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.
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