Physical Education : FF

I’ve never really understood the intense loyalty bordering on insanity which we see now associated with sports. I mean c’mon it’s just a game which you have no influence over in any way unless that is you decide to strip naked and run through the field, and even with that the most you can expect to achieve is to delay the next over by a 5 minutes which be spent be the ground security in trying to confiscate you from the pitch. I know numerous friends who support some football team in England or Europe and go to the trouble of staying up in the night till around 2 or 3 just to see a match that is going on in the Britain at afternoon. I have never felt any love for Wayne Rooney and neither has Ronaldhino ever silly football trick ever earned an ounce of respect from me that requires me to support their respective football team. Maybe it’s because I’m just not interested in sports in general. Many people who know my dad, my brother and me find that as a shock. It’s because all my dad did when he was a kid was play cricket. They tell me that he was real good and even made it to the tryouts for the Indian cricket team, where he was sadly not selected. That’s a good thing I tell him now, imagine the amount of pressure I would be under right now to play cricket, when I can’t even do something as bowl and the bat when in my hand for some reason repels the ball which then has a terrible affinity for the wicket. I can’t play cricket, not even if my life depended on it. It’s simply beyond my scope. Then again so was every other game and sports in general. I think there come a time in everyone’s time when one has to either choose the way of the book or the way of the cricket bat, and I for better or for worse have chosen the book.
Now I’d like to make one thing clear that this does not imply that I was the intellectually inclined kind. In no way ever did any of my angles incline towards that direction. I just simply liked to read, I need not have to learn something out of it reading it, I just had developed a kind of addiction for having my eyes focused on letters in a book. So it was never the playground for me. But it’s not like I never tried. Out of peer pressure actually, I’ve tried my hand at some games like badminton and basketball. In which I have gone the farthest among the lot in badminton, and over here by farthest I mean I’ve bought around 4 rackets and played one tournament match, which I lost for an obscene score. That was the end of my brief badminton career. It wasn’t worth my time to keep being humiliated like that; I would rather read a book. So now you say that I can’t criticize football fans when they go overboard with their emotions. Fine. But pray explain to me how breaking your backs in fights between club fans would in any way bring pride and glory or improvement in performance of your favorite team. Every time there are football league matches, we first see enthusiastic fans outside the stadium, and then we see drunk enthusiastic fans outside the stadium. And then we see drunk enthusiastic fans with missing teeth. It honestly gives me more entertainment seeing drunk fans brawling after a match than seeing the actual match itself. Maybe they should do everyone a favor and make a sport out of this dog match. First you have players of respective teams competing in the concerned game and then you have their respective fans knocking each other’s teeth out, the team with maximum number of teeth wins. At least then I’d get a sport to follow, I’d be grateful.

i'm a true metal fan.....NOT

When people ask me what sort of music I’m into I feel awfully confused. I have almost 4000 songs on ipod. So do I listen to all of them? Heavens no! I have amassed half these songs myself from whatever CD I could lay my hands on, simply because I had 30GB of space to fill. My ipod’s made rounds through a lot of rooms in the boys block. Everyone uses it, adds to existing library and voila I have enough songs to keep playing a whole year at a stretch. But I don’t. So this brings me back to confusion, what is that I like listening to? Well I feel I don’t have a constant taste when it comes to music. At school in 6th to 9th grade it used to be the Backstreet boys, Westlife, N’sync, (sniff sniff yes its true) Aqua and Vengaboys. I can still remember the time when the song Barbie girl came out. It used to be the only song being played on MTV. Man! Now I think about it, I must have looked really silly walk down the street singing “I’m a Barbie Girl!” to myself (No wonder I was so unpopular with the girls). Then in 11th and 12th grade you became senior in school and along with that came Linkin Park with all their screaming, an ideal way for a pissed off and misunderstood teen to take out all his frustration. Then it all used be about wearing what they wore, having Linkin Park written on your cap made u cool. It defined you as a person who was fed of life and had taken all the beating the world had to offer. Or at least that’s what we thought it looked like. Our parents however had a very different opinion; they thought we just looked stupid and ridiculous. Once I came to college after that, I realized that whatever had grew up listening to was as musically complicated as playing a tune by slapping my stomach to create some noise. I was introduced to the amazing world of Rock music and instantly became a devout follower of the cult, so just like any other rock fan, I went and bought myself a guitar, and kept trying to strum along to all the popular rock songs. Evenings were spent listening to GnR’s, ACDC, The Doors, and Iron Maiden. And then came the various subdivisions of rock itself metal with Metallica, slipknot; punk rock with Green day, offspring; classic rock, etc etc. Now I’m faced with the dilemma which bandwagon do I hop onto? Do I like Metallica more than green day? Do I enjoy “Stairway to Heaven” more than “Last Kiss”? Swearing your allegiance to one of these camps became compulsory. Is it a crime to have “boulevard of broken dreams” and “enter the sandman” in the same play list? This is why whenever the topic of music comes up in a group I dread that I might be asked the same distressing question which may potentially offend some. As I try to come up with a diplomatic response in which all parties involved are satisfied, I think to myself; Life was simpler with The Barbie Girl.