No need to buy this strange little compilation for your bathroom bookshelf, go read it at a bookstore in half-an-hour.
Bhaichandbhai gives the game away early in his introduction, when he more or less defines the book’s contributing group: "We...meet often for pot luck, have drinks at the India International Centre, and go dancing at the Delhi Gymkhana on Saturday nights." And, "Our lifestyles have changed for the better...thanks to more spending money at our disposal." Translated, this means ‘comfortable’ to wealthy South Delhi residents.
For starters, a basic level of money, the things it can get you, and the names it can let you drop, run through the slim volume. In no particular order, we get: Cabernet Sauvignon, Anne Rice, M&S (lingerie), Laura Esquival (sic), Lagavulin, Glenmorangie, several zikars of Sex and the City, Abba, Shakespeare, Andrea Bocelli, Godiva chocolates, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, the inevitable Bridget Jones, the ditto Kahlil Gibran, Bill Murray and George Clooney.
I suppose if you’re single and don’t have serious problems with dosh, objects could replace humans quite happily. Besides the flaunted erudition both textual and televisual, it seems the other great leveller between those hordes of happily unhitched idiots and the free-as-a-bird bachelinster is the first-person-singular bathroom. In the book, the captive, unshared loo is a site of huge triumphalism, both for the men and the women: no one to stop you from piddling outside the bowl (no one whose piss you need to clean up from the floor), no one to leave the toilet seat up (or down), no one to stop you from capping the toothpaste tube (or leaving it uncapped and decorating the washbasin like a birthday cake), no one to stop you from reading in the loo, or smoking, or, living in it.In fact, if one was to take the book’s toilet obsession and couple that with its almost complete locational bias, (no Single life, obviously, outside the Fornicapital of the subcontinent), one could rename the book ‘Chasing a Screw: How do you Do in New Deloo’ except that would be pernicious and unfair to the few really good essays included within.
In fact, the only person chasing a screw here is Suhel Seth, a guy who obviously fell into a large vat of really cheap seduction manuals when he was small ("establish targets" i.e. women, "perhaps one city where there are as many women as there are hungry dogs" and other such lovely stuff). In contrast, there’s some really nice writing from Gouri Dange, Radhika Jha, Urvashi Butalia, Anjali Puri and Kanika Gahlaut, all of whom manage to break out of the envelope of the South Delhi singles loo, but those strong pieces really do belong in some other cocktail and not this weak mixture. No need to buy it for your bathroom bookshelf, go read it at a bookstore in half-an-hour.