The Battle of the Bathian Sea

Captain Shorty Pie is standing short in the Bathian Sea and this time she is surrounded by a multitude of sea creatures. One by one the creatures are floating towards her. A star fish, a sea horse, an octopus, a blue whale, a sea lion, a shark and a jelly fish all of them in every single direction, lay there waiting for her to make the next step. She is completely surrounded, she has nowhere to go. Oh god! this is the first time in the history of Sea creatures attacking a short Captain, that there are so many sea creatures attacking a short captain all at once.

The star fish is all orangey and ready to feast on the prey. The sea lion makes an echoing moo noise which is extremely devastating. The sea horse does the sea horse neigh and taking quick swim steps to get ready for the attack. The octopus waves all of its arms in every direction and makes its move slowly towards the captain and getting ready to embrace her in its venomous arms. The blue whale squirts out water from the top and opens its mouth wide open with the blue whale noise. The shark makes rapid swims and jumps with its fins and coming in closer. The jelly fish emanates its vicious jelly like substance that will get anyone who comes in its path.

Such was the situation, so dangerous and nowhere to go. But our captain has conquered the 7 seas. She has been there to every corner of the world and fought every creature in her way. She is no stranger to such situation. She can handle this with ease. Captain gets ready with her crouching stand with legs wide apart. It is the strongest of the stance and only experienced adventurers adapt it.

She quickly moves to the right and grabs the star fish with her palm and squeezes the juice out of it and throws it away. The rest of the creatures pause for a moment and get cautious. They come to know she is not an easy prey. She is a fighter and they have to beware. The sea horse quickly tries to make an attack from the back, but our captain is too smart. She grabs the sea horse by its stomach and squeezes its juice out of it and puts it in a container. The rest of the creatures are now really scared, they are not going to take the next step but will wait for her.

But she doesn’t wait, She has got into her stance and there is no turning back for her. She now grabs the blue whale with her right hand and the jelly fish by her left hand and squeezes them and extracts an ocean of juice from them in just a few seconds. She growls and makes an angry face when she does that. It scares the big juices out of the Octopus and the Shark, who are the only ones left in the battle. They are not sure if they are strong enough to fight the almighty captain. Shorty pie puts one step further towards the octopus. The shark takes one step back. The octopus tries to bow down to the incredible pie but it is not forgiven. The shark tries to give an attack from the side but she is too clever and moves away. The shark now goes to her left and watches the captain squeezing the last drops of juice from the octopus.

It is now a duel between the shark and the captain. The shark makes one final attempt to jump on the captain. The captain catches the shark and squeezes the juice out of it too. The shark screams in agony but that is masked completely by the arrogant growl of the juice squeezing captain. Captain Shorty Pie of the bathian sea once again smells victory.

And this is how I see, when my daughter plays with her squirt toys in the bath tub.

CD in the bathtub

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.