If Wishes had Wings...

Last week I was sitting and watching TV with my 6 month old son sitting on my lap and very interesting question popped in my mind. 

Will my son be as crazy and passionate about Football as I am? Will he be a Man Utd supporter or a Gooner like my brother? Or will he be a neutral who just enjoys a good game of football like his grand-dad? 

To be honest I do not remember when I started following football as religiously as I do now. I do remember watching the world cup in the early nineties with my Dad on Doordarshan and going bonkers over every goal or foul along with my dad. I remember that cable channel made the English Premier League more accessible and hence started the intense football rivalry between me and my brother. There is still a broken door in our house when Arsenal beat my beloved Red Devils. We repaired it just this year.

My love affair with the Champions league started in 1999. Incidentally that was the year we won the champions league in true Bollywood style. 2 last minute goals in injury time to win the game and propelling Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjær into United folklore. We have gone and won the champions league again by beating Chelsea in Moscow but the 1999 is still my favorite. Another exciting final was one involving Liverpool Vs AC Milan where Steven Gerrard brought them back into the game after trailing 3-0 after first half. Of late most final are either one sided or boring. This years final was no fun to watch as Chelsea killed the game by hanging on to their dear life but they still won. Thats football for you.


The beautiful game as it is called my many is the true global sport and it is also the great leveler. The Red Devils have had their highs and their fare share of lows as well. The most recent being losing the EPL crown to the noisy neighbors on the final day of the league. 


Coming back to my initial thought of will my son also share the same passion for football as me. The initial sign looks good. He loves the Airtel add about sending Kids to Manchester United Soccer School. But the he also loves the Dairy Milk Ad "Kiss Me". He loved to sit and watch the Euro 12 highlights in the mornings with me. I know it is too soon to be sure but being a true optimist I can only wish for the best.


If wishes had wings, then they will all make it to Heaven and we all will be kings.

Love them or Hate them

Recently I was reading an article on cnn.com and it got me thinking and hence I decided to write about it.

Now the article about how famous social networking games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, Cafe World etc are now. Of all of them Farmville has taken the world by storm. Its a simplistic game where you are given a piece of land and you grow crops on it. Players plant virtual crops that can be harvested hours, or days, later. Along the way, they invite online friends to become their neighbors and help each other by sending gifts or helping with the farming. There's no way to "win," but players take satisfaction in building big, fancy farms that they can showcase to their friends. The fact that they can be satisfied with so little is amazing.

Some interesting facts about Farmville

• Avg active players 27 million daily/75 million monthly
• Out of these 60% of the player are female with avg age ranging from 18-34 yrs.
• This app has 118 million installs which is more then the population of France.

Zynga the gaming company which is the creator of all these games has hit a jackpot with the success of their games on Facebook. But every rose has its thorn. As the popularity increased so did the number of complaints and lawsuits. People are getting increasingly annoyed with the amount of updates they are getting because one of their friends has bought a tractor or caught a fish or killed a gang member. Recently on Farmville, a group called "I don't care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!!" had more than 5.2 million members recently.

Now here is most interesting part of all of this. With the gaming industry booming and the age of the game consoles like Xbox and Sony fighting it out with interactive gaming and fitness console from Nintendo Wii, why is a simple social networking game be so popular. The reason is simple. Unlike other games you can play the games while sitting in a conference call when in office. Think about it, you are sitting in a boring meeting and you can pass time playing Farmville. Zynga says that the time when they get maximum number of player playing Farmville is between 8 AM- 9AM CST.

Personally I am not a fan of getting updates on all my friends playing. Nowadays when I log to my Facebook, its impossible to find genuine message from my friends. All we wanted was a simple networking site where we could just hang out with our friends but these games have turned Facebook into something else. Hence I don't like it anymore.

My Olympic Dream

In the recently concluded Olympic games India did really well by winning their largest haul of  medals ever. We won 6 medals - 2 silver and 4 bronze medals. I am really proud of the sportsmen/women who won us these medals but to be honest I am a bit ashamed that we only managed 6 medals. The very statement "India did really well by winning 6 medals" is something not to be proud of. For crying out loud we are a country of billions and yet we only managed to come 55th at this foregone Olympics.

This begs for the question to be asked.. whose fault is this? Our ever responsible government or does the fault lie within in each of us. I believe and I am up for debate for this but the fault lies in each and everyone of us. We all are ready to run the rat race for engineers and doctors and lawyers that we miss out on expanding our view and look at sports also as an option. If you throw a stone in Bangalore 9 out of 10 it will hit a Software Engineer. I agree there is a shortage of doctors in rural areas but there are thousands of doctors in our urban cities. Where as you can count the number of Olympic winners we have in our hand.

The reason is very simple... it is the Indian parenting that is at fault over here. Parents always push their kids to excel in studies and rarely ask them to concentrate on sports. I do not have to look far for examples for this. In school when I was selected for a under 12 all India Football tournament for my school and went home with the request to buy boots for the same, that request was thrown out of the window by my mom and another guy who bought boots took my place in the team. When you look at this from her point of view, that sports does not pay but a doctor or an engineer is set for life seems very straight forward choice and simple decision. Cricket is one game in India where the same thought process is not applied.

This idea that "Sports does not PAY" is that one that needs to be changed. Not everything is about earning money and be set for life. Some times we need to look at the big picture and see how we can improve ourselves and the society as a whole. But here lies the dilemma that scares every parent. If your kid concentrates on sports and not studies and eventually does not make it as a sportsman then what. This is where the government should step in. The government just needs to look across the border for inspiration.

China's medal tally has increased exponentially since their first participation in 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland. At one point of time the Olympics reflected the cold war with USA Vs USSR but after the Soviet union was divided for a few Olympics the USA has a clear run but since 2000 Sydney Olympics on China gave the US a run for their money eventually overhauling them at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. How did China achieve this? Then answer is simple, because the government started getting young kids to the extend of forcing kids to join government backed training facilities where they were taught the finer details and groomed to compete against the rest of the world. The result is for everyone to see. Li Na the first Asian women to win a grand slam is a product of such an institute. The sportsperson from these institute till a certain age have to give 50% of their winnings back to the government so that they can continue running such training institutes. To be honest this model can work only in China and used to work for USSR due to the communist regime which to a certain extend is autocratic.

The model that should work for India is that the government already has many institutes like Navodaya, Kendriya Vidhyala, Government Schools that should be used to find the kids that have potential and groom them. Should they not succeed they should be give opportunities to succeed in life like give them job security in govt sector. The Armed Forces should also be used to start up institutes where kids of the defence community and others can be trained and imparted the skills required to succeed in sports.

I recently became a father and if my kids want to pursue a life in sports then I will do everything in my reach to help them succeed and hopefully every parent does the same. A small change made my many will become a big change and could lead some thing better. Maybe then we might some day in the future topple China and USA in the Olympics. That is My Olympic Dream!.