When you really gotta go

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 as 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.

It is a much envied fact by women all around the world that equipped with position-friendly attributes, men can unzip against any wall. Hence, P-Mate (authorised by Portable Sanitation Association International) has designed disposable, sanitary, single use cardboard urine director that allows females to urinate standing. It is designed to fit the female form and works on the simple mechanism that the female urethra empties urine from the bladder into the cupped area. The fact that it is made with finely waxed cardboard adds to its stability.

This has resulted not only in a higher level of comfort for normal females, but also proved beneficial for women with orthopaedic problems or even, younger girls who cannot perch over the toilet. Additionally, they reduce the risk of contracting any sort of communicable diseases from public toilets as they negate the chances of direct contact.

However, portapotties and other forms of user friendly portable excretory designs have faced major flak of not being socially accepted. 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 of portapotties.

So, till these simple yet marvellous pieces of design gain the requisite social acceptance, a very very happy journey to you.

Neha Bhat