Dressing with Ghaghra Choli

Consider the following statements:

1. It looks cute when a full sized adult dress is miniaturized for 1 to 2 years old and so a Ghaghra Choli for 2 years old is very cute.

2. When you dress for a party it takes the longest for the Woman in the family to get dressed.

These 2 points imply that the father in the family gets to dress his 23 months old daughter for the party. It takes longer for a Man to dress his toddler daughter than for this wife to dress herself up for the party. The challenge is not in just dressing but tackling the active toddler and then dressing at the same time. It is like trying to dress your bike in a pyjama while you are riding it with both the hands and the bike going in a random direction no matter how you hold the handle bar.

So It was a day of one of the parties at our friend’s place and I took the mission of dressing the daughter.

First, Undressing the daughter is very easy. You just have to pull the top upwards and in 3 seconds you will find the kid 3 meters away from you while you will be holding the top inside out. Same goes to the bottom, except she would have only reached 2 meters for that. After that you will need to perform 3 somersaults to change the diaper (perform 4 if you have the intentions of saving the nearby objects from being vandalised).

Now comes the tricky part. I made a few attempts at getting her dressed and here they are:

1. Is the top part called Choli? Assuming it is, I took the choli and put it on her left hand and then I put the other end on her right hand. During this time I didn’t notice that she took off her left hand from the choli. I went back and put the choli on the left hand and she cleverly undid the right side. The cycle continued for a while until I decided to go attempt 2.

2. Knowing that putting it one hand at a time is difficult, I tried to put it on both the hands from the front side at the same time. She bent down, got under me and ran away into the other room while I was sitting there with my both hands partially inserted into the choli. It took me a while to chase her down and clamp her to my lap before trying attempt 3.

3. This time I was very determined. I wasn’t budging, I wanted to be the one in control. I wanted to show her who the daddy is. So after a brief bit of wrestling with a combination of above 2 attempts, I finally got the choli on her and started to tie the knot. The knot was tied and She was dressed. There all done and neat. That’s when my wife came and looked at me with a stare.

Wife: What’s this?

Me: I dressed her, what else!

Wife: Is this how you dress Ghagra choli?

Me: I haven’t dressed myself in Ghagra choli in any way possible. So I don’t know.

Wife: Funny ha! Why is the knot on her front?

I didn’t realize as my daughter was turning and I was turning around to get into position I was off by 180 degrees. I had tied the knots that come on the back, to her front.

Me: Oh! You are right, was that supposed to be tied backwards. Let me try again.

Wife: (walking away) and Put her bottoms will you!

That must be the Ghagra I forgot and that was why I was wondering why the Ghagra looked exactly like her diaper. After a brief hunt, I found the Ghaghra barely hanging off from the ironing board.

All is well that ends well. I was finally able to dress her up for the party and we were ready to go. Just one thing was left. My wife adjusted the bottom by rotating it for 180 degrees.

Wife: “This is the correct side”

Me: How would I know? It looks the same on all sides!

Wife: Watch the label on the inside. It is the same way you wear your Banian.

Now we were definitely ready to go for the party, except I have to put the daughter’s shoes on! And there I went again!

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.