Yours Sportively

I never imagined sports and games as “a crypto-fascist plan for repressing (my) sex-drive” [Julian Barnes’s phrase in The Sense of an Ending] or any other particularly intriguing conspiracy. When I was a young boy, life was much simpler an affair because people didn’t play a fraction of the games they do today. At any rates, games and sports never caught my fancy.

As a school student, I didn’t even care to step into the playground. I idled away the games period standing on the side line and watching my spirited friends run after an inflated piece of rubber as if their whole life depended on kicking it in some particular direction.

The institution where I studied after school insisted on everyone playing one game or another. I remember standing with M in the corner of the football ground and chatting away while the others kicked the ball around frantically. M could drop names like Jean-Paul Sartre and Ludwig Wittgenstein which sounded game enough to me. If the ball ever reached near us by chance, we would pretend to run for it though we really didn’t need to take more than three steps before some of the genuine players would grab it and the game would go on with dead seriousness.

As years passed, M grew up into an attenuated saintly person with a sophisticated contempt for the world and its silly people who continued to run around inflated pieces of various materials. I became a little less attenuated but brawny cynic who found enough amusement in the various games people played.

One of the most amusing games I find today is people’s flights into history. Too many of my countrymen have become passionate about history quite suddenly and rather unnaturally. History was the most boring subject while I was at school and the only one in which I managed to fail on occasions. What does it matter today anyway whether Shahjahan changed Indraprastha into Shajahanabad or Bal Thackeray changed Bombay to Mumbai? Let them change Dilli now to Modilli if they wish. Who cares?

Name changing is quite the hobby of the Yogi ji in UP. First he changed his own name and then he changed the names of quite many places around him. That’s just what history is, I guess: games of the victors. And the disillusionments of the defeated too, perhaps. Disillusionments or self-delusions? Well, self-delusion is certainly not the prerogative of the defeated.

I have seen 56 inch wide self-delusions walking with proudly bared chests on the royal highway of the victors.