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Last Thoughts of the Millenium |
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Thoughts
Without Boundaries Thoughts
of love & longing |
When I was a kid, I wanted to be Pele. In fact I wanted to be everything. The most difficult decisions I made was whether to be Pele or Gavaskar. A decision made considerably simpler by the fact that owing to the lack of appropriate exposure I never wanted to be Amitabh Bachchan. In my later years I wanted to be Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Crousteau. This came with the heart-crunching realisation that I would never be Boris Becker. In my twenties I was mostly caught up being myself. Fortunately I have few apologies to make on that score.
Of course as a deprived child in the pre MTV era, my senses were not battered into a mush of dance videos with ½ second cuts that roughly coincide with the trends in attention span. The park was a playground and not a hotel. The little Casio digital watch was the coolest gadget in the universe. Agony in those days meant scraping half the skin off your leg, it did not mean not getting your favourite VJ to read out your letters of love.
There comes a point when you realise with an embarrassing poignancy that the sporting heroes of the day are younger than you are. When I was leaving college, Tendulkar and Leander Paes were struggling with their math tutors. Heck, when I was hanging up my soccer boots, Michael Owen was learning to tie his laces. Anyhow, I reached and crossed that inflection point of ambition with a fair amount of equanimity.
Over the last few years, I have been fortunate to get exposed to a quadrillion new bits and bytes of new experiences. Some planned and enjoyable. Some not. I have grown to think of the Internet as a life support system. Given a choice, I would check mail on the way to brushing my teeth in the morning. Sometimes I feel my online personality is evolving in entirely different ways than my real life personality, which has given up trying to develop and is focusing on preventive maintenance.
Over the past few months, I have wanted to be, Pico Iyer, Tom Robbins and Jeff Bezos. Do we progress or merely change? Half my life is over and I haven’t changed the world yet. It bothers the hell out of me. The assorted debris of things that I have been can fit into a small little matchbox of achievements.
Just today I was reading about Pele on the CNN site. He has been named, by both Time and CNN, as the athlete of the century. Did you know, he was not allowed to leave Brazil to play for an Italian club because he was declared a national treasure? Or that when he visited Africa, they halted the Nigeria-Biafra conflict to institute a two-day cease-fire? Or even that recently when some people tried to rob him at gun point, they recognised him and apologised instead?
They say every kid around the world who plays soccer still wants to be Pelé. He once said, "I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man." You know what? I still want grow up to be Pele. 31st Dec 1999
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