Skip to main content

Public Spaces

 This is very welcome news for New Yorkers and visitors to New York who all have long struggled to find a public restroom. My solution involves staying semi-dehydrated while I am out so I would not need to use a facility until I returned to the hotel. While an unhealthy idea it probably works if you are out there only for a couple of days at any time. My troubles with restrooms in the city always reminded me of life in India when I was growing up. If we had to travel any significant distance at any time. Parents would start to tell kids that they need to use the bathroom (multiple times if need be) before they left and caution them against drinking too much liquid along the way. 

My mother used to carry a water bottle for us if we were out and about in the summer but it was very much rationed so there would be no need to visit a bathroom. New York is not alone in lack of access to public restrooms - there are way too many places in around the world that have the same problem. It will be great to see Google convert this to a global map layer so people (specially children) can be put out of their misery. I feel glad that I have learned adaptation techniques early in my life so I can cope better than those who did not have such opportunity. 

The group Alliance for Public Space Leadership, which promotes equity and effective management of New York’s public spaces, said in a statement that the new Google map “will make our public realm more accessible for everyone” but added that New York City has far too few public restrooms.

“These facilities should be easy to find and abundant so all New Yorkers can enjoy public space with peace of mind,” the group said

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...