Mother's Love - By a software engineer.

MOTHERS LOVE

-          By a software engineer

                After being dumped by my 6^th girl friend (for not giving an expensive good looking gift), I was at kaada malleshwera temple again. (A routine I follow whenever I got ditched.)

Don’t know why that places soothes me like my mother. (Whatever I think of my mother, or some good things, being not trapped again in love, these kinds of thoughts were all limited to the temple premises. When I am out on my bike I am the same old crap again ;)) The cool breeze, not so crowded place, on the steps against the Siva idol is the best place to sit in this world and to lost in the world of my thoughts.

But this time it turned out to be a bit special. Something that happened made me write this. I was lost in my thoughts and staring at nothing. Suddenly someone stamped on my leg (very lightly indeed) brought me back. With a fuming anger out of my nostrils (may be actual anger I wanted to let out on my GF) I turned to see who it was. It was a cute kid may be having 2 yrs ran across the steps to his mother. She may be in her late twenties, looking so divine, some kind of pure, calm poise look (she is gorgeous too) that a mother have, took him in her arms and carried him down the steps to the pond. A step just above the water surface, few tortoises were resting. She released him from her bosom and asked him to touch the shell of it. He was so scared and went pale. She convinced him that it will be fine and she will be there to ensure his safety (may be she offered a chocolate if he do that) and it will be good to touch. She held his hand tightly as he leaned extending his other hand. As he touched the hard surface, instantaneously the tortoise took its head and limbs inside the shell, the boy jumped with joy and triumph that the mission was accomplished and he is even more ecstatic to see something like that. He continued to observe the turtle, as it put out its limbs slowly again, he touched again (with less fear this time) and swiftly ran his fingers across the hard shell for a long time as the turtle rolled back its head. The boy was even happier by now seeing this he repeated again and again. I was so taken up by the boy’s innocence, his pure joyous feeling about small things. As I shifted my gaze towards her mother, I was even more awestruck. I realized that she is the person who is more genuinely joyous than the boy. She was so happy seeing her child being happy and embraced him again as if she wanted to feel every detail of his happiness. As he was out of her arms running to his dad I clearly saw gleam in her eyes telling that she is the happiest being on this earth, Real happiness (how many people in this world are blessed to be such happy). No surprise, I was more than convinced to accept that, yes she seemed to be the happiest person (at least in that moment) I have ever come across. Suddenly I thought am I going too filmy? I checked my eyes they are not wet and the glitter that I saw in her eyes is a real thing, I can still see that.

I remembered my mother and memories of my childhood began to roll before my eyes (I personally believe eyelids are the most powerful, amazing camera with unlimited memory. They take pictures with a better clarity than the so called SLR’s. They give us the glimpse of anything we want to recollect in fraction of second. Even a computer takes time to search retrieve and paint the image on the screen). Time slipped away.

But one thing occupied my mind completely. Her smile, happiness and sparkle in her eyes for him being happy. I am running out of words or pardon me does any words exists to express what I saw that day and what feelings she had for him. Huh, I am completely hopeless in describing it.

Finally I took it as a challenge. “Describing it”.

(My bloody job taught me analyzing a thing and describing it clearly to the client or getting the description from the client clearly.)

So I started with, why is she so happy? Because her son is happy.

So what? Why such happiness? What is the secret? It turned out like I am digging in the air, because nothing is falling in to my cup.

Again my job taught me user perspective or others views about a situation. Ask questions probing for a clear view of the task at hand. Make a questionnaire that should be short and sharp, the answers should give you complete answers.

For this job, I got 2 questions on my questionnaire.

1.       Do you love your mother?

2.       If yes, why?

I posed this questions to my team mates, friends, everyone I know of.

For the first question almost everyone said “Yes”. For the second question….

“Why means what?”

“Are you insane?”

“My love towards my mother is unconditional”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“Today what I am, who I am is completely because of her”

“She loves me more than I do”

“She always thinks of my sake and cares for me.”

…………….

…………………..

……………………………

Mmm, these answers are nothing new; they seemed to be very familiar. I thought I should give up. I should concentrate on my work. May be its too hard when we want to define feelings. This is what I thought for the last when I left the job unfinished. Finally I gave up. (But a thread in my brain running this task didn’t give up. It continued to multi task.)

Days went on and I am working normally as I ever did. One day there was a mail saying that there will be a team out the following Friday. It turned out to be absolute fun. We were all enjoying playing, eating, dancing all around the resort.

As a usual thing, the next day people were discussing about the outing and I joined the chat. I was teasing people and making fun again. Suddenly one thought hit me. When it all started? Rolling back in time 2 years, when I joined as a fresher in production with a fear of what to do, how to do, what is what. I was placed in good team and my colleagues being very nice and taught me the things.  I quickly got the flow and did well.

I remember my PM congratulating me on fixing a potential bug at production for the first time. That day, I was more than happy ever and it turned to be one of the happiest moments in my life. Every time I fix a bug, add a new feature and deploy the changes I used to feel the same sort of happiness, I did something productive, some application that is running properly and doing some task correctly. (Hope everyone feels like me)

Suddenly the floor was alarmed by a potential production issue and our team mates packed to their seats looking for a fix. The bug was a critical as some batch that ran yesterday altered the account balances. After one and half hour I finally landed on the issue. It was some problem with firing of batches and the issue location has been located and fixed. There was a huge sound of OOOs and Aaahs from my team mates and I feel again the same thing. I did something productive and make something work fault free.

We all love what we do or at least what we did. There is a great satisfaction (proudness) when we say “hey that’s my code”. (No matter how junk it is ;))

Tring …. Tring ….Tring……… (There was a yield() method called on my main thread, and the only thread left unfinished was notified of its task.- (spare me for this java terms))

Finally I finished my challenging task this way.

                Just a few (thousands of) lines of code, we write and we feel so happy for it.  We feel like we created something great and its working great because of us. Of all the team that contributed for application ‘You’ are a part of it, still you are happy to share a feeling that you are great and you are responsible for its success. (Say the amount of happiness as X units)

Imagine, only you developed the application from the scratch, requirements, design, use cases, coding, testing, building and resource  allocations, web server deployment what not everything is done only by you. Imagine the happiness you feel. (Say the amount of happiness as some 1, 00,000 times of X – still it may sound less to you)

All this happiness is just for developing an application that severs some specified task and which is lifeless.

                Now see a woman creating a life, a human being (you, me & everyone) which is capable of writing code, making pots, welding grills, designing buildings, sweeping roads, painting arts, writing stories, playing games, counseling minds, building monuments, inventing medicines…. what not, everything you name it she is the one who created it. Now think of the happiness she feel for the human being she created all alone. I say I can’t put a constant before X and say this many times. I feel like even infinite seems finite before X.

We worry and work hard for our code to look good and work well. At times we don’t even care of food, time and fun. We just want to do a good job. Isn’t this love towards your job?

She is creating a life, a godly thing. Even god can’t do it and she holds the place of creating a life. She cares for the life she created every moment. The way she feels responsible, undergoes pain for her creation to be happy, the torment she is ready to take for the sake of her child is just inexpressible.

I can’t call it love again. It is something more than love. If I were among the early scholars of English I would have coined a new word for mother’s love. Because if we ever define love, there will be fathers love, brothers love, sisters love so on and so forth. But whatever may be it; nothing can come close to a mother’s love, it’s just unique.

 FOR THE REASON I AM HAPPY, the meadows look more green..

FOR THE REASON I AM HAPPY, the breeze turned to be soft and soothing…

FOR THE REASON I AM HAPPY, the sky seems to lower and was trying to touch me….

FOR THE REASON I AM HAPPY, I just feel like God & everything is according to my wish….

I AM NOT HAPPY BECAUSE, I won a million dollar lottery…

I AM NOT HAPPY BECAUSE, a handsome guy fell for me…

I AM NOT HAPPY BECAUSE, I have landed on my dream job….

I AM NOT HAPPY BECAUSE, my husband gave me an expensive gift…..

I AM HAPPY BEACAUSE I AM A MOTHER NOW.

I went through the unbearable torture, skin stabbing deep pain, YET I AM VERY HAPPY…

Its 3 hours of labor and I was drenched in sweat and smelling like a rat, YET I AM VERY HAPPY…

We are poor, doubting we may not able to clear the hospital bill, YET I AM VERY HAPPY…

I am an ordinary woman and not one special thing about me, YET I AM VERY HAPPY…

BECAUSE I AM A MOTHER NOW.

Of the late I wish I were a woman so that at one point of time I will be a mother and I can feel that happiness what I saw. Unfortunately I am not….

Still I don’t feel like I have completed the job. What I did by writing this long is just an attempt to describe something that is magnificent, wonderful, and enormous and simply out my scope.

P.S.: after writing down this all the way long, I asked myself what is love. If you are not sick of me and my thoughts I put it this way.

Love is just like an interface in java. There are some standards or contracts you say in case of an interface. Similarly love has the standards (methods to be implemented) like care, fondness, struggle for the one, so on and so forth. Just like any class can implement any interface in its own way following the rules (rather say virtues). Love can also be implemented, expressed, felt, shown in many ways. Fathers love, mothers love, sisters, and friends. Whatever may be the form of love, accept, appreciate and be grateful to it. But don’t ever try to define the class love in a concrete way. Your project will be a big time failure.