in the world. The prototype consists of a custom designed vacuum toilet adapted from a commercially available vacuum toilet that is used in aircraft which evacuates its discharge into a bio-digester tank which is now successfully proven in the bio-toilets of Indian Railways.
Those who have had their forced tryst with Indian Railways toilets will close their eyes and hold their noses to blank out their horrible memory of the sight and smell (rather odour) of such toilets. Yet, until 1910, the Indian Railways had no on-board toilets and passengers had to cope with their bloating bowels and bladders on the platforms and surrounding landscape when the trains halted for unspecified lengths of time, often with disastrous results as in the case of a Bengali Babu who articulated his experience in a complaint as given below:
“I am arrive by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit. I am therefore went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with 'lotah' in one hand and 'dhoti' in the next when I am fall over and expose all my shocking to man and female women on plateform. I am got leaved at Ahmedpur station.
"This too much bad, if passenger go to make dung that dam guard not wait train five minutes for him. I am therefore pray your honour to make big fine on that guard for public sake. Otherwise I am making big report! to papers."
One Okhil Chandra Sen had written this hilarious letter to the Sahibganj divisional railway office in 1909. The letter is on display at the Railway Museum in New Delhi. This letter supposedly led to the introduction of toilets on trains. Please note that the Railways had been running without on-board toilets after their first introduction between Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) and Thana (now Thane) in the 1850s.
But, we should not be inferiority-complexed. Victorian England and modern Europe and America too have a poor record of controlling bladders polluting public spaces as per some Victorian-age accounts noted below.
The average (male) Londoner of the early 1800s, out and about, was quite happy to relieve himself in the nearest alley. Urinals were becoming more common – usually outside pubs – but typically one found a quiet corner and had a pee. Those who lived in said alleys, or who owned commercial property adjoining, were not entirely forgiving of this practice, as this quote from 1809 suggests: “In London a man may sometimes walk a mile before he can meet with a suitable corner; for so unaccommodating are the owners of doorways, passages and angles, that they seem to have exhausted invention in the ridiculous barricadoes and shelves, grooves, and one fixed above another, to conduct the stream into the shoes of the luckless wight who shall dare to profane the intrenchments.“
A recent writer on the subject wrote: “This was the only reference I’d ever seen to these ‘barricadoes and shelves’ and I wondered if the writer was exaggerating, perhaps just drawing on one or two peculiar examples. Then a few days ago I found a quote from 1853: considering how disgusting are the preventives that disfigure every alley and court, and every piece of blind wall; considering, too, how ineffectual these contrivances are....
“Today, by chance, I walked down Clifford’s Inn Passage, off Fleet Street – an ancient bit of London that used to lead to the Inn of Chancery of that name, whose gatehouse still survives. Here, Rokesmith takes Mr Boffin aside from the bustle of the main thoroughfare in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. And here, I only now realised – even though I’ve been here before a hundred times, and even feature it in my Dickens guide-book – was where many a Victorian stopped for a pee. But surely these are 19th century urine deflectors? I know, you’ll now tell that there's a whole website somewhere devoted to 19th century urine deflectors.”
Those deflectors were crude and only splashed back the urine to wet the bottom of pants and shoes. But, the modern world has developed urine deflector paints that work as boomerangs that come back home to hit the man hard with the urine jet that he trained on the urban walls. This is happening both in modern Europe and America.
According to reports, San Francisco has come up with a new weapon to tackle those who urinate in public spaces. It is a liquid-resistant paint that repels the waste, splashing it back at the offender. San Francisco is notorious for its stench in some neighbourhoods, stemming from those who pee in public. Its Chamber of Commerce sees it as a growing concern and a quality-of-life issue. The liquid-resistant paint is already being used in other cities, including Hamburg, Germany.
Hamburg’s neighbourhood of St. Pauli ends up getting pretty stinky on busy nights. This famous red light and entertainment district with its raucous bars and cabarets attract up to 20 million visitors a year. Most visitors come by night and many of them end up peeing where they shouldn’t. With drunken visitors emptying their bladders on walls, St Pauli’s weekly invasion adds up to a whole lot of urine going where it shouldn’t. Now locals are fighting back against the “wild pee-ers” with a new weapon.
The neighbourhood’s residents are making sure offenders get a small taste of their own medicine by painting walls with splash-creating, urine retardant paint. It’s so liquid-resistant that anyone peeing on it is liable to end up soiling themselves all over. To keep potential offenders on their guard, some of the painted walls have “Don’t Pee Here” signs warning them off.
So, why I am concerned? It started as a joke. A British orator, fond of hearing his own voice, went on and on to the point of one captive listener going to the speaker and telling him: “Your fly is open”. He immediately sat down – end of speech!
In my case, it was a disaster. I went to Bangalore for a two-day outing with three formal functions, starting with a church service. A delayed flight, long drive to the city centre and an impending Mass put the bladder out of mind. At the end of it, the search for the toilet ensued with many locals giving multiple directions – finally taking me to a remote corner of the large campus, only to find there was no toilet there. Then I had to fall back on what they do in San Francisco and Hamburg. But, in the hurry, the zip of the only pant that I had for the two-day outing came apart. Like the skirt covering many a sin, my long kurta covered my unzipped pant for the rest of my outing.
“The Swedish engineer who invented the zip fastener made a greater intellectual leap than many scientists do in a lifetime.” - Martin Rees (b1942), British cosmologist and astrophysicist.
So, is there a lesson in all this? Toilet need not be hidden from view. They are called rest rooms and comfort rooms in many countries. Bring them upfront and keep them swachh. They are part of modern civilised life and not to be ashamed of.
Veteran journalist and author, John B Monteiro now concentrates on Editorial Consultancy, having recently edited the autobiography of a senior advocate, compiled the history and souvenir to mark the centenary of Catholic Association of South Kanara and currently working on the history/souvenir to mark the platinum jubilee of Kanara Chamber of Commerce & Industry. He is also Editorial Consultant and content provider for Vishal Jagriti, the English monthly of All India Catholic Union, now published from Mangaluru.