Indoor Air Pollution

This post has got nothing to do with a similar post elsewhere. Specifically, at Serious musings of a Questioning mind. I maintain that the person who writes that blog is one of my multiple personalities. Other personalities, about whom you might have heard, are indulged in society improving activities such as murdering politicians and corporators, cleaning the gutters of Mumbai, etc. Well, not really. Cleaning the gutters of Mumbai is not exactly a good thing to do. Getting rid of the blood stains is easy enough : you can look it up in the Murderer's Manual for Dummies. But the stains that one may get after cleaning the gutter are unimaginable. Who knows what sorts of pollutants enter the gutters of Mumbai? Which brings me to today's topic of pollution inside houses.

There is a simple remedy to prevention of pollution indoors. Which is this : Ban the production of all sorts of protein containing beans! Yes! Nature has given these beans the power to generate flatulence, in an effort to reduce the human population by sheer force. In the sense that nature wants people to die trying to hold their breath rather than take in what is probably a malicious odour! I will try to explain the phenomenon of flatulence, which in some crude and un-informed sections of the world, is called a "fart".

When you eat something, the food that is chewed enters the bronchial cord. No wait. I think it enters the fallopian tube. Oh, just forget it. Whatever does enter, finds it's way to the stomach. And nothing can be said about the food that remains in the mouth, because given the highly advanced tooth brushes we have today, there is every probability that you are using the tooth brush in a "wrong" way and hence it is not serving it's purpose. So, the food that remains in the mouth probably remains there your whole lifetime and get's removed only in your old-age, when your teeth fall off. But I am deviating from the topic at hand here. We were at the stage when the food has reached the stomach, after it's journey through the vestigial tubes. In the stomach, the food is broken down into two major categories : solid and gas. At this stage, this particular phenomenon is fine, because the gas that gets produced in the stomach comes out only as a "Burp!" from the mouth, and is usually non-smelly, unless the food stuck in your mouth has been degraded very badly. And if you have some manners and etiquette, or sheer skill such as me, you can disguise the burp quite effectively, making it sound like a car back-firing in the neighbouring building.

After the stomach, the solids travel through another set of tubes. Sometimes I wonder why all the systems in humans need to have tubes. I mean, the food we eat passes through tubes, our blood travels in tubes, there is a tube in our ear, etc. There is even a tube through which liquid can pass, though it is external to our body. No, you perverts! I am not talking about the bodily organ involved in reproduction. I am talking about straws with which we sip our cold drinks. Sheesh! These days you got to be careful to ensure that you are not misunderstood. It is in these tubes (not the straws, you dummy!) that the problem of flatulence finds it's origin. There are some bacteria planted there by nature, who have malicious intent. Any time they find any sulphur, which is present in unnaturally high quantities in beans, they go into over-drive and start a war dance around lighted bon-fires. Actually, what they do is called "Fermentation", which is a Greek word, combined from the Latin words "Fer" and "Mentation". Fer means "around a bon-fire" and Mentation means "to dance". So, these bacteria do what they were put into the human body for. Namely, they convert harmless food substances into smelly gases. And this is where the problem begins.

The intestinal tubes, or wherever it is that the gases are produced, are located quite close to the brain. And the gases make you "heady", if you get my drift. So in an induced seizure caused by the "high" brain, the tubes collapse, forcing whatever gas is there inside them to come out of the body with an amazing amount of force. To understand the magnitude of this force, consider the following example. If you "farted" in the vicinity of an ant, you would probably find it thrown away quite a distance and on inspection and scientific analysis, you would find that it is dead. The reasons for it getting thrown away are not yet clear. But you know why it is dead : Lack of Oxygen! Anyway, flatulence, as I said earlier is quite a nuisance and is also a biological hazard. Hence, it has tremendous potential to be used as a Biochemical warfare weapon. This is probably the principal reason why the US desperately wants us to sign the non-proliferation treaty. We, as a country, consume around a zillion "pounds" of proteinaceous beans everyday. And given the unpredictable nature of the south western monsoon winds, who knows which fart may land where? Currently though, it seems that all the flatulence in the country is finding it's way to places like Kurla and Bandra, which is why they are smelly. Not to mention the pubs and the bars which smell really bad. This is an example of indoor air pollution. It is very dangerous and immediate measures need to be taken to handle the situation before it gets out of hand!