Pee Discrimination

On a certain level, the history of India is nothing but varied struggles against discrimination. Barring the pre-ancient period, when deep teakwood was the color of people, who flourished an awesome and enigmatic civilization beside a mighty river called Indus, the whole Indian subcontinental history is marred with wide-ranging protests and struggles against the blatant discriminatory policies of kings and nawabs, priests and maulavis, colonists and politicians. Even ‘men’ discriminated ‘women’ for millennials with such astuteness that majority of womenfolk now fell in love with those discriminations and some go even extra miles to preserve fucked up deviations. And legendary are those elaborate discriminatory rituals of rich against poor in India, so that so a poor’s whole life and hopes and dreams keep circling around those ‘rituals’ forever, till he passes his withered baton to next generation.

Well I guess that, now I should state the obvious, that despite everybody despises discrimination, everybody adores discrimination. The nakedness of it is more glaring, when it is institutionalized and written on the wall of an epitome of government buildings. There was a time when signboards outside of eateries or rail-wagons declared that ‘dogs and Indians are not allowed’ and there is a time when aluminium plates outside of modern furbished toilets warned that ‘Only for Senior Officers’ and no person who sweeps the floor or cleans the same toilet, or no clerk who deals with the same files as these seniors do, or no visitor who contributes taxes to the same government and complies with its every now-and-then rules is allowed to pee or poop or even look at the toilet.

That day, I drank more than my usual intake of water and had to run for toilet to pee and was told by the disgruntled keeper in green uniform that the poor man’s toilet was under service. The wall of Senior Officer’s toilet was common to poor’s, but the entrances were different. For a second, I contemplated my move to use senior’s for once, and before I put a foot inside that restricted place, where expensive ‘urines’ flew through expensive ‘zips’, the keeper stopped me. I didn’t have a yellow or red ribbon, which was the marks for being a ‘senior’. I wasn’t allowed. Okay.

Now he should tell that to my bladder, which so far was in dire hope to be relieved soon, and when my incapacitated nervous system carried the wicked message of ‘go-to-another-toilet’ to my bladder, it screamed. My whole renal system screamed. And weirdly I heard some parts of reproductive system too. Another poor’s toilet was in ground floor – some hundreds of footsteps away and I had to carry my screaming systems altogether. I couldn’t run with over-filled bladder out of fear of spills and couldn’t even normal-walk out of fear of malfunction of systems and possible embarrassment. I did an extreme cat-walk to cover the distance and when I was finished, I stood before mirror to wash my hands and I understood why Nirvana was so elusive.

The discrimination of pee in North Block is powerful. When you see a modern furbished toilet filled with gadgets constructed wholly with taxpayer’s money but only to disbar those taxpayers even from have a peek, it’s a new height of discrimination. And our democratic government boasted that fact by nailing a trendy aluminium plate on outside wall.

Maybe ‘Seniors’ were ashamed to share toilet along-with fellow humans who were bloody juniors, casual workers or sweepers, who did their jobs with perhaps more passion and in more challenging environment than those elite ‘Seniors’ could ever imagine. But then, they could have a temp toilet installed into their chambers or could pee only at home, instead of openly insulting the thousands of hard working ‘juniors’ and makers of constitution along-with the great book itself, by way of barefaced pee-discrimination.