Havent written in a long time, not because i was too busy with the going-ons of life, but ironically enough, because i wasn’t.  However, that is a story for another day.

I wanted to write about a phenomenon that grips about a fifth of the world population every four years, and lets go just as easily.  I have never followed any sporting event very intently, although i do like to watch the NBA games on occasion, never have i followed any team during the regular season and kept up with who needs to win what games in order to move to the next round.  An admission is in order here; the primary reason for the new-found interest was because the bleeding-heart liberal in me was tickled by the idea of an african country hosting the magnanimous event.  Song along the lines of unity and inspiration by a certain hip-thrusting diva, another with a verse that said “fuck you rest of the world for sucking on africa for generations” on the opening ceremony version, and commercials of a very delighted mandela holding the cup, kept me interested in the event, be it for the wrong reasons.

It took a few games and understanding of how the groups and points work, to realize the excitement this whole craze could deliver.  And by the final rounds of the group games, i was hooked.  Frantically adding up points and looking at various possible outcomes, id try to predict who would move forward to the playoffs, and who was going to play whom in the next round and so on and so forth.  You see, what makes football so good a sport to watch, is its unpredictability.  In an NBA final, on a best of 7 games, the better team usually wins.  Not true in the case of the world cup.  I watched the favored teams like Brazil, Germany, England, Italy, to name a few, drop like flies, while underdogs like the US and Uruguay moved forward way past what was expected of them.

But, what was probably more exciting to me, more than the actual game of 22 men trying to put a leather ball within a post, was the name associated with these group of 11 men.  Each day, some country, familiar in one way or another, would win, and images of its citizens’ jubilation would flash across my tv screen for a few seconds, uber-excited crowd ready to party on all night.  The best part of it all is that there is absolutely nothing at stake in these highly charged competitions.  The losing team does go home, but the players will still get paid just as handsomely in their professional games, and the lives of the citizens and supporters will go on just as it had before the whole thing started.  So, there is nothing to lose, yet a win is such a thrilling experience, it rejoices so many souls, letting them forget about their day-to-day worries for just a few moments, in fact, it could be the ideal opiate.  In the end, this world cup results ended up looking like one of the world war, most of the world started out competing against someone or other, but in the end, couple of big european players remained, and the rest of the world picked a side and aligned themselves with a superpower.

An absurd twist was thrown in the midst of all this drama.  An octopus in an aquarium in germany was rumored to have correctly predicted the result of all of Germany’s games.  It went on to predict correctly that Germany would win against Argentina, an impressive prediction by any gambling standard, and then again went on to predict, amidst a lot of hype, that germans would lose to the dutch.  Correct predictions were made for the third place game, and the final as well.  Now, knowing nothing about the field of psychology, i wonder what the experts in the field would make of this turn of events.  Did these teams win and lose according to the octopus because it was meant to be, or did the result come out that way because the octopus, with all his given authority by now, had said so?  I couldnt help but look back at the story of macbeth.  The witches told him he would be king, so he goes on to murder the king and chase away his sons.  If Freud were alive, would he not give his pinky-toe to do a controlled experiment with the octopus, perhaps, one could lie about the prediction and see what would happen.  Or maybe both the teams could be told they would lose.

In all these limelights, excitements and awe-inspiring moments, one entity shines above it all.  The host South Africa, a very young nation by any standard, successfully set the stage, at which the world watched without batting an eyelash for a month.  Even with all its problems of unemployment, its class and economic divides along the racial lines, and its extremism on the rise, held the event with screaming vuvuzelas that yelled out: look at us, not with pity, but with admiration, reach out, not to someone needing a helping hand, but to an equal to shake it with.  Mandela’s rainbow nation never really kept up with the pace of his dreams, but maybe, the dream is not to be written off, not just yet. After all is said and done, this is just a game, its easy to organize something merely for leisure, where everyone comes together for celebration, many times harder to face the real problems of this nation where struggle for the resources is still going on between the ones who have historically held it, and the ones who have never really had chance of a fair fight for it.  But then again, the same problems persist in the rest of the world as well.  Which is only logical, because, after all, as a certain hip gyrating artist put it best, “We are all Africa”.

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