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The great equaliser – Football

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Put your football cleats on its World Cup time! The Football (soccer to Yankees) is probably my favorite sport in the whole entire world. Its charm probably is in its simplicity. Two sides, one ball and all you got to do is kill the ball with a small space. You don’t even have to buy a leather ball, paper rolled into the shape of a ball and held together with rubber band would do as well … also forget part of the cleats, just need your two feet!

I was watching the Argentina vs Ivory Coast match yesterday and I was given many more reasons to love this game. I watched as a opponent got fouled and then in amazement the culprit giving the victim a hand to get up … also saw a couple of opposing players patting each other after a particularly good dribble or shot. You would be hard pressed to see such scenes in any other professional team sports specially in America.

The sportsmanship was not the only thing that struck me, the fact that Ivory coast was observing a ceasefire for the duration of the world cup was a testament to the universal appeal of the game. If only it helped solved such situations permanently … I know that is wishful thinking.

I have been talking to a couple of friends of mine who think its a girlie game ’cause you don’t get t beatup on your opponent like in American football or Ice hockey and my only retort to it was that this was a poor man’s game. This can be played in slums unlike the other aforementioned games. Also the slums have produced the best players the world has ever seen. This is the only stage in the world that the countries at the bottom of the food chain can beat the ones at the top. I remember playing in my school against the evening schoolers(from the nearby slums), they would literally cream up in our Nike cleats with their bare foot.

I know lots of people would like to say that the Olympics would hold the honour of uniting the world. I know the Olympics has its place but football is special, for the only reason that there is only gold and there are more people (Almost a quarter of the world’s population) watching you kick the behind of the best countries in the world.

Its not without its fault. Racism in the European countries has been on the rise, and in a drastic measure, the captains of the teams read a massage against racism before each game. Its obviously caused by a fringe group of people.

The thing that irks me the most personally is the fact that the two countries with one third of the world’s population don’t have the capacity to qualify for this tournament while puny countries like Trinidad and Tobago could. I would easily like to put the blame on the system … but countries like Ivory coast don’t even have a system … and then I realise what a great leveler football is!

BTW : My football jersy number is 4 and Maradona was the best football player ever!!!
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A bird in hand

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I was listening to the radio a couple of days back when I heard this song which goes something like ‘A bird in hand is worth one in the bush is worth one on a electric wire’, which instantly sounded like one of those meaningless songs that are the rule rather than exception now-a-days. And then suddenly realization hit me like a ton of bricks on a glass window, this song had a deeper meaning that I could ever imagine.

‘A bird in hand is worth two in the bush’ is one of those oft’ quoted and misquoted sayings. The song though was at a entirely different level, subtle though it might be. How often do we esteem one person over another? How often do we put down one person to show up another? Or how often have we knowingly or unknowingly estimated one life over another?

I know what some of you are guessing, I am getting sensitive here (An unknown quality to me).

We thinking highly of a person in power more than the homeless. I have been in situations where somebody gets a place of honour just because they know somebody who is powerful. I don’t want to get into the argument about how a person works all his life to be recoganised. The differences that I want to point out is in judging a person by the what he belongs to, by who he knows, by what society says rather than by what he is.

To further drill this point home, the sermon at my church last week was a eye opener. The Pastor passed around the flyer that wanted people to write down a list of various things that people thought were important. It ranged from important clothing brands to important women not in the entertainment industry. More often than not people picked the expensive ones for inanimate objects and people in power for the people centric questions. And then he proceeded to ask us why we didn’t consider the brands that we normally use as important? Why we didn’t consider our own relatives and friends as important? The worst part of it all was that he was right.

Our sense of importance seems to be highly wrapped and twisted. We cannot survive without our friends and family but we accord more importance to people we don’t even know or will never meet. We don’t consider the simple things in life that we cannot live without as important rather spending all that adulation on things that we don’t need, that we would buy just to impress people we don’t have to!

It was definitely an eye opener for me, atleast God is not a respecter of personsRomans 2:11, or I am definitely screwed(Pardon the French)

Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour.
Leviticus 19:15

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