Dark Water

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Sometime in early 2007, the smiling technicians from Eureka Forbes (Yes, the "Friends for life" people from TV) came smiling into my house and set up a water purifier system, the drilled-into-our-heads-through-incessant-ads Aquaguard system in one corner of my house. This was the second Aquaguard system being installed in our house, adding on to the one already installed in my uncle's kitchen. It just goes to show that if you run your publicity campaign before the advent of attention splintering multi-channel satellite TV in any country, you have your loyal customers booked for life.

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I have no complaints with the service that the machine gives. It's as close to perfection as any machine can get. Litres and kilolitres of potable water have poured out of its tiny nozzle and it has never even hiccuped (fingers crossed/touch-wood). What I do have an issue with it is the tremendously ominous music that plays along while the purified water is pouring out.

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The aforementioned first Aquaguard of our house was installed by my uncle a long long time and the music it plays is a tinny monophonic version of "Sochna Kya Jo Bhi Hoga Dekhaa Jayegaa [Why worry too much, we'll take life as it comes]" from the movie Ghayal (Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYCguKQnTm8 if you want to relive your inexplicably weirdly dressed early 1990s Bollywood memories) while the water pours out. It was a song whose lyrics are positive to say the least. Like so many other Bollywood movie songs, this song was a direct lift, this time from a Spanish song "Llorando se Fue" by Los Kjarkas (Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT4T5GyGqRQ if you want another good laugh). "Llorando se Fue" apparently in Spanish means "Crying... one went away"(so says my favourite translator http://babelfish.yahoo.com) but I don't understand Spanish all that well and for me that tune was permanently associated with the cheery spirit of the Hindi version than its morose Spanish one.

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With the passage of time, like monophonic ringtone technology on cellphones had morphed into polyphonic grandness, the new Aquaguard, my Aquaguard has spectacular polyphonic speakers. So what does it choose to play? A musical piece which combines the sentiments of the words "gloomy", "depressing", "foreboding", "menacing" and a few hundred more of that nature from the English dictionary. I don't know what the name of this new tune is and neither do I want to find out. There is just that one tune and although I understand it made business sense not to include an in-built MP3 player, but couldn't it have been a more cheery one. Cheery tunes I would imagine sound so much better on polyphonic speakers.

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Early in the morning groggy with sleep or late at night drained by the day's work, standing in front of the purifier to fill up rows of waiting PET bottles is almost an ordeal. A quick press of a button quickly mutes the awful tune in the real world but it keeps on playing like a funeral song at the back of your mind all the while it takes to achieve the drinking water supply targets. Someone at Eureka Forbes seems intent on teaching us about the true tragic nature of life while we get our day's quota of water. There are days when you can't help but agree with the infernal machine's outlook towards life. But on days when the sun is full and bright outside and you realize how much worse things could have been, you feel like getting into The Joker mode and ask the forever depressed Aquaguard "Why so serious?"