A Vuvuzela for Mr Roy

He is the most popular creature in Mumbai’s media world. He’s like the superhero of journalism roaming incognito in the streets of India’s financial capital. He’s got that extra long nose for news. He pokes into everyone’s affair. When everything seems alright he spots an inconspicuous anomaly and probes deeper.

When Mumbai sleeps he stays awake and files the biggest breaking stories that shake the Sensex the next morning.

Corporates respect him, peers envy him and women love him. He is for you the inimitable MITH*****. Sorry for the unexpected five stars after MITH. It’s his towering personality that has forced me settle for the stars. Let’s call him Mr Roy (name intentionally changed to protect identity).

Mr Roy, besides news sniffing has two interests in life – football and travelling from Vashi to Andheri in Mumbai’s suburban trains on Sundays -- which invariably fits into his chock-a-bloc schedule.

For football lover Roy, FIFA world cup is like the best time in his life and he makes it a point to watch every match live. Roy comes home early in the evening and jogs around in his three-by-three feet balcony overlooking a mosquito breeding pond and a proposed mango orchard, where the mango trees are yet to be planted.

Roy claims the run between kitchen and balcony melts his extra kilos.

Well, enough of jogging. Now Mr Roy switches on his television to watch the match between Uruguay and France.

All excited, tea sipping Mr Roy jumps, laughs and bites his nail in excitement whenever the ball reached near the goal post on either side. Roy says he doesn’t support any team and every team which plays world cup football is worth supporting.

The excitement increases further in the match but Roy suddenly looks silent. Vuuun…vuuunn..vuuun..vuun..vun..vun the sound continues. Roy know there is something missing here.

No one of his neighbors, mostly nuclear scientists, would be playing something so stupid that too during a football match. But the sound continued vuun …vuun..un..un…He went to the balcony and found no movement outside. Children in the newly built shanties at the proposed mango orchard were playing cricket, while their parents were playing cards.

He then thought may be the mosquitoes in the adjacent pond which is being filled for building a new luxury tower, are to be blamed but his intelligence told mosquitoes do not have such a strong voice and to create such audible sound you need all the mosquitoes in Mumbai jamming in a studio.

The picture outside was serene. But the voice grew louder and the pattern more frequent. In his detective style he walked silently and put his large ears near the television. Suddenly there was loud vuuu which almost damaged his ear drum. Now he knows it. The poor five year old television has lost it. It’s sick now and is expressing with cough and coarse voice during the football match.

Roy suffered the match and got up early in the morning. Before even brushing his teeth, he called Atif Aslam, the namesake of the Pakistani pop singer and the plumber-cum-electrician-cum watchman and much more to the housing society. At one call Aslam was at his tenth floor apartment.

He opened the television and claimed there was some problem with internal speakers. Roy shelled five hundred rupees and went with his daily schedule. Today is an important match. Argentine vs Nigeria. Roy though claims all teams are equal, has actually secretly been endorsing the Latin American country by making his permanent Gmail status as Waka waka tis time for Argentina and has already been beaten by two English and Brazilian fans in his office for such brazen support.

Anyways now on day two Roy switches the TV set no noise. Match starts noise starts. He loses his patience and calls Aslam immediately, who cuts his call five times. Roy is furious. Bugger is this time to cut calls the real match is on and this TV is shouting. Disappointed he mutes the TV and watches. Aslam in the meantime messages back in Hindi saying, “boss samjha karo ek din to chhuti milti hai Bandstand pe baitha hun baad mein baat karte hain.”

Roy fumes in anger and decides to buy a new television the other day. Unable to sleep he watches Ram Gopal Varma directed James movie, his all time favourite, on his Acer laptop. Whenever Roy fails in life he draws inspiration from the hero in James who beats all odds to achieve his target. Others however don’t understand the inspiration part; anyways most have not seen the movie.

While watching James for the third time nonstop, the newspaper boy throws the Times of India newspaper into his balcony. He runs to get the paper while thinking about the hawker. “This is the problem with this country… everyone can throw it like a cricketer but no one can bend it like Beckham.” “How can people breathe so easily without playing football in this country?

Then in his mind he blamed it on Neheruvian socialism which destroyed teamwork and promoted a individualistic game like Cricket. Suddenly he stops and what he reads. "People want to ban irritating noise at world cup soccer." He read the noisy instrument is called Vuvuzela. He sighs and laughs at him and falls asleep while James was still playing on his laptop.

(Mr Roy thought of keeping this secret to himself till he had two small pegs of whiskey. This story is fictional and doesn’t resemble to any character except Mr Roy in real life.)

Indian soccer in tennis ball and flip-flops

The football fever is on across the world. Like many Indians I feel and act confused by the utter ignorance about the game, the trends, the players and the buzz around. I am well present on the social networking arena, read as widely as possible for a journalist, yet I miss everything on this game. Sometimes the genuine passion and knowledge people around me display I feel threatened about my indifference. I simply can’t communicate on this subject except a confessional script like this.

The social and cultural environment I was brought up in had Cricket and Gilli-danda as the most dominating games, in primary school and neighborhood playgrounds. So football was out of question till I reached high school. Mine was a large class with more than 400 students, while the school had more than 2,000 students and we had two playgrounds. We had to play everything in the same space and time, the one hour recess in the afternoon. If you stand on the top-arch of the school building you can see upto five teams playing football in two playgrounds, while upto ten teams sharing space in between to play cricket, handball or Gilli-danda.

As everyone wants to be a batsman in cricket, everyone wanted to be forward in the kind of football we were playing. Though I was kind of a leader in my batch after running for class monitor elections twice and losing by a margin of two and five votes, I had little say in the football team selection. Like the national game and sports associations ruled by certain people, our school football team was designed, choreographed and even decimated by a small group of people who never wore the jersey but played bets on it in multiples of ten rupees.

I was interested in the game for the sheer fun of running and hitting the ball. But I was rather chosen for the event-less goalie’s position, where I failed miserably because of the ball’s size. After all we were playing soccer with a lemon yellow coloured tennis ball on green grass and mud (The school had few balls which were out only during annual sports). Almost no goalkeeper of an international repute could have stopped such a tiny ball.

One day out of frustration I ran ahead and tried my legs at snatching the ball from the opposition player who was just about to hit the tiny lemon into our side of the post. You must have watched the scene. The opponent fell flat with my one stroke. I couldn’t understand why? Later the big boys who were putting money on our teams told me that I have the strongest legs in the school.

I was asked to play as a forward from the next day. It was thrilling! I realized I was no great player with techniques; I couldn’t even roll the ball between my legs or hit it in the desired direction. But as I told earlier, the kind of football we were playing in our flip-flops was mostly mud wrestling with the objective to keep the tiny ball at your legs.

When it rained, as it did for a large part of the year we loved the game. I was called the ‘danger man’, a local coinage for the ferocious one on field. If I had the ball people avoided body contact and stayed clearly away from the legs. I had those unusually powerful, green muscles showing legs thanks to the 16 kilometers of cycling I had to do besides some early morning Yoga aasanas with dad helped.

I became the bully on the field, though I rarely scored. Drenched in rain I remember many conflicts on the mud, putting fear into the eyes of the smaller looking opponents. But every hero or tyrant has a final day. So did come my day on the field. One of the newer entrants recruited by the non playing gamblers had a spiked shoe. One with sharp spikes that can peel flesh of your succulent legs and tear your ligaments. It happened to me though I didn’t let the pain show on the face but decided to hang-up my flip-flops forever.

I briefly played football at University again mostly to track the most powerful opponent and offer fierce resistance. But nowhere did I fell in love with the game or get to learn anything.

It was an unfortunate thing that I missed the game the world loves. It seems despite the entire hullabaloo, it still has not caught my attention or fancy. It is like mathematics. If it doesn’t interest you it doesn’t click. So I give a miss to the Jabulanis, Vuvujelas, Messis a miss. But I still very much connect with the gorgeous Shakira doing waka waka.
this time for Afrika.
(Photograph Kids playing mud-football Photograph)