The bygone jugs

I always had a throat problem, so wasn't typically allowed to drink chilled water. As a result, this is how my childhood afternoons merged into evenings: it grew dark, I returned home from street cricket or football in the park, thirstier than anything-to-which-the-as-thirsty-as-similie-can-be-assigned-to, and took the stainless steel water-filled jug on the table, rotated its lid so that the small netted circle came into alignment with the triangular snout, and you know the rest.

Where have all the jugs gone?

There used to multiple ones in every household. They could have been of stainless steel or plastic (transparent or otherwise; I've even seen plastic jugs with scales for measuring liquids marked on its side), or if you were really elite, then of glass. But jugs were everywhere. They were all the same: there was a triangular snout, and the lid consisted of two circular holes - one netted to allow a slower flow of water for the user to drink, the other a full uninterrupted circle to allow the user to pour water into lesser containers like a glass.

They used to be in all sorts of places, from dining tables to bedside tables, from hotel rooms to picnics, from playgrounds to conferences. But for no reason whatsoever, they have disappeared completely from our lives.

They seem to turn up, that too only the opaque versions (for some reasons mostly the sea-green ones with boring blue or turquoise designs on the surface) only at the most ordinary roadside rice-and-fish joints and the most humble tea outlets.

We have advanced technologically and taken massive footsteps backwards hygienically to migrate to used bottles of soft drinks and mineral water, instead; the smarter ones do use stuff like PearlPet, but the point remains that we have banished jugs from our everyday life altogether. We don't use glasses at home either - just the bottles. We have somehow managed to banish those grotesque creations of stainless steel and plastic (and glass, if you're elite) altogether from our lives.

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Moral of the story: When bottles appear in hordes in your life, they can make you forget everything. Even jugs.