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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
13 comments
Read more

Randeep the melody

Many people in this pic have made their presence in this A2Z series A phone call came from an unknown number the other day. “Is it okay to talk to you now, Sir?” The caller asked. The typical start of a conversation by an influencer. “What’s it about?” My usual response looking forward to something like: “I am so-and-so from such-and-such business firm…” And I would cut the call. But there was a surprise this time. “I am Randeep…” I recognised him instantly. His voice rang like a gentle music in my heart. Randeep was a student from the last class 12 batch of Sawan. One of my favourites. He is unforgettable. Both Maggie and I taught him at Sawan where he was a student from class 4 to 12. Nine years in a residential school create deep bonds between people, even between staff and students. Randeep was an ideal student. Good at everything yet very humble and spontaneous. He was a top sportsman and a prefect with eminent leadership. He had certain peculiar problems with academics. Ans
25 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
19 comments
Read more

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
37 comments
Read more

Sanjay and other loyalists

AI-generated illustration Some people, especially those in politics, behave as if they are too great to have any contact with the ordinary folk. And they can get on with whoever comes to power on top irrespective of their ideologies and principles. Sanjay was one such person. He occupied some high places in Sawan school [see previous posts, especially P and Q ] merely because he knew how to play his cards more dexterously than ordinary politicians. Whoever came as principal, Sanjay would be there in the elite circle. He seemed to hold most people in contempt. His respect was reserved for the gentry. I belonged to the margins of Sawan society, in Sanjay’s assessment. So we hardly talked to each other. Looking back, I find it quite ludicrous to realise that Sanjay and I lived on the same campus 24x7 for a decade and a half without ever talking to each other except for official purposes.      Towards the end of our coexistence, Sawan had become a veritable hell. Power supply to the
12 comments
Read more