ASHES

It’s Just a Game
- Keith Miller (1946-56)

The last week at office was probably the fastest. I was so amazed to realize one morning that it was Thursday already and the next two days were no different. Work is starting to come to a steady state and both of us have made our peace with each other. It’s the life outside the office which is becoming a TV serial to say the least. The drama I have come across over the last couple of weeks or so has been disconcerting and the reason I call it a TV serial is because fortunately I have to only look at it from a distance.

We take many decisions in life, some instantaneous and some with a lot of thought. But are we always sure that we have made the right choice? In fact what hurts one most is to realize later in time that the decision was not a good one. This is one aspect about life that I am very wary of. I am not afraid of making wrong decisions; they are bound to happen. I am afraid of repenting having made bad decisions. More often than not when we look back at time we feel so stupid about having cribbed about that little toy car in the store that mom didn’t get you, or having lost sleep over not having done your homework or having had to a go through an informal channel of politics to be a student representative. And most of all making enemies at various points in life for reasons that have no consequence in our life now. We see at the years gone by and feel stupid about ourselves, laughing at those crazy demands, fights and even ideologies.

Not me. I believe one person can never be able to understand thoroughly what another person feels, and this is how I guess it is meant to be. I believe with every passing second in our lives we become more intelligent, more experienced and posses more knowledge than we had the previous second, and with all this knowledge we become a different person. Our perspective is by all means a function of time if not anything else and it can never be the same. Therefore what we feel now about those issues of yesteryear is understandable, because we have stopped understanding the person we were in that yesteryear. I think this is unfair to that person who made all those choices based on whatever he knew about the world at that time. That person did not have the wisdom we have now.

I think all the animosity, ideologies and grievances of the early times are invaluable for me. Those are the parameters that have molded me as a person at various points in my life and I am proud of it. Whenever I have taken a fight (although these have been rare occasions) with someone it has been on a point of principle. That point may lose its value later in life but at some time it was important and had to be done. I have come to think about all this whenever I have had the chance to look back. My biggest memory would be the tear in my eye and almost choking feeling upon winning a cricket tournament in IIT. The fact that it took five years to win it made me emotional at that time, but I will always respect that emotion because I know at that time it was the biggest achievement for me.
Its all good for Keith Miller (who was an exemplary all-rounder for Australia, for the benefit of those who may not have heard of him) to say “its just a game” because he had been a soldier in the Australian air force in the II WW and had seen blood shed on the battle field, no wonder the cricket field was a garden for him. But that’s not the point, when you are in there it is war, and you have to play it like it is war. I would never love to hear, that cricket is just a game. It is what I am made of. It’s not just a game, it is everything.