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)

Midnight thoughts: social networking is good

I had always hated to become a writer by night, except some educational writing, compelled by the desire to earn a degree. But the last few days have brought the writer in me to wake only after midnight.

The IPL is surely to be blamed for this. I read my daily dose of book after the night IPL match ends around 1130 pm and after midnight your body and mind gets diluted and flows in the ether.

If you listen to equally airy thin music from the collection of ‘Guns and Roses’, Kurt Cobain and Bob Dylan, the heart pounds like a unstable volcanic mass and thoughts erupt and spread like clouds that can burst as the right temperament touches them.

One such thought burst yesterday, technically this morning as I write. The thought is about being eternally happy and innocent. Do we ever manage to stay innocent in all our thoughts and actions? I think we don’t.

The ability to hide sorrow with the faint smile and happiness with the dumbfounded awkwardness is familiar to all of us in workplaces.

Those who are lucky have a family and friend network to be innocent and real whenever they want to. I think for millions of others the gift of social networking is doing miracle.

It’s like the village chowpal or you, where you have your small society that gathers, drinks chai, hookah or whatever they want. They talk about all sorts of issues -- sensitive, insensitive, political, social – and that too in small groups of likeminded ones.

Here you have the option to share your mundane views without being rebuked. You share your best moments through pictures, which can be enhanced with the gift of technology and spares you the time and effort of actually looking good.

You can share your disillusioned state of mind by sharing Bob Dylan‘s Knocking on Heaven’s Door video through YouTube, despite actually being a hope less singer yourself.

It’s good for your self esteem, your heart and mind too. You learn the slangs and management case studies here before anywhere else. I dare to disagree with whoever did the study inferring social networking sites reduce productivity. I claim they boost in more than one ways the individual’s moral, ego and power her/him even to stay on the top of her/ his professional developments.

Even in personal relationships it helps you find some and also protects you from losing some. It helps you with regular birthday wishes, which all men now can’t blame they forgot.

It also gives you opportunities to wish at personal and professional developments thereby cutting on actual travels. Lot of carbon foot prints reduced. Besides you chat and save millions of trees every year, it’s another thing you destroy them as toilet papers and on Pizza delivery.

The verdict is social networking makes your life better. As I am writing the last line, I can say it took me about 25 minutes to compose this prose and I’m still listening to Knocking on Heaven’s Door on the background.

Note: By the I posted this story I had switched to Lady Gaga's hit number' Bad Romance' so that my romance with midnight writing ends and I could catch some sleep.

PHOTOGRAPH: By Samrat Mukherjee. We all social networking aficionados, like the thirsty little boy pumping and getting his water, do our tweets, FB messages and meet our thirst of virtual society.

Batak Mian's story must be told

Batak Mian’s story must be told to every Indian. Despite the unfamiliarity of the name, the absence of his story in India’s history, Batak Mian cannot be ignored. One Indian mainstream news paper recently took the pain to digging out and publishing the story of this extra-ordinary Indian, without whom India’s independence might not have been possible.

The story goes back to 1917 British India. Mahatma Gandhi was visiting Bihar’s Champaran district where he started his career India’s politics, supporting the cause of the local indigo planters.

Batak Mian was serving as a cook with a British indigo plantation manager who apparently instructed him to offer Mahatma poisoned milk. Mian disclosed the plot in front of Mahatma and Rajendra Prasad, who became the first President of an independent India later. Result Mahtma’s life saved and the rest is history as we all know.

I understand the story sounds loose and slightly heroic. Even as an objective writer I find despite the folklore involved in glorifying Batak Mia’s role, it’s worth remembering. And at least his grand children shouldn’t earn their wages as daily labourers.
Here is a link to the original story http://www.hindustantimes.com/Family-of-Mahatma-s-saviour-in-dire-straits/H1-Article1-500334.aspx

Why good people suffer?

Last week I was asking myself a question. A question that has stayed with me since my childhood but rises to my conscience on certain occasions leaving me bewildered.
The question is –“Why good people suffer?”
And I know no one has a satisfying answer.
It’s both difficult and dangerous to be good. Being good gives us simplistic happiness, honesty of purpose etc. But it needs courage to remain good.
I have seen people who practice good going to jail, losing in relationship at workplace, money and health wise. Though not all of them, but many of the good suffer. So do many of the bad.
But the problem is both good and bad exist. And the fine things in life come to both of them irrespective of their purpose in life.
Picture this: A teenager like Ruchika who lost her mother as a kid was harassed by a senior police officer and saw her family being harassed for years. While the police officer who has got everything in life does this act and has woman, his wife, to protect him all the way.
How could one justify this situation? Nothing asking from the government or judiciary....asking God if such a situation exists. Then why?
Ruchika never had the option to enjoy life while this old man has lived his life to the fullest. Even if the case progresses against the alleged culprit and he’s convicted punished. How much harm will it do to him?

Ruchika’s story is just a case point there are many such instances where injustice is inflicted upon the good. And we have never found an answer why?

The decade ends; remembering poppy flowers, ghats, rock pythons and friends

In past few days, I had a sudden consciousness about losing or going past another decade, the third one in my life.

When you think voluntarily, the recollections become vivid, unpredictable and leave you with sighs and mild laughter depending on what situation has appeared from memory lane like calling up a rare video from YouTube.

It comes up in your mind all the time. While preparing a cup of pepper-mint special tea for yourself on a Sunday morning, while jogging inside the small park in your locality, while travelling in a jam-packed Mumbai suburban train or even while chewing a Kalkattia mitha paan from the local cigarette and paan vendor in posh south Mumbai after office hours are over.

The first memory I had was of the undergraduate university days in eastern Uttar Pradesh. My university consisted of large colonial academic structures, a whitewashed small Chapel and vast stretches of green farm land and Orchards spread over 600-acres on the banks of mighty Yamuna River.

The 100 year-old campus was secluded from the crowded Allahabad city, separated by an old dilapidated Naini bridge that officially expired in 1970, but was able to support five-million-strong city populace, hundreds of passenger trains and every logistics carrier on its way from the north down Madhya Pradesh.

The winter months of December 1999 and January 2000 were full of hope and hesitation thanks to the the next century will be India's optimism, world will end fear, Y2K buzz etc. Those were also the months of floriculture practical classes for us. We were given small plots to grow and identify flowers. There was faint love affair with the delicate flowers in an otherwise boring and secluded campus. Three flower patches -- gladiolus, carnation and poppy – were in my kitty.

I loved of all, the bulbous red and pink poppy flowers which belonged to the Papaver genera popularly known as the Oriental or Opium poppy . When I remember how I welcomed this decade and millennium, tossing poppy flowers on windy wintry evenings instantly appear on my mind.

The early years of the decade also remind me of the morning and evening Yoga classes in another University in neighouring city of Benares, the mindless but spiritual wanderings on hundreds of ghats of the 3000-year-old settlement, the occasional association with bhang and regular listening to BBC Radio to improve English pronunciation and soft old Bollywood songs on Vividh Bharti to get a nice sleep.

The long hours spent in the huge lighted central library of the university, where I was the only one reading The Economist, Times and The New Yorker always taunt my present day painful reading adventures on a bean bag in my small sub-urban apartment balcony in Mumbai.


The memory lane also took me to my early days with the Indian Express newspaper in Delhi. The support from the Police, the threat from a builder and the protection from another bigger builder while doing a particular story was interesting.

A year in solitude, when I dared to craft a dream livelihood intervention project in southern Jaharkhand districts, and failed against the system touches me till date. I still remember the early morning trips to impassable villages crossing torrential rivers and rock pythons with a passion to connect with village women and build self-help groups for them.

The passion that forced me to try for cheaper innovations for the villagers.... How aggressively I fought with the local bank employee, when he passed lewd comments against my clients a 27 year-old Oraon tribal woman, whom I called didi, and her 14 year old daughter Chini, when they had approached the bank for a loan to buy a goat to sustain their six member family. There were many haunting moments that come to the memory but I have no words or intention to shock myself or readers.

The later half of the decade showed me journalism of different shades. Investigative, page 3, human, colourful and business. I travelled across many parts of India, exposed to its diversity and unique blending propositions.

Living in two megacities -- Delhi, followed by Mumbai – has been less than fun but an immersing affair. Witnessing the mindless terror acts and being a victim of one left me a changed person, almost like a new born.

The greatest discovery of the decade for me, were friends, who stood by me at all costs involved. That was the most permanent and satisfying discovery precious than hitting crude oil blocks or gold mines or even being nominated for a Nobel.