Sporting Sunshine...

Just what Pittsburgh and Seattle have been asking for. Some much-needed sunshine!!! What Mother Nature has denied them for years, a sport called football has delivered :) So what if it is oblong and brown instead of spherical and yellow ;) As long as it can generate the passionate fervor and heart-stopping reverence in the way only sport can.

And since I’ve spent the last two weeks in rapt attention, glued to a screen that displays men fight for the ultimate prize – domination - by smashing a small green ball across a court or grappling over a bigger brown one over a field, I thought I might as well philosophize about it.

Some famous person once said that the only part of a newspaper worth reading is the Sports section cos it celebrates man’s victories instead of denouncing his failures. The rest is about death and darkness and dismay.

And I couldn’t agree more. Aside from the occasional TO-controversy or Ganguly-bashing, sport for the most part, is about hope and happiness, about triumph and joy, about all things branded “positive” by the world we live in. And it remains thus pristinely uncorrupted despite the many fallacies of humankind, that seem to taint every other realm...Where we celebrate the winners without necessarily condemning the losers.

Little wonder then that nothing else man accomplishes – gene cloning, endless trips to space, the world’s smallest microchip – seems to generate the kind of universal applause seen in true sporting wonders. And the standing ovations at the Oscars and Pulitzers still fall a tad shy, since there is but no objective winner in the arts, where beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder and there is often one beholder too many. But when competence is judged on the basis of numbers, a 10-7 or a 6-4, other than the occasional ‘bad’ call, everything seems fair in this rosy world where armstrongs win multiple tour titles and samprases break innumerable records.

Since I’ve followed the lovable sixth seeds with growing fondness this season, I’d sure like to see them lift the Lombardi trophy, for having been denied it time and again by a worthy competitor, they’ve slowly but surely, worked their way towards it...And now that I have drunk the NFL kool-aid, I can hardly wait...