Our daughter loves to conduct experiments. Her field of specialization is to perform a regular act of a toddler and examine the reactions of two fully grown adult species of Homo Sapiens, one from each sex – Me and my wife. She likes to improvise and hence her experiments have been more offline which means she does what she wants to do stealthily without our knowledge and then when we see it with our eyes we react and she takes down the readings, more like scribbling with a black ball pen on the Telephone directory.
In one such experiments of the toddler, I was stepping into the shower on a lazy saturday morning (No, Please don’t picturize this unless you want to suffer from Flu for the entire winter) when my feet stepped on a flat hard object. It was a CD. A CD in the bathtub. I went “arghhhh …..no……”. I then took a deep breath and said “it’s ok, it’s just a CD”. One close look at the CD and I was actually quite relieved. It was a Sony CD-R that I had used to copy some photos from my friend’s laptop. The photos were already added to my iPhoto library and hence this CD can be actually thrown away with no harm done (except occupy some square inches in the landfill and let it sit there for several decades).
Little did I know that I was going to be the subject of the toddler’s experiment and open my mind into self realization. I picked up the CD and wondered what other things it can be used for. I was feeling itchy on my back and used that CD to slowly scratch my back (Again don’t picturize). It felt great, tremendous. All of a sudden, an object whose primary use was to store some seemingly important data, was led into one of its possible other uses – Scratching my back. This CD could very well be doing it’s job of displaying photos on a computer or a DVD Player but it perfectly worked its way comforting me from the itch. This was the moment of enlightenment.
Are we all CDs in a bathtub? Are we in the right place doing the right job we are capable of and not just the one we are qualified for? Could I have done better as a doctor saving lives rather than sitting in front of a computer all day and working through spaghetti of lines of programs? Perhaps a courageous Journalist? or a Sportsman? Or a Car Designer? Or a musician?
Was MGR a better actor than a Politician? Would Aishwarya Rai have been better off doing Modelling than acting in Bollywood? Didn’t Kumble and Srinath do great as Cricketers rather than Software Engineers? Don’t we dance to the tunes and voice of Shankar Mahadevan rather than do nothing with the Software that he might have written? Didn’t Bikerdude kick IT recently and enter Arts? Is Arnold better being a Governor than the Terminator?
Life doesn’t allow us to do everything at one time. We get to choose and when we do, we don’t know if we have chosen to be the CD on the player or a CD on the bathtub. But what we should do is we should remain truthful and good as the CD and shouldn’t mind being in a player or the tub. Who knows, being in the tub might perhaps make the CD feel better than being in the player.
I have to tell my daughter that her experiment was a success, she is a genius, after I change her diaper.
