No Good Place To Do Mutra Visarjan In This Country...

At least, that's what Chatur Ramalingam seems to think. However, many of our fellow Indians seem to disagree with him. According to them, there are nothing BUT places to do mutra visarjan (for all you poor, masochistic folks - ah, I mean, non-movie-going folks - out there, mutra visarjan means urine expulsion). In case you haven't guessed already, we're going to be talking about one of India's most widely criticized and even more widely practiced issues - public urination.

I'm not exactly saying that it's our people's fault - I mean, come on, we have so much urine-related cultural history! Just in the past 50 years, we've had people who've used their urine for everything from watering plants to drinking it (I believe that some people also flush it down their toilets. How wasteful of them). Besides all the historical precedents, however, we also have some more practical reasons for peeing wherever and whenever we feel like.

If you've ever seen a construction site in India, you've also probably seen one of the workers taking a leak by the side of the road near the site. It's not really their fault - where else can they pee? It's not like they have toilets or something. Personally, I think that's quite sad. If we can afford to have a house built, we can afford to give the poor chaps building the house a toilet, can't we? Or at least a place more private than the side of the road?

That's not what really amazes me, though. What's incredible to me is that I have seen well-dressed, early morning walkers peeing into the drain outside our house. These are not, do note, people who work for 12 hours a day constantly in an area without a toilet. These are people who, in all likelihood, have lovely, clean (also apparently underutilized) toilets at home.

You know what we ought to do? Every time we see one of these guys peeing at the side of the road, we ought to walk up to them and ask if they've had some manner of bladder surgery that's made it impossible for them to resist the urge to urinate. Or better yet - and this is something I really want to try - we ought to put up signs of Durga or some other equally horrifying-looking, axe-wielding deity and the words "You pee, I chop" up on our outside walls, because no one ever pees on pictures of deities, now do they?

I really wanted to leave you guys with some deep, thoughtful quote or poem about urination, 

but it turns out all the old dead guys didn't write about it very much, so you'll have to make do with this.

~Me