If there’s anything that would best fit the difference between this forlorn hostility of the day’s work and the ever luring cacophony of night’s peace, it should be sports.
Courtesy: theteacherjames.com
We may, at times, get deceived and duped by the prosaic semblance in ecstasy that sport offers, and error ourselves at times, in failing to understand the value of flesh donning a veneer of a cloth. For someone like me, who would boss loudly on the statement “200 Fly in the pool is greatest sporting spectacle involving flesh,” sports, in many ways occupy the arsenal of my life.
Cricket happened to me at a very early age. Mine is a geographical location, which would treat the personnel in sport as demi-gods and at times, gods. That said, we still understand that they too, are mere mortals like all of us.
As the moment my dream melts away into nothingness, I get up, leaving the comfort friendship of my bed. With the window panes beating to the gentle breeze of morning’s air and curtains swaying to shining imagery of the sun, I start my day rubbing my hands, placing them on my eye lids for a short prayer.
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Sports and the sportsman in me get up at the same time, too. A short lounge into the air and a few seconds later, you would find me completing the regulatory laps in the pool. I do them back, I do them front and I fly. And then into the day, my mind with its innocence, lives and reverberates around cricket and football. I have an answer either wittingly or unwittingly to almost all the questions, but to one.
Why does sport constitute the real image of my life? Why do we, miss the meaning of life, when there’s an absence of the game?
I’ve arrived myself locked haplessly at these feuding thoughts many a time. Why do we really moan and often find ourselves in a despondent mood when our heroes humbly walk into the dusk and dust of their sporting careers? Why do we, mortals, proudly say our lads do not have hair out of place? Well, they say life’s not all beer and skittles. But, when Roger Federer is poetically lifting himself into the air, and backhanding the ball to perfection, or, when Rahul Dravid with his debonair grace is allowing the 156 gm of leather to fall in his hands to dismiss a batsman, life surely is an art to beguile many an adversary.
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The thing that makes these guys legends is this: they work their fingers to their bones. The greatest strengths lie in rising to the Phoenix when it’s doom and gloom and when the path to their dreams is buttered with hassles of the time’s ineptitude. And, in those moments, they get down to nitty-gritty rather than passing the buck and modestly prepare themselves to the battle that lies ahead, or, in the case of the aforementioned legends, keeping aside the perturbing annoyance in front and gently allowing the ball unto their bats. As mortals, they sweat their brows, for they are the apple of our eyes.
I, with an astute confidence can say their deeds, will always be as fresh as a daisy for they will forever be hale and healthy. As Charles Buxton writes: “You will never find time for anything. If you want to, you must make it.”
Our heroes never whiled away their time. They offer to us, something ineffable. They are the semblance of life’s winsomeness and pulchritude combined.
I can go on evincing the characters of my heroes and the flesh in sports eternally and without exaggeration. But time and space forces me to stop here talking about them, my inspiration and one of the very few reasons I survive on this pale blot, planet earth.
Long may their richness last.
