The missus of course opines that this was the was the audience’s way of showing me ‘my place’ ! That was incontestable. It was from the missus.
Work takes me to fancy hotels once in a while and recently the eye caught a contraption sleek looking machine in the men’s room. Any of you frequenting hotels that have a ‘star’ tag to befit the charges that go past the moon, will take offence to these mundane ‘everyday elements from the loo’ ( as a friend called it) making it being a blog subject !
Tissue paper ( a.k.a just as ‘tissues’ ) that are placed in artistic boxes that could well find a place in a middle class living room and a noisy ‘hot air blower’ to dry your hands, that can emit so much noise that they can compete with one of those Apollos or Sputniks are de rigueur.
Perfumed hand sanitisers, shiny floors, sparkling lamps and spotless mirrors and such else are far more basic in the star hotel loo!
“But this one is far more ‘energy efficient’”, said a pinstripe type as he dried his sanitized hand using the shiny new pristine contraption machine. ‘The hot air is contained in this cavity and thus your hand gets dry faster….Wow, what innovation’. Adding, in some time adding, ‘even the machine’s noise is far more refined’
The chap next to him was obviously a junior as he announced his position in the hierarchy and the relevance to the gentleman through nodding of the head in agreement, mildly describable as ‘vigorous’. In a hierarchy induced vigour, proceeding to talk about global warming and Mr.Pinstripe’s ‘energy efficiency consciousness’ as Mr.Pinstripe himself held grand court.
All this in the loo.
In a brief while, Mr.Pinstripe, reached out to the tissue paper with a flourish, I presume after the hands were sufficiently dry (if his eloquence on the machine was anything to go by). Dabbing his dermis on the hand off the dormant germ and the evaporated droplet !!
Mr.Pinstripe and his junior were soon gone.
It was my turn to use the energy efficient hand drier and hear ‘the refined purr’, as they called it! The contraption machine purred away singing glory to refinement and technology!
We live in good times. Don’t we ? A hand drier to steam away dormant droplets and a sophisticated tissue to dab away whatever remains are evidences to that. While uninterrupted electricity is a mystical promise that gets spoken of at election time and environmentalists are ‘bizarre’ folks !
As the last water droplet was banished into evaporated state of invisibility by the contraption sleek machine with a refined purr, the day of a good clean handkerchief that I learnt to use when my mother used to pin one on to my school uniform, came whizzing back to the mind.
But hey….
We are an emerging economy. With fancy words / phrases used by all. Emerging tiger. BRIC country. Growth story. Middle Class. Incredible India. GDP. FII inflow And such other glorious words and phrases. Of course, we need better cars, clothes, ice cream, paints, computers, mobile phones and such else.
We need such pursuits to keep us particularly chuffed, the economy to keep growing while fat salaries provide a comfortable numbness to stifle any memory of the simpler times. A simpler time when a good clean hand clean handkerchiefs ruled, with no hand drier and tissue paper in sight.
Come on, what am I complaining about…
These are instruments that help people hold grand court in the loo if not anything else. Not to think of providing a below average blogger a topic for his blog. Amen to that.
PS: A better post and some pictures from the mens room, here is the earlier post !