Why We Watch Sports

I have branched out my blogging of late. I can recently be found on these two sites:

http://blog.dawn.com/author/ahmer-naqvi/
http://clearcricket.wordpress.com/author/karachikhatmal/

now, here is another post that recently got published at dawn. i have written other stuff for both blogs that i haven't put here yet, so do check it out.

London is a notorious city to travel in. According to one account, the average speed of travel across the city has not changed in over 300 years. The situation becomes exacerbated further when winter comes in, especially this year’s edition which promises to be the worst in 30 years. Yet last night, I found myself braving the elements to take on a two-hour journey, all to catch the last 15 minutes of a match.

Unfortunately, the team I was supporting was decimated, to put it politely. You can read about it here, but as far as I was concerned, there was a more pressing question I needed to answer. Why did I care?

At first, my meditations flocked around the match in question, which involved two teams I had no link to, had never seen in person, and was probably never going to be able to either. But perhaps the sheer magnitude of the loss forced me to delve deeper – why do we follow any sports at all? Especially people like me, who have been so bad at all sports that they are forced to buy the equipment in their local gully before anyone reluctantly puts them in the team.

Sports as war

Ok, that is a rather sensationalist claim, inspired by George Orwell’s observation that all sports was ‘war minus the shooting.’ But its not completely off the mark.

Modern football, for example, evolved from annual events where neighbouring villages would compete to drag an animal carcass across a lengthy field. The whole fiasco would result in outrageous violence and often, fatalities.

However, the noblemen realised that if the villagers would be allowed to vent their emotions, angers and frustrations through such events, they would be less likely to involve themselves in actual warmongering, particularly against their overlords.

To date, a lot of sports allow themselves to serve as a way of channelling machismo, aggression and frustration. The Pakistani artist Faiza Butt has done some fascinating work showcasing how sports allow ideas of masculinity to be represented and reified. As a recent blog noted, channelling machismo is not always the best recipe for success. However, it continues to be the way forward for sportsmen, but more importantly sports followers.

Getting excited, angry, vengeful, bullish, threatening on the fluctuations of a match allows supporters to come to terms with their own emotions that they perhaps struggle to express otherwise due to the bounds of civility, legality and social norms.

Sports as narrative

One day I was being deliberately sexist (I do that as part of my roguish charm routine. It’s not always successful, but I am married, so clearly it worked when I needed it to) and claiming that women are vacuous because they like watching soap operas. My wife had a pithy response – watching a soap is no different than following a football team.

What? At first, I began to pout and snipe, angrily demanding she take it back. But later, I started to think about what she had said.

Every day, I find myself scouring blogs and articles which dissect the latest sporting events, the reactions of the competitors, the intrigue of the administrators, the drama, the suspense, the excitement.

However, I recently realised that the restrictions of work and personal obligations meant that I was rarely able to actually watch the sports I was following so diligently. I could not stop going into work, or avoid picking up a relative from the airport just because a sporting event was playing live.

More interestingly, I hadn’t even realised that I had been reduced to following these sports through some scattered highlights, and a plethora of words on websites, tweets and forums. So I wondered, why am I so eager to follow the interpretation of events I am not even watching?

The answer is that our own lives are messy, seemingly random experiences. Sure we have goals and dreams, but our trials and tribulations are constant and monotonous, our ‘defining’ moments occur haphazardly and irregularly, and it is often difficult to discern any tangible meaning from the procession of our daily routine.

In contrast, sports follow pre-defined patterns. There are seasons, tournaments, leagues, rankings, competitions. The adversary is easily defined, the end is easily identified. There are winners and losers, champions and chumps, heroes and villains.

We can’t watch every match, but we can follow the score, day in day out, through out the season. And doing so, it helps provide a steady tale of ups and downs, of victories and defeats, of hope and sorrow. And so if our own lives seem messy and complicated, sports (and indeed soap operas) allow us to follow something that does seem to make sense, and end with a nice ceremony.

Sports as art

For a lot of people, a trip to an art gallery can be bewildering. Very few things seem to make sense, and fewer still betray any idea as to why they were deemed important enough to be put up in such a sacred manner. Which is why, a lot of attendees are there to curry favour with others, to be seen and talked about. But that’s not true for everyone. Appreciating art requires an understanding of context, but also technique. The knowledge of both allows one to appreciate a work for what it’s trying to say, as well as the difficulties and the limits, of conveying and representing what has been said.

Sometimes, watching sports is truly akin to appreciating art, and in that sense, it becomes divorced from the experiences described above. Sometimes, we watch not for who is playing, and who we want to win, but rather to watch something incredible unfold.

We watch to see limits being challenged, to see previously someone breach what is considered possible. We watch to see roles being changed, new interpretations being created, new ideas brought to life. We essentially partake in a supremely creative process, where the appreciation comes not from our own affiliations and prejudices, but rather our desire to watch new possibilities, new meanings to emerge.

Truly great performers are like great painters creating new styles, great writers discovering new forms of expressions. A Messi dribble, a drive from Lara, a shot from Federer is watching a new form of expression being created, and in such a moment, narrative and emotions matter little.

Sports as transcendental experience

It was 2004, and I was in a concrete cauldron in Karachi. By all accounts, me and 30,000 other people should have already headed home. It was lunch, and India had just posted the highest total the ground had ever seen. In the days before mammoth chases were common, and the fact that this was Pakistan’s notoriously hollow batting doing the chasing, the target of 350 seemed like an impossibility.

And yet somehow, the crowd hung around, ignoring the initial parts of Pakistan’s chase and amusing themselves with shouting out obscene comments to the outfielders, and buying copious amounts of food from the stalls nearby.  Somehow, they resisted their usual penchant for stoning the opposition captain, or rioting in the stands.

And somehow, even more improbably, Pakistan starting making a fist of the chase. Somehow, the boundaries kept flowing. Somehow, that glorious saviour Inzi kept shuffling his cards and producing aces. Somehow, the most impossible of chases, against the most fiercest of rivals, began to materialise.

And it was there, in the last few hours of that match, that I suddenly lost myself. The entire stadium began to pulsate as one giant beastly cacophony of sound. Bottles were relentlessly smacked against plastic seats, Mexican waves cascaded continuously upon themselves. Roar after roar after roar continued to be emitted. It didn’t stop for dot balls, it didn’t stop for over breaks or drinks breaks. It didn’t stop for fall of wickets.

And when the match reached its climax and Pakistan lost in one blink of an eye, the roar stopped for a moment, before beginning again. The stadium’s relentless noise transformed into applause for a team which had been pelted with rocks the last time it had played there.

And when it all ended, I realised that for the past few hours, I had no awareness of my self, my individual self. The entire experience had felt otherworldly, eerie even in retrospect. There had been no concept of individuals, no concept of political feuds and human follies. No concept of victory or defeat even. It had been a sustained moment of pure exhilaration.

And every sports fan who tastes such a moment, who participates in that obliteration of the self and the connection with all of humanity around them, who experiences emotions beyond those that can be described by words, keeps coming back for more.

For all its faults and pretensions, sports remains one of those mediums where we can experience something truly beyond the ordinary. Something which affirms our belief that there is more to life, if only we choose to embrace it.

And out of all the reasons, that is the most noble one for following sports.

Keeping It Real

This blog was originally published in the Express Tribune Magazine. It was meant to be published in the Dawn blog, but someone there felt it wasn't relevant. My special thanks to a great fan of the blog who had my back, and to @Nadir_Hassan for offering and succeeding at publishing it at ET.

According to this article, bestiality is a rite of passage in parts of Pakistan. Considering that sexual depravity, even in innocuous terms is no stranger to young, virile Pakistani men, I am reluctant to dismiss this claim as another journo out to malign the image of Pakistan.

Rites of passage after all, are essential to human life. 

Take for example the rite of passage involving young bloggers in Pakistan. At some point in their blogging career, all of us write this post.

This post?

You know, the one in which we deride, mock and seek to humiliate the ‘elites’ of Pakistan, their obsession with material goods and facebooks, their cluelessness regarding the local transport network, their obliviousness to the rampant poverty faced by the unclothed majority, their contempt for our local vernacular.

Inevitably, these rants exhort the elites to pacify their ‘liberal extremism,’ to nullify their ‘western-boot-licking’ to pop out of their ‘bubbles.’ Words like ‘reality’ ‘common man’ and ‘masses’ litter these posts like plastic bags in Clifton Beach. 

Let us lay aside the implicit irony of English speaking, computer using bloggerati railing against people who are essentially their own friends and family. 

Let us look instead, at something far more intriguing.

What makes someone a ‘real’ Pakistani? What makes something a ‘real’ Pakistani experience? From what these posts imply, being rich and privileged strips you of the ability to be real.

What a fascinating idea! 

It appears that the venerable Defence Housing Authority is no more than a figment of my imagination, that the Fez nights at Sindh Club are merely a mirage concocted by misfiring neurons in our elitist brains, that those of us going to ‘dance parties’ and ‘social clubs’ are merely computer generated holograms, created to incense the fevered blogger and implode Pakistan from within.

On the flip side, it also implies that the poor are one coagulated mass of noble, wretched, helpless, nameless limbs and faces whose entire destiny depends on whether or not we stop watching ‘Jersey Shore’ and sipping skimmed milk espressos.

What a load of bull.

For starters, while there is no reason to defend the oblivious and corrosive actions of the elites in our country, pointing the fingers at people essentially from the same background as yourself displays stunning self-delusion.

Secondly, holding up the ‘poor’ as some paragons of virtue, as being common or part of an undifferentiated mass, robs them of their individuality, their diversity, and only further intensifies the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them.’

And most importantly, defining some things as ‘real’ and others as not only deludes us from taking responsibility of the fact that every action, every moment, every experience is as real (or not) as any other. Eating out in Burns Road or Anarkali is not more any more ‘real’ than the same activity being done in Zamzama or MM Alam Road. Spurning the advances of nefarious corporations might be healthy for your wallet, but falling to their embraces does not cloak you in a halo of ‘unreality.’

So much like young men allegedly deflowering unsuspecting four-legged mammals, bloggers railing against the elite is one rite of passage we can all do without. 

Once upon a khabarnama...

when mushie chacha turned off the channels in november 2007, many journalists took to the streets. in karachi, one particular protest was shut down by the police, and the participants arrested. later, they would quote the experience when they spoke of being 'hardened journalists' who bore the brunt of 'a repressive military regime as they fought for the freedom of speech while rocking out to rage against the machine.' 


what most of them failed to mention was how their stay in jail for a few hours involved being brought over pizzas and cans of soft drinks as well as untold cartons of cigarettes.


the point being, that sometimes things aren't what they seem. 


so when dawn.com had issues with my second consecutive blog because of things i was saying about their other employees, i decided to put it on my blog, which is only beholden to me. this doesn't stand as an example of censorship or any such malarkey, for several reasons. the most important one being that in both cases, the references to dawn employees was not an indictment of them personally, nor was it a personal vendetta against two popular and well respected men. instead, it was an attempt to contextualise their words and actions.


so, without further ado, here it is.

Before disney took over the job, fairy tales were the realm of the spoken word.

instead of animation, grandmothers, or audio cassettes, usually took upon the role of reading out elaborate tales of fantasy, adventure, bravery and magic. each tale was embellished with fascinating characters with pretty one-dimensional personalities. 

the brave prince, the wronged princess, the devious churail, the friendly giant, the mischievous gnomes, vengeful pirates, bashful fairies, scheming sorcerers, generous djinns, 40 crafty thieves - you get the picture.

for the story teller, the liberating aspect of this exercise was the ability to create a whole world, populate it with characters, and trust that the listener would take that on face value.

there wasn't any necessity to provide context. the evil king was evil because that's what the story said - no one asked to hear about his human rights record, or his control over his kingdom's sovereignty. 

a few days ago, one of pakistan's most respected journalists wrote a rather curious article, in which he spent a long time dissecting the life and times of Angelina Jolie.

the inquest resulted in a lot of wink-wink, nudge-nudge innuendo, and some outright tamachay on the wisdom and choices of Ms. Jolie. 

now several blogs took apart this approach on the interwebs, and i'll leave you to judge for yourself. but personally, the basic question that arises upon reading this column is why unleash this maelstrom of mense on the actress, who after all was working recently for flood relief victims in pakistan?

a quick glance at the article reveals the answer.

the article's conclusion was related to ms. jolie's complaints about the excesses of the Pakistani government. according to the scribe, this was how low the government's stock had reached - that even a person with morals as allegedly dubious as Angelina bhabi looked down upon the rulers in islamabad.

now, if we step back, and ignore the spicy gossip strewn all over this column, a more primeval reaction arises - 'huh?'

what is the point of all this?

well, pyare bacho, the point is that in order to provide context to a story, to an event, to any scrap of news, one has to create a narrative.

a narrative requires certain characters, certain events and their consequences in order to provide a conclusion. 

narratives help provide allegories, examples and advice on how to make sense of the world. to provide a beginning, middle and end. and the simpler the narrative, the flatter the characters, the more emphatic its message becomes.

in pakistan, where we are saturated by news and nothing but news all the time, it appears that we have put our grandmothers to sleep and turned on the television for our fairy tales.

and so each day, we stare agog at our screens, as wise men narrate epic tales of evil plotters, court room intrigue, daring heros, corrupt rulers, oppressed masses, wanton destruction, foreign hands and local bodies. 

unfortunately, while our grandmothers would end the fairy tales when we started to fall asleep, the modern story tellers just don't let up. and so if our attention begins to waver, they conjure up even more exoticised characters, whose benign actions become symbols of societal malaise. they start weaving together completely unrelated fantasies and present them as a cohesive whole.

like the amorous, brazen queen of the heathen tribes of the west, who visited this fair kingdom, and even she, this insatiable devourer of men, was left ashamed by the excesses of the evil king and his supporters.

i wonder who disney would get to play the role of the grand vizier?

Smokers Cornered

A few days ago i posted a blog on dawn, which was ostensibly aimed at NFP, but not really. it appears that people are having trouble posting their comments on the page. So, feel free to speak your mind here.


Smokers Cornered

One of Pakistan's most famous columnists recently wondered aloud on these pages, as he so often does, 'how its no surprise Pakistan's current generation is so"conservative and intransigent."' The former student activist and veteran 'surkha' delved in subversive, philosophical and political contexts, and traced the problem back to his favourite hunting ground - the Islamization policies of General Zia-ul-Haq.

I'm talking, of course, about NFP.

Now, before I begin, I am at pains to stress that I don't wish to ignite a flame war here. I apologise in advance if it feels like I am resorting to petty and personal attacks, because I have no intention of doing so.


Disclaimers done, let's move on to this hit-mongering argument.



NFP, if I am correct, seems to be upset about the political leanings of the most young people of today, or rather their blatant lack of political concern amongst the rest. The current situation strikes a discordant note with his own past, those heady days when young people chose (and choose they did) the Left or the right with great fervor. 


Now it seems, the youth has no interest left in politics.



At the face of it, this claim sounds preposterous. Young Pakistanis of all stripes are obsessed with politics, and the youth with their politics-based blogs, the politics-obsessed tweets and facebook statuses seem to be no different.



But this is confusing the reality. 



If there is any sort of politics being professed by today's youth, it is the politics of individualism.

immediately, this sounds like a dirty word. individualism means selfishness and greed, it means consumerism and strait-jacket capitalism. 

thats all probably true. 

but lets try and understand why this came about.

for starters, our generation grew up during a time of the collapse of collectivism. 

in a strictly political sense, this was a time when both the Left and the Right collapsed upon each other.

ideologues on the left were reduced to hacking each other into factions. witness the fact that the pakistani left split into possibly as many factions as the PML.

but in a social sense, the right was equally undermined.

a lot of this had to do with technology. our generation saw television channels morph from the ubiquitous PTV to a cacophony of hyperbolic hosts, vengeful saas-bahus, and 24/7 hungama.

we saw the esteemed familial tradition of the telephone landline, so often an extension of patriarchal authority, become fractured into individual mobile lines for everyone, including the woebegone "common man."

we saw the already defunct system of household postal services replaced by the ravenous onslaught of the internet with individual mail addresses, and individual profiles and statuses galore.

we saw the VCR give way to the personal computer and youtube. the one dayers give way to t20s. the cassette to mp3. radio pakistan to FM 100.
 

the one common thread to all these changes was that they were all about being catered to our own individual needs. which is why men like zaid hamid and imran khan, so frequently the source of NFP sahab's ire, are so popular amongst people of our generation. 

because unlike ideologues of that past, with their rigorous demands for unflinching devotion (anyone from thatcher to mullah omer, from mao to imran khan the cricket captain) these guys offer their followers choice. the choice to wear jeans and jackets, but still spout anti-western rhetoric. the choice to speak in english and yet denounce the english speaking world. 

and that is also why their popularity can never translate into actual feet on the ground. because when they switch from offering choices to making demands, their very appeal gets eroded. 

witness the damp squib that was mr. hamid's takmeel-e-pakistan rally, or the number of seats won by the PTI. because even while our generation of individuals enjoys echoing the thoughts of these men, they don't allow them to subsume their own individual self. whenever the call goes out to follow an individual, the generation of individuals decides to choose its own path instead.


and its within this individualistic ethos that our generation finds its redemption as well.



it is why while the older generations respond to natural disasters by bringing out the begging bowl and fretting about pakistan's 'image' abroad, our generation focuses on doing what we can on our own, setting up camps and relief teams.


it is why while our elders cry themselves hoarse over whether our president is the dajjal or misunderstood, whether our cricket team cheats because of structural reasons or a few bad apples, our generation finds the roots of both evils within ourselves.


it is why while you criticize us for being politically apathetic, we continue to populate the internet with some of the most incisive political debates in recent pakistani history. 


and it is why, Sir NFP, i take umbrage to your thesis: because it robs us of our context, and reduces it to your own.