It's every author's dream that there exists some secret pocket of the world in which his work is fully appreciated. Realizing that dream is even more unlikely when the author's work has the word "poop" in its title. So it's a strange journey indeed that begins with founding a bathroom humor website and leads to a ceremonial honor by one of India's most important sanitary advocates.

Only 18% of Indians use toilets, according to the country's 2001 census. The 19th century wave of sanitary reform that formalized the west's bathroom habits didn't wash over India; today 13.6% of its urban population and 78.4% of its rural population still practice open defecation.

Change is coming, though -- on high from organizations like UNICEF and the UN, which declares 2008 to be the International Year of Sanitation; and locally from advocates like Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, whose Sulabh International has, since 1973, built 1.2 million household toilets and 6,500 community toilet blocks that serve 15 million people.

Dr. Pathak is often cited alongside Ghandi for his work to liberate India's untouchable caste. And yet there he was, a sanitary visionary, laying a flower garland on a guy who wrote a book about poop.

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New Delhi guidebooks recognize Sulabh only for its toilet museum. But its broader mission is far more serious: liberating India's lowest caste from "the demeaning practice of physically cleaning and carrying human excreta." The staggering number of toilets it has built are the sole source of funding for its related ventures: free schools to teach trades to former scavengers, research into human waste as energy and fertilizer, and more.

Having found myself in Delhi on (non bathroom-related) business last month, I'd emailed Sulabh an introduction of myself and my book, hoping for little more than a tour of the museum and perhaps a few minutes of Dr. Pathak's time. Sanitary advocacy and bathroom humor may not mix, but perhaps they could intersect for a time.

But the welcome I received...! A short audience upon my arrival, first with Anita Jha, Sulabh's Managing Director, and then with Dr. Pathak. A formal welcome before an assembled crowd in Sulabh's conference center. A classroom-by-classroom tour of the school. An exhibit-by-exhibit tour of the museum. A model-by-model tour of the Sulabh's household toilets, with staff scientist Dr. P.K. Jha (no relation) explaining how their dual-pit pour-flush system allows waste to compost in one pit while the other is slowly filled. Over the three years the first pit lays untouched, bacteria transform the waste into compost -- turning waste into a resource while eliminating the need for human scavengers.

Dr. Jha led me to a nearby fertilizer bin. The photographer who had been trailing me since I arrived leapt to immortalize this moment: me lifting a sample to my nose, inhaling the sweet smell of pure earth.

From there, it was on to Dr. Pathak's office for a long conversation about his work. It began in 1968 when he moved in with a community of untouchables -- an unthinkable breach of taboo for a Brahmin. But Dr. Pathak saw human waste as Ghandi did: not a symbol of filth but a fundamental baseline that links all humanity.

Dr. Pathak, Ms. Jha, and I were joined for lunch by a man introduced as "one of the most famous astrologers in India."

My journey sees me returning to Delhi for a year beginning in November, in part to research a book about the future of toilets and sewers. Upon learning this, Dr. Pathak invited me to attend and speak at the 2007 World Toilet Summit, hosted this year in Delhi. The Summit will kick-start the Year of Sanitation's efforts to reduce by half the 2.6 billion people who don't have access to basic sanitation; my experience translating bathroom humor into sanitary awareness, it seems, is directly relevant to the Summit's goals. Jack Sim, president of the World Toilet Organization, often introduces himself as "Toiletman" -- intentionally eliciting an initial giggle to diffuse the taboo.

Human waste is a fundamental baseline; bathroom humor is a fundamental reaction to it.

But I didn't know this was Dr. Pathak's perspective when, standing with him on the dais in front of his assembled staff, the garland fresh on my shoulders, he frowned at the typed speech he was about to deliver. He turned to me, gestured to the title of my book on his paper, and asked, "What is ‘poop'?"

Before I could consider an answer, Ms. Jha leaned forward. "It's shit, sir," she informed him.

"Ah," he said. And then he proceeded to the lectern and gave this author the greatest honor of his career thus far.

You can see photos of Sulabh, Dr. Pathak, and more on my Flickr page.