Welcome to the world’s greatest game ! A game that is not just a game, rather a universal phenomenon that most numbers on this earth can comprehend, can relate to.

Football, Soccer, whatever one chooses to call it, the world’s greatest game can represent the story of the world. And on the football field called the world, this game is not just about those who grace our school history and science textbooks. Not just about the Aristotles, the Newtons, the Einsteins and the Gandhis, it’s also about our endeavours on the soccer field; yours, mine, of each one of us.

Different leagues, different matches

The world is the soccer field, on which we script our essays ! And, life is the game.

When your life's a cloud 

And hopes appear small

Ride that little wave of sunlight

Go, kick a soccer ball

Literally for some, but metaphorically for all others, this football field can represent the story of the world.  It can also represent the longing for utopia, as in:

Forsooth

There can be no peace in this Kingdom
Till the lowest midfielder

Is equal to the Beckham[1];

We level up and level down,

And will share

Both the rags and the captain’s crown.

Like most of the soccer leagues we are familiar with, the Life Soccer League too operates in different divisions. Protagonists of these leagues challenge their state of existence at every point in time, striving to get ahead, for they always believe that there is nothing so good that it cant be improved. And what are the domains are we talking of here: we are talking about the domain of life itself, tangible sub-domains like academics, conceptual frameworks, science, technology, space, and also intangible ones like freedom, equality, and social upliftment. What gets included in this domain, unfortunately, is also the domain of fanaticism, where extreme passion is pushed to the point of catastrophic outcomes, as we will see later in this essay.

Spectators in one of The Life soccer league’s myriad divisions become players in another, and the only obstacles in the move from one league to another lie the limitations of thought, and nothing else.

The key drivers in this game of football can be summarized in just five words:

Dissatisfaction, Challenge, Passion, Altruism, and the Ego.

We need to understand that the goal of every action is ridding oneself of that dissatisfaction. However, the closer one appears to be in scoring that goal on the field, the post keeps moving ahead, keeps shifting further. What leads to this dissatisfaction can be any or some or all of the factors listed above.

Much before the documented history of the world, of individuals, of civilizations, this game of football was ‘on’. In an unspoken manner, individuals, whose only ‘qualification’ was they were dissatisfied enough, were pushing themselves, and with them, the very boundaries of civilization, pushing ahead the domain of history.

They could do so because in this game, rolling substitutes are allowed, with dissatisfaction the only talent required, and anyone can just walk in and join the game.

Aristotle, in his keenness to participate in the football game, forgot to put on his jersey, he just ran on to the filed.

Christopher Columbus, for whom it was said, “When he set out, he didn’t know where he was going, When he reached, he didn’t know where he had come, When he returned, he didn’t know where he had gone” was just hugely dissatisfied, a reason enough to push him to undertake a journey into the unknown, a journey to find the mystical land of India. That he didn’t succeed in his endeavour is entirely irrelevant, for it is in Columbus’ pushing himself to an entirely unknown, unchartered voyage that the lesson lay for the rest of the world. 

Driven by the spirit of altruism and moved by the sight of the destitute, Ajinz Poukhokio decided to spend the rest of her life serving them. In pushing the limits of compassion and love, she came to be known later as Mother Teressa, also called the ‘Saint of the gutters (of Calcutta)’.

Suspecting that mosquitoes might have been responsible, in some way, for spreading the (then) killer disease, malaria, the British Army Doctor, Ronald Ross, conducted hundreds on experiments on mosquitoes, of different sizes, shapes and varieties, driven as he was by an amazing passion to get to the root of the disease’s cause. He toiled through a series of experiments in the extreme heat and humidity of an Indian summer, and with his perseverance was finally able to establish that the Female Anopheles mosquito caused malaria, a discovery that led to a dramatic reduction in mortality rates due to malaria in Asia and South America. 

Stephen Hawking has ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or Lou Gehrig's disease, a neuromuscular disease that progressively weakens muscle control. He lost his voice due to a tracheotomy. Yet, none of his deterred him from searching for a "theory of everything" – one unified scientific theory that explains cosmological questions like How did the universe begin? Why is the universe the way it is? And how will it end? While there can little to comment on Hawking's intellect and genius, it ha been his ability to fight out his physical limitations, and push himself way beyond his limits that has ensconced the world firmly into the Post-Einsteinian era of Physics.

However, for all that pundits and experts might say, today’s greatest players might not be Beckham and Zidane, they might also not be Einstein or Hawking, they could just, merely, be those brave men and women, striving to break out of the limitations of their existing life, in the hope of a better tomorrow. They might not be there in your morning newspaper, neither on your TV screen, but just unsung, unheard, yet operating with fine passes and dribbling across life’s hurdles to orchestrate the symphony of the greatest game in the world, the game of football, played on the field of life.

Yes, this game is not just about those under the glare of media lights, it’s also about people like Najiba Said, Suriya Parlika, Rida Azimi[2].

Never heard of them !

Don’t worry, no one has.

On the football field of life, displaying extraordinary courage, guts and gumption, these Afghan women challenged the might of a repressive, oppressive unforgiving political regime and took a gamble with their lives, so that they, and others like them, could live again.

The 28-year-old Najiba Said plucked her courage and re-registered for pre-med classes at Kabul University.

The 57-year old Suriya Parlika developed an effective exchange for Afghan women needing and offering medical help and basic education helping to establish clandestine workshops to teach basket weaving and embroidery to widows with no skills or income.

The 25 year old Rida Azimi, is today Afghanistan’s only female television personality, who, during the fundamentalist regime which made education out of bounds for women, secretly read and learnt from old journalism textbooks smuggled to her by a former teacher and the owner of a bookshop. During the day, she ran an illegal school for girls in their living room.

Vibrant and inspiring, the above is a scene from the film Aladdin. Titled: "SOARING FREE", this litho depicts Jasmine releasing birds from their cage in the moonlight, while Rajah, her faithful tiger looks on. A metaphor for the brave Afghan women, perhaps !

“Finding the courage to break free”, is, broadly speaking, the motto of these brave women. In the courage they displayed to break free, they pushed the boundaries of their existence, and challenged the political, physical and organizational might of a regime.

While on one hand we are talking with pride in terms of pushing technological frontiers as in the Human Genome project, about cloning, about Space missions to Mars, we need to be humbled by the statistics regarding the widespread nature of underprivileged conditions for more than half the human race. While the life football leagues we have been talking about exist at each of these levels, the challenge before individuals and organizations is to narrow the gap, and to integrate the objectives of the former with the latter. Transfer of learning from one league to another is another endeavour that the players in these leagues need to be working upon.

The irony is that although limits are being pushed and defied in these leagues on science and technological advancements, many of the other leagues, consisting primarily of the underprivileged, are getting left behind.

It is here that the job of these leagues should be not only to push the limits of their own existence and goals, it should also be to pull the boundaries of the leagues below them in that particular attribute, towards themselves. By doing so, the league at a lower level gets moved up on that attribute to well beyond its ‘usually perceived’ limits.

If we extend the dissatisfaction and passion analogy further, we can attribute to them acts of a very different kind. The people who are suspected to have rammed the American Airlines jumbo jets into the towers of the WTC in New York were not a motley, unemployed group of brainwashed youth. They were well-educated, economically well-off, seemingly 'normal' people. While the act caused a loss of thousands of lives, we need to remember that the people who 'did it' also lost theirs. We might never exactly know, but their passion and their fanatical drive pushed the limits to an absolutely unchartered and catastrophic domain. If we look at it, it is the same set of attributes that might spur an Olympic sprinter, coupled with the desire to do something big that drove these men into doing something that would change the history of the (modern) world.

Based on the arguments presented above, we appear to be sitting on the horns of an irreconcilable dilemma. On one hand, we understand that pushing the limits, by passion, or by other drivers, has brought progress to the world, has improved the quality of life. On the other hand, we have all been a witness to the dangers of pushing the limits.

It is here that we need to understand that the drive to push the limits in an irresponsible, or even a suicidal manner can also lead to extremely disastrous consequences for others.

The Bhagwad Gita, the ancient Hindu Scripture on life, underlines the concept of Nishkaam karma (action without bothering about the fruits of action), wherein the journey through life is the destination itself, and the true Sadhaka (one who devotedly follows that path) keeps performing his duty of Nishkaam karma, doing his duty without bothering for the rewards.

The concept of Nishkaam karma places a very strong emphasis on action, yet, makes action the motive itself. An example often quoted in this context is the role played by the Indian soldiers in the II World War. Fighting for a nation that ruled them colonially, on the side of the British Army, the soldiers just gave it their best shot, as the outcome of the war was unlikely to affect them anyway.  

The notion of Karma itself is divided into three categories of Karma; the Satwik (of pious mentality and motives), the Rajsik (of selfish mentality and motives), and the Tamsik (of crooked mentality and motives). Attributes from each of these three categories are present in everyone, albeit in different proportions.  It should be the endeavour of everyone to understand the notion of one’s duty in order to increase the proportion of Satwik attributes. 

If one looks at this definition provided by ‘The Gita’, and compares it to conventional thought, one might tend to argue that a person performing his action without a goal or a motive is doing an exercise in futility. Having a goal, after all, is important to achieving, so would our traditional modernist thinkers say. However, the concept of Nishkaam Karma emphasizes on the importance of action, of unrelenting, passionate and truthful action. It is this notion of continuous action that needs to be understood in the right perspective. This, along with the attempt to move towards a more Satwik set of Karmas is essential to save the world from the ‘dangers’ of passion, dangers of the kind mentioned above. And it is this understanding that we need to develop so that the human spirit continues to redefine the infinite and make tomorrow a better day!

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