Mobiles v/s toilets
Anthony J. Simoes

Now that I have retired, the world is beginning to look so different from the time when I was I was part of the rat-race. It’s all about Time. When you don’t have it, you can’t buy it and now that I have Time I can’t sell it. So I must use it.

 Believe it or not! I have looked at some of the data collected during the census of 2011. What a revelation! Let’s look at some of the gems of information and the tremendous impact it can have on public life and on people holding high, low or no public office.

Did you know that half the country’s population has no access to a toilet and are forced to urinate and defecate clandestinely in both Time and Space?

There is an apocryphal story that Albert Einstein got his notion of the Space-Time – CONTINUUM on one of his visits to Kerala where he plagiarised ‘his’ Theory of Relativity. He witnessed the morning ablutions in ‘God’s own country’.

 Later on he went on to discover space-warps and time-warps that unravelled some of the mysteries of our universe. However the Brahminic scientific community in India disagree since they don’t notice this open (in)sanitation. They insist that Einstein had a warped mind.

 Interestingly, the census shows that Indians who own a mobile-phone outnumber toilet-using Indians by a huge margin of 2:1. Which confirms Dr. Amartya Sen’s observation of the ‘Talkative Indian’. Which seems to suggest that most Indians have no control at both ends of the alimentary canal. This reminds me of Bennet A. Cerf’s definition of a baby: ‘A long alimentary canal with a croaking voice at one end and no responsibility at the other’.

 At the  Nokia headquarters in Helsinki, they are working overtime to design a special low- cost mobile-phone for the Indian market. It will have a built-in Toilet Paper Dispenser for people affected by Nomophobia.

Even as our government struggles to build mobile toilets, Nokia will give us the Toilet mobile. Toilet paper refills will come free along with every phone re-charge. ‘What an idea sirji!’