Nothing is more revolting that standing in front of the wash basin and blowing your nose. With all your might, you force the air out through your nose hoping that the accumulated filth would get aught up the huge thrust generated and fly out in bursts of yellow spendour. People welcome to Phlegm Tour!

Its 7 AM in the morning. A fresh start as we realize that the huge organism is just shaking a bit. Don’t worry, he’ll be up in 10 minutes and straight to our dream destination. The drain below the wash basin. The ride is gonna be full of adventures and dangerous turns. But we provide you noseat belts because hey you’ve not come to soeme water-cum-amusement park. You are inside the huge organism’s nose. Huge gusts of wind will start blowing, the sound of trickling water falling softly onto the basin ceramic luring you towards itself and the varying stops that you’ll make hile the organism will heave, breathe, pant and rant before he finally ejects you out towards (and Michael Jackson sings along) Freedom.

I have wondered if all human beings can come undera any other common ground category other than ‘humans’ or ‘homo sapiens’. In fact, there can be many. But for today let’ss suffice by all being merchants who manufacture phlegm.

I was sick in the past week and lay in bed for four straight days. It was basically a heat stroke that triggered fever, body ache and extreme cough. Now from extreme, I do mean eXtreme. Because, even though I am a regular customer of Cold, Cough and Party, this was the mother of all their visits. Fur days and every 10 minutes I am off to the basin and pumping it out. For those whose tubelight’s still didn’t flash, phlegm (who gave that name anyway? That ‘l’ in between makes onomatopoeic sound resembling blowing the nose. Nice thinking but revolting act.) is the viscous thick yellow gooey substance that you spit and throw when you’ve got cough.

So, all these four days I must have pumped out more than a litre of phlegm. I mean it just kept coming out. I wondered if there was some sort of a storage tank and pump mechanism fit somewhere that was making this possible but how could the body generate so much and from what raw materials fails my imagination. I know is a method ofwaste getting out. This is not an informative post and so I am not going to Google for it and then state the ‘crude’ facts.

But I just want to say – ‘It’s not fair’. A guy is so weak that he can barely walk and he’s supposed to just blow air out. He gets so exhausted! Imagine!

I wish the doctors invented some mechanism to suck all of it out at one go rather than giving Titanium Dioxide coloured bitter tablets and lousy pills.

I am fine now but I still have to go and stand in front of the wash basin again. Sneeze! There’s the call. Gotta go.

Siddhartha