Hey there Sheeples, this is Anirudh here and this is my first ever article for The Sheeples and I thought I should talk about the one thing that’s shaped my life more than anything else – Sports.
Growing up, as a 10-year-old kid in Mumbai, I was told that I couldn’t just sit at home and laze around during my summer vacation, instead, I had to pick 4 different sports to play as part of my “summer activities” organized by the school. Ugh.
As you can tell, I wasn’t a fan at first. Why couldn’t I just sit indoors and watch TV instead? Over time though, I actually found myself falling in love with different sports at different stages of my life, and every time I fell in love with a new sport, I found myself thinking “This is it, imagine living life not loving this sport”, just like Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) in Moneyball:
As I grew older, I was able to take a broader perspective and realized that it didn’t matter what the sport was. Sport by itself has the unmatched ability to bring people together, it inspires a sense of tribalism like nothing else not just among the players, but also in those sitting in the stands watching on. The fan lives the game vicariously through their favorite players, experiencing every moment, every moment of joy, every tear shed as if their own.
Did we not all of us as a nation experience the same joy simultaneously when MS Dhoni scored that winning six in the 2011 world cup final.
Let me jog your memory of that one – we all felt the ball hitting the bat, we all moved our eyes up in complete silence as we saw the ball fly up and then again together jumped in joy as we understood what had just transpired.
In today’s geopolitical setting with the events in Ukraine, the pandemic still lurking around and the polarized state that we find our country in, Sport is extremely trivial and there are far more important things on the agenda. However, I still strongly believe that Sport, like education has the incredible power to break barriers, bring people together irrespective of our colour, creed, race, or nationality.
It holds the power to inspire, it teaches us the importance of failure, it tells us how to find the strength to pick ourselves up after defeat, how to grow, how to heal. It teaches us how to keep going when faced with insurmountable odds. It teaches us to be fair, to win gracefully and to respect our fellow humans.
It teaches us life.
I’ll leave you all with this quote from an iconic football manager -
“Some people think football is a matter of life and death, I assure you, It’s much more serious than that”
I’d love you hear from you guys about sports and how it’s impacted your lives, write to us at contactus@thesheeples.in
PS – As a bonus, here is one of my favorite football clips titled “The beautiful game”, always gets me.