I was rather surprised to read that mankind put a man on the moon before putting wheels on luggage. As a child it was very cumbersome for me to carry my own luggage and sometimes those of grandparents but the thought never crossed my mind that luggage could have wheels. It was only in my teens that I saw a wheeled suitcase for the first time, it was insanely expensive of course since it was an imported item. Now of course everybody seems to have one. It seems so cruel that we had to carry so many useless things back then now even laptops have wheeled cases. When I look around there are so many stupid things we are doing that we should not be doing and I began to notice these only after we were snowed in during COVID lockdowns. None of our house hold workers have been allowed inside since march this year as we have senior citizens in the family who cannot be put to any kind of risk. I have been playing the role of gardener, janitor, cook, priest in addition to what I did in pre COVID times and yes plumber and oh wait electrician too! I have noticed a lot many stupid things we are wasting time and energy on since thousands of years. One very stupid thing that stands out by being singularly disgusting is cleaning of shower drains. This is something we cannot avoid doing because the kaamwali bai is not around anymore and perhaps for some more months to come. Luckily we have only one toilet with shower. I cannot describe how disgusting it is to do the job of cleaning the drain. I cry to high heavens why oh why could not mankind discover something to totally avoid doing this most disgusting chore. I have a feeling our basic shower drain design is at least three thousand years old! A more problematic drain is the one on the terrace, not the normal terrace it is the terrace that you cannot reach. In India for some strange reason there is always a terrace without any staircase and there is always a drain there which gets choked by dry leaves and when it rains: the terrace is flooded and there is no way you can reach it.
Necessity is the mother of invention but disgust is the midwife! I spent a month thinking day and night about a way to cut down on my visits to the shower drain and bingo I was able to put together something that cut down my visits by ninety percent. My research still going on but maybe I will give it up when house help returns. Moral of the story is we are doing so many things wrong. Here I am reminded of another of my roles, that of a priest. We have an ancestral temple and with other stake holders out of town and the priest or pujari not being allowed in I was the only one left to do the needful. I noticed that not only was dhoop burning a tedious task but in fact the mixture was made of toxic substances, ideally one should be burning a mixture of dried herbs and incenses like guggul. This is a tedious process because contrary to what you might think starting a fire without LPG gas stove is not a joke. I googled for online stores selling something that allowed easy and slow burning of guggul and other incenses but there was practically nothing. So I am working on this one too a kind of small stove very small but will have to invent charcoal too for it because normal charcoal chunks cannot be burnt in a miniature angithi.
Lastly the brooms that we use in India, they are too short and too loosely tied. Yes I know there are modern things in stores for cleaning but for dry sweeping one still has to fall back on the good old or should I say bad old broom. I have had excruciating backaches from bending to do the brooming thing in the ancestral temple. There are so many things around us that we are doing wrong hope in a post COVID world we would have fixed a lot of them. I for one am going after the drain design with a vengeance.
