Skip to main content

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.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...

Empuraan and Ramayana

Maggie and I will be watching the Malayalam movie Empuraan tomorrow. The tickets are booked. The movie has created a lot of controversy in Kerala and the director has decided to impose no less than 17 censors on it himself. I want to watch it before the jingoistic scissors find its way to the movie. It is surprising that the people of Kerala took such exception to this movie when the same people had no problem with the utterly malicious and mendacious movie The Kerala Story (2023). [My post on that movie, which I didn’t watch, is here .] Empuraan is based partly on the Gujarat riots of 2002. The riots were real and the BJP’s role in it (Mr Modi’s, in fact) is well-known. So, Empuraan isn’t giving the audience any falsehood as The Kerala Story did. Moreover, The Kerala Story maligned the people of Kerala while Empuraan is about something that happened in the faraway Gujarat quite long ago. Why are the people of Kerala then upset with Empuraan ? Because it tells the truth, M...