When you really gotta go- Final

There’s wind in your hair, a tune making its way to your ears and the bright sunny idea of a destination taking a front seat in your head. Now, what could a better journey be? , wonders that little devil of an optimistic traveller inside you. A couple of sessions of your ‘chai-thanda’ later, you have no option but the ebbing woes of your pressurised bladder do the talking!As driver, toddler, wife or general passenger, we’ve all faced the vagaries of a journey gradually turning into a desperate search of a decent toilet.
Portapotties are a wide range of portable toilets which epitomise the adage desperate times call for desperate measures. These are essentially pieces of ingenious user-friendly design, open to the user at the minimal cost of a slight change in social perspective.
When nature calls in a car:
Kaneko Sangyo Co, a toy manufacturer in Japan has designed a Do-It-Yourself version of a toilet that consists of cardboard toilet bowl and a water-absorbent sheet inside. The toilet comes with a curtain large enough to conceal users and a plastic bag to collect waste, and can fit inside a suitcase.
Why should men be the only ones?
Design has exemplified excretory feminism to the core.P-Mate (authorised by Portable Sanitation Association International) has designed disposable, sanitary, single use (finely waxed)cardboard urine directors that allow women to urinate standing. Designed to fit the female form, they work on the simple mechanism that the urethra empties urine from the bladder into the cupped area.Resulting in a higher level of comfort, P-Mates have even proved beneficial to orthopaedic patients and younger girls who cannot perch over the toilet. Having negated any direct contact,the risk of contracting communicable diseases from public loos has been reduced drastically.
However, portapotties and other forms of user friendly portable excretory designs have faced major flak from society. The embarrassment and hilarity that they might cause, not only to the users but also to the people sharing the same environment contribute majorly to this view against portapotties.So, till these simple yet marvellous pieces of design gain the requisite social acceptance, a very very happy journey to you.
Neha Bhat