AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

CRANK'S CORNER

Evidently Sunita Williams is a hardy sort of woman. She had to be. After all, she spent over five months in a claustrophobic spacecraft with two men who never could take baths. When such men are around, it is fair to say, Sunita would have needed an oxygen mask to survive even if she were just on ground and not literally gallivanting around the globe.

Men ‘by nature’ are more smelly than their counterparts from the other gender. Why is this? Is it because women douse themselves daily with perfume whose quantity is the rough equivalent annual oil output of Iraq?  I don’t know, but what I am sure about is that most men would have not known that they reek of odour, which would in comparison make a skunk seem a brand ambassador for Axe, unless otherwise told by women. Women are irritatingly finicky when it comes to these things. They can smell a dead rat that rotted four streets away four days ago. The police department is making a mistake by investing in alcohol breath analyzers. Women certainly do a more through job of it. Most husbands, who had gone home after a few gulps, would doubtless vouch for this. Men, in contrast, are the exact opposite and their noses can hardly pick up anything even if they were treading on the corpse of a horse that had been run over by a bulldozer.

This article, the smart among you would have noticed, started with Sunita Williams. So I will get back to her. All through last week the indomitable woman was all over. From Gujarat to Hyderabad to New Delhi to Mumbai, she logged more air miles than she might have done while in space. And almost all the TV channels took her to their studios and asked some of the most profane questions possible. Who would want to ask Sunita about women empowerment and the state of Indo-US ties? It was like taking  Mallika Sherawat on a date and asking her about, er, Sunita Williams.

The pertinent thing to ask Sunita Williams is how she survived the trip and the men who could not wash themselves for six months? But forget about baths, how did they brush their teeth? With no sink around as there is no gravity to take the water down, did Sunita & Co swallow in their toothpaste after brushing and in the bargain obtained sparkling white intestines? But again with no gravity to take it inside, the foam would have stayed put in the mouth itself. So after a few bouts of brushing, only minty (assuming that is the flavour of their toothpaste) bubbles could have emerged from their mouths. And you would have thought that the telecom link from space to be bad when the astronauts spoke from their space vehicle.

We are told that space capsules such as the one Sunita travelled in had provision for a loo. But regrettably there could have been no flush. That means, are we to presuppose that the toilet was something on the lines of the hole-in-the-floor loos that Indian trains have now made famous? So that straightaway begs the bigger question whether the increased monsoon activity in these parts has some connection to the toilet facilities available on spacecraft? To you, this may seem a puerile query to ask a celebrated astronaut. But to me, with increasing global warming and other environmental hazards like unknown elements falling from up, toilet habits of spacemen and women is very much important to our lives. One man’s meteorite can be another man’s ...well forget it.

I did read that spacecraft have lavatories that suck waste away with a vacuum. But the real problem, as far as my unthinking brain can imagine is, how does the vacuum differentiate between the waste to be sucked and the astronaut to be left free? And the bigger question, is what the astronauts wear is a special space attire or just a heavy-duty diaper?

It is just as well, that space personnel get only canned and pre-cooked food. They are so bland and leathery that it can in a jiffy do double duty as toilet paper.
With such poor toilet facilities and foam in her mouth, Sunita, if you actually got down to it, hardly would have been bothered by the smelly male astronauts.
Anyway, it is just as well that Sunita was in Chennai only as a transit visitor. If she had, and had a whiff of the famous Cooum, she would have doubtless believed she was back in a space shuttle.