Taking a bath was a simple activity, back in the 1980s. While many of our homes had bathrooms, men seldom had a bath inside. The children, almost as a rule, bathed in the open, under the hand pump, which were common in every other home.
And children didn’t mean just infants or toddlers. We were children until we hit puberty. Youth didn’t strike prematurely back then. There was no internet or mobile. The boys bathed in the open until at least 9 or 10. Shame was a concept reserved for adulthood and moral issues. Children rarely attached shame with absence of clothes.
And so, we bathed in the open. It was such a pleasant affair. There would often be more than one kid at the pump. While one would work the pump another would flail furiously under the thick shower of water. We would all take turns.
Soap was a disarmingly simple affair back then. There were only two kinds. The one with you bathed, and the one with which you washed clothes and pretty much everything else.
In the bathing section there were very few brands. There was Lux and Liril on one hand, and there was Lifebuoy on another. We went with Lifebuoy. Though my aunt hid Lux for special occasions. Shampoos had been invented but were unknown amongst us. Men almost didn’t know what it was. Women made their own with Reetha and Shikakai.
For washing pretty much everything else, there was Nirma, the powder and the bar. We would wash utensils, to clothes to everything else with Nirma.
As a result, the bathroom was bare in the ultimate sense. There were four walls, with one roshandaan at the top. There was one tap, one bucket and one mug. And there was that Lifebuoy. And that was it.
It is only when you imagine your childhood like this that you realize with shock what a diverse array of soaps and liquids our bathrooms have become. There is the bathing soap, preferably different for every member of the house. One for the husband, another for the softer skin of the wife, and of course, the Johnson’s or the Dove for the softest skin of the kid. So go the shampoos. For how can the wife use the Reetha shampoo that the husband does and it would an atrocity to use the adult shampoo on the kid’s hair. The face is sensitive, and so it needs a different product, customized just for the face and its sensitive skin with those cute little granules in it. But you cannot expect the face to remain like that if you don’t scrub it with a particular scrub every week or so.
Until five years ago, the men’s range was limited in the bathroom but with the advent of ‘Ustraa’ and other brands men’s products in the bathroom have fought for equal space and rights. And so there is beard oil, beard softener, beard conditioner. The hair cream, the hair gel and what not…
There is washing powder, then the washing liquid for the machine, and then another washing liquid for the front loading machine. There is Harpic for cleaning the toilet. What cleans the ceramic of the toilet seat is obviously not proper for the ceramic of the tiles and thus there is another ‘bathroom floor cleaner’. That is not enough to eliminate the need for the general floor cleaner which is used to wipe the floors. How can the living room marble be given the same treatment as the bathroom tiles?
The glass of the window panes and the almirah glass need a glass cleaner like Colin. Then there is the hand wash, another kind of liquid. The hands need special treatment just like hair and face and body. And it has to be very convenient, for who can wait to use soap after coming out of the toilet for the fourth time during the day?
But it doesn’t end here. There are conditioners of different kinds. That Baby Bath liquid with special non-burst bubble creator is a must for a good day’s bath. There is the dishwashing soap and the dishwashing liquid. Then there is that special liquid soap for your woolen clothes. And once when you have special liquid for your woolen clothes, how can you leave your linen without special treatment? They have rights too! And so there is that special linen washing liquid. There is the fabric whitener. And then the liquid to wash your copper utensils and then the brass utensils.
An entire shop in the 1980s had less number of brands in soap than an average modern bathroom has.
But it is not just about the number of products and the money spent on so many products. The malaise is much deeper. And this problem became clearer during the lockdown.
In the 80s, under any such lockdown all you would have needed would be five packets of Nirma powder and 10 bars of Lifebuoys and you would be set for months.
But now, it is a whole different ball game. How easy is to feel stressed if you run out of one out of the 23 different bathroom products that you use? It is impossible to take care of all of them. How hard it is to sleep peacefully during the lockdown, when so many articles and their expiry dates come knocking in your dreams? What used to be an affair of a few minutes now takes hours and hours of planning and execution: buying the essentials.
It goes deeper than that. For even in peaceful times, the sheer number of articles that you need in your daily life has grown exponentially. The idea that you need articles to survive, articles bought in the convenience store, articles bought from the market has become so deeply embedded in our psyche that every little shock in the market jolts our peace, and something as big as #COVID19 is sure to put many into depression.
It is ironic that an era so fanatically obsessed with the idea of freedom has made us so deeply dependent upon the market. Gone are the freedoms of self-sufficiency, the peace of self-dependence. Our pleasures like our livelihoods are dependent upon the market. They go up with the markets and go down with them too. Our blood pressures have become clinically connected to the NSE and the BSE.
This is why, not with nostalgia, but with a clear sense of longing for a past worth having even now, that I rue the carefree days of bathing. It used to be a beautiful, carefree, stress-busting activity back then. Out in the open, with often just water, and not a worry in the world, the most existential of all joys, the sheer joy of bathing was easily available to all of us. It wasn’t such a chore it has become now, needing so many articles. Like many other things in our quest for ‘progress’ and ‘development’, things which were supposed to make our life easy, have made it harder than ever before.
Pankaj Saxena is a prominent Hindu thinker and the author of Svayambodha and Shatrubodha.