The Olympics take place once every four years. India plays Sri Lanka every four days and yet I care more for that than for the Olympics.
The reason for the simple. Any cricket engagement allows me, an Indian, to be optimistic about our chances. In Olympics, leaving aside hopes of superb individual performances from a few talented athletes or a “May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss” walk d’grace from Madame Madhura, we know, even before we take the stage, that on the list of medal winners, we will be near the bottom.
The “guardian call” missive from school was the closest thing you could experience to a letter from the income tax authorities while growing up. If your luck was out, two things could happen. Your parents would either be berated for their ward engaging in that most heinous crime of them all— “talking in class and making it into a fish market” (I went to school in Kolkata as you can tell) or for the equally dire ” not up to standard of the class” which was sometimes an euphemism for “Sign the kid up in my coaching center”. If your luck was better, the teacher would gently chide your parents for your “silly mistakes” (like forgetting, just once in a seventeen-step problem, to change the sign when you changed sides in an equation or copying the number wrong to the “Answer” line). Not that it meant you would not get a zero or that you did not need to attend the teacher’s coaching class (after all practice makes perfect) but at least the teacher acknowledged that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with you, sans the irritating habit of getting distracted while doing your HCFs and LCMs.
What was Zizou thinking?
An inveterate Brazil fan (
It’s a question we all keep asking ourselves. Especially when we see countries some plagued by civil wars, some with populations of about a million, do it every four years.
