3pm, 15th April 1993, summer
holidays, Bangalore: Temperatures may be hovering around 36 degree C. The
tarred road is almost boiling. 8 boys are oblivious to all the standard
temperature and pressures of an Indian summer because they are engrossed in
playing the 6 over-a-side cricket match on the road in front of their homes.
Their respective mothers have given up on their sons, as they know that the trick
of containing these boys inside their homes with ‘rasna’ and other foodie
incentives will not last long.
What’s making
these boys stay all the day in hot sun ? Plain and simple – it’s the craving
for the sport. The boys talk and live in it. They have just finished the
great-grind of Indian youth of 1990s – the final exams, and now are free birds,
at least till June 1st. Sports for them is a form of expression, a
purpose for their living, an aim to achieve, and thrill to experience. It is not
out of any big ambition of becoming a sport star. Not at all, that is usually
never on their minds, but they play it to just enjoy the game and live it as it
is happening. A kind of practical nirvana, one may say, without enforcement.
It is worth introspecting why we, as humans,
play and like sports so much. One important reason is the human interaction.
You play to bond and compete with others, and this bonding and competition can
bring out the best in you. This process of interaction involuntarily helps you to
understand one-self. Playing sport is one of
the greatest forms of self-realization. It really brings out the YOU out of
you, whether you like it or not. The spectacle of sports too, gives you an external
impression, and to a large extent an exposure to the nature of people playing
it. You may not know a person, but you can watch her or him play sports for an
extended period of time, and construct their image of external behaviour. So
sports tell you and others, who you are.
If someone
does love the sports they play, and have been trained to play well since a very
early age and extremely passionate about it, then they usually take it up as
their career. These people can live
their sport and make a living out of
the sport. It is a happy thought. So as you may observe there are two
components to sports as a career. One is an internal thoughtful realization of the
self, and the other is a professional side which puts you at the interface of
your ‘self’ and the outside world.
Alas! Time
and again, many sport ‘stars’ have fizzled out of their shine in public, having
caught doing wrong things. Why? Why do they do this despite being successful?
May be the definitions change in their minds. If
you look up the dictionary for the meaning of the word “game”, you get many
definitions such as A contest with rules
to determine a winner, and there is another one which defines game as A secret scheme to do something (especially
something underhand or illegal). The problem occurs when the definitions
are transformed from the former to later; where sporting bravado transforms to
out–of-the-line bravery. Only one of them is a positive kind.
Many of the
tainted sport stars are also high-achievers, but somewhere down the line, they lose
their ‘self’. Why? May be they have stopped seeing themselves through their own
eyes. May be between the ‘self’ and the world they have lost themselves. It is
critical to curtail this loss of “one-self”. We know why we need curtail this
loss. The important question is how to do it.
May be the answer is also within one-self?
