Where Legends are Born
Written on May 26th, 2018 by {"login"=>"jcbitshyd", "email"=>"journal@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in", "display_name"=>"Journal Club, BPHC", "first_name"=>"", "last_name"=>""}“You will be nearer to Heaven through football than through study of Gita” -Swami Vivekananda
No seriously, if by no other means than excessive fake injuries
footballers are prone too. With Arena right around the corner, every
athlete is putting in everything into training. This is especially true
for all those whose new year resolution was to wake up early and go for a
jog and fortunately are holding out a bit longer than those who
resolved to attend the morning lectures.
Teams from across the country will be participating in the potpourri
of sports with more zeal than we ever showed for our academics or
perhaps ever will. We owe this fervour to origins of these sports where
games were indeed a matter of life and death; some more than others.
Colonialism and the world wars are the main reasons why our favourite
sports are common these days. We can take this even further for our
glorified national sport of hockey, which goes as far back as 1400BCE
where they play hockey with skulls and the losing team was usually
sacrificed to gods so that the sun kept moving. Thankfully nowadays a
hockey game is slightly less serious.
Speaking of serious sports, racquet sports are the way the cookie
crumbles. A tennis match is played like a war usually. John Isner and
Nicholas Mahut (The 70-68 Wimbledon match) played 183 games over three
days which is just insanity. Incidentally, the longest recorded tennis
rally took 29 minutes in a 1984 women’s match. Of course, that doesn’t
imply anything. Not really, it’s amazing that we now have women’s
football and basketball teams because when our semester started they
would only advertise the frisbee team to the girls.
Play hard, play harder.
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Article by Abhimanyu Dasgupta.