Judas

Then
There was the time
I gave my friend a crystal ball
Of trust

And returned
To find
Its fragments
Shattered
On the kitchen floor.


Frank Krishner 1984, Published in Friends Magazine.

Bihar's football crazy girls

From the BBC:

Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Zidane, Kaka and David Beckham are unlikely icons among girls in a remote village in the dirt-poor Indian state of Bihar.

The girls of Barauni village in Begusarai district eat, drink and sleep football and stay up all night to catch their favourite teams at the World Cup on television.

"How can we miss it? We get a chance only once in four years," says Mausam Kumari, who is rooting for Germany.

The girls of Barauni are not only mad about football, they also play the game with a lot of passion - three girls from the village have played in the national women's team, and seven others have been in the state team.

In a near-lawless district - over 100 people have died in political killings in one village alone - the achievements of Barauni's football girls have gone largely unnoticed.

The girls here are so mad about the game that they have a village football club, which even became the women's club champions in India four years ago.

Bihar's state girls' football team is ranked fourth in India.

Rainy Day musings

Raindrops keep falling on my head,
Just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed,
Nothing seems to fit…

It’s one thing to be in the midst of sweltering Delhi or parched Gaya
Where the heat is intolerant, smashing down from a hot tin sky
And the first few splatters of heavenly H-two-O cause the earth
To burst forth with that heady perfume of pure, distilled, water-vapour

It’s quite another thing to be in cool Lachung or draughty Darjeeling
And feel the cruel, icy fingers of steel run down your neck
While the one chilling icy blasts from the Himalayas pierce your eardrums
Through and through and you can hardly stand up from the pain.

So the rain is a time for jubilation in the heat-filled plains
But it’s a different story in the Alpine climes all over the world…

Have you ever seen the rain? Coming down …

In the Plains, love songs and mating songs are woven around the venal monsoons.

Elsewhere, the grey, soggy, wet weather that rots umbrellas and creates a dank smell that doesn’t seem to go away for months at a time is not a symbol of such joy.

For the people of Punjab, Delhi, the plains of India, rain is such a joyous, life-affirming event

And yet
The rainy day is somehow a time of sadness, as in this evergreen song:

Don’t look so sad, I know it’s over
But life goes on, and this old world, will keep on turning
Just let’s be glad, we have some time to spend together…
There’s no need to watch the bridges, that we’re burning
So lay your head upon my shoulder
Hold your warm and tender body, close to mine
Hear the whisper of the raindrops, falling soft across the window
And make believe you love me, one more time…..

Fire and Ice

There's absolutely nothing that can compare to a rough and tumble game of football in the rain.

Cricket is a decidedly namby-pamby cissy game, which has the mamma's boys running for cover at the first hint of moisture in the air.

You don't see either the players or the spectators running for cover when the skies open during a football match. No sir. The players just muck in and the referee as well.

Of course the real reason that the girls and I loved watching football was that one got to see the most fabulous bods around -- sweaty, sinewy, and many of them finger-lickin' scrumptious. The other reason that I really loved reporting on football was the additional extra: I got to walk into the guy's locker rooms.

Cricket can't come a distant second. Soccer is the one game that really socks it to Ya

All that body contact. The moves that are as graceful as a russian ballet and as supercharged as a ten foot cannon. The sweat and the heat and the excitement.
Football! Nuthin' compares to you.

foota

And what an entertaining opening match it was, with Costa Rica and Germany battling it out and Germany winning 4-2.

A couple of years ago, I toured the interiors of Jharkhand, looking at community run schools which were run by the Santhals, one of the main tribes of Chhotanagpur.

I saw a passion for football that surprised me.

This young man not only works in the family fields and goes to a community run school. His passion is football. He hasn’t access to television, but he knows the names of the football clubs: Mohun Bagan, East Bengal, Dempo.

He reminds me of when I first spotted Baichung Bhutia, a sixteen year old schoolboy from Tashi Namgyal Academy, Gangtok. This young boy was so good, that he was fielded in the Sikkim B team during the prestigious Governor’s Gold Cup. I remember sitting next to Jerri Bassey, one of Sikkim’s International footballers, and we were watching this young lad work magic with his feet. Later on, I wrote in my column in Sikkim Express that this lad would be courted by one of the major clubs and would blaze his way to fame.

True enough, he was snapped up by a top Bengal Football Club a couple of years later. The rest, as we know, is history.

The Golden Game

Oh. He’s football crazy, he’s football mad
And the football it has robbed him o” the wee bit sense he had
And it would take a dozen skivvies, his clothes to wash and scrub
Since our jock became a member of that terrible football club …

Jimmie McGregor [‘Football Crazy’ 1960 song.]

In Sikkim, the spiritual land of my soul, football and moonshine are the two most important subjects.

Some people think football is a matter of life and death .. I can assure them that it is much more than that . To the true son of the hills Goli is religion, church, sacrament and penance rolled into one. In Sikkim, there are three seasons: summer, winter, and football!

I remember in the bad old days of Boredarshan, how some of us drove cars over the mountains to the top of a particular ridge in 1986, so we could aim makeshift antennae and catch weak signals from across the border to catch the opening of the World Cup live… what we saw mostly was a lot of grains… but we drove back triumphant and bleary eyed, secure that the ritual had been satisfactorily performed and we had participated in the quintessential pontifical observance that separated the true worshippers of the leathern sphere from the neophytes.

World Cup Fever is in the air and I’m a believer.

To my friends in Mizoram, Meghalaya, Nagaland, North Bengal and Sikkim… To all football fanatics the world over: Viva la compagnie!

Moody Blues

The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you’ve played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder. [Constant Lambert 1905-51]

I’ve been putting aside some time each day to catalogue my current music collection. ‘Current’ because my peripatetic lifestyle has resulted in my entrusting dozens of albums to friends’ safekeeping in various towns over the decades. Disturbances in the north-east in the mid-eighties meant that I left a collection of some 50 albums with a good friend in Shillong – quite a few are tucked away in a corner of a little house in Sikkim -- music that may be difficult to lay hands on easily: The Who, Conway Twitty, Jim Croce, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Alabama, Gentleman Jim Reeves, The incomparable Dusty Springfield, The scorpions, AC/DC, several Joan Baez and Bob Dylan albums, The wonderful Ray Charles and the elusive Cat Stevens, among others.

My decade in Patna – certainly not the place to find intelligent music in the dark decades of Lalooism – was made bearable by recourse to the music I carried along with me … and the music I picked up whenever I visited Calcutta, Bombay or Delhi.

Last year, I picked up Harry Belafonte’s Carnegie hall concert for the THIRD time: my first set was purloined in 1986, the second was borrowed by the librarian of the erstwhile British library in Patna in 1994, which he forgot to return when he left Patna some years ago.

Just listening to Harry Belafonte belting out ‘Man Smart, woman smarter’, Mama , look a Booboo, and Ma-til-da is more than enough to drive the monsoon blues away…..

Raindrops ... fallin' on my head

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens: a time to be born, and a time to die… a time to weep, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, and a time to dance …..

The rains have crept into Patna, pussyfooted in as a gentle and welcome shower around mid-day on Monday and then after a pause of an hour or so, a drizzle elongated itself into a droning, pattering, watering-can that went on through the evening and the night and it rained on, almost without a pause the whole day…

Hardly any thunder and lightening, just dull rainfall, drab skies, mud-filled streets and an erratic electric supply…

Rather early for Patna in Bihar… the monsoons usually break with a crash somewhere around the third week of June or later.

The weather’s cooler, the mosquitoes have revived and are swarming through windows, skylights, any orifice they can find, the frogs are a-croaking

the kids, as usual, are having the time of their lives splashing about
but there was a rather cross young man who just couldn't figure out why car drivers have to be so uncivilised as to crash through the water- logged streets soaking pedestrians ...

…. And I’m caught unprepared, without a brolly…

…

toodle-umba umba… toodle umba umba, toodle aye-aie
any umbrellas, any umber-rellas to mend today?
Bring your parasols, they may be small, they may be big
I will fix them all in what they call a jiffity-jig ….

Four letter word...

If somebody says ‘I love you’ to me, I feel as though I had a pistol pointed at my head. What can anybody reply under such conditions but that which the pistol-holder requires? ‘I love you, too.’ – Kurt Vonnegut

Love is an extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love … is the discovery of reality.

The other night someone whom I care about quite a lot and I
Touched upon the subject of love, attraction, and sex
We talked late into the night and didn’t stop till the grey light of dawn turned azure.

Is attraction the first step of love, or is it the first step to sex?
Can I be in love with someone and yet not feel the need for the intimacy of sex?
Is it possible to be in sex with someone, but not in love?

Like Auden, we sigh:
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love…

The other night I shadow-boxed in the dark
Not wanting to get hurt all over again,
perhaps not wanting to let my defences down and admit to myself …

that the feeling is mutual
that the first time in September when he opened the door and pushed his way unannounced into my life I saw him I liked what I saw
and within the week I knew … yes, I knew

that love is a terrible thing. You poison it and stab at it and knock it down into the mud ---- way down – and it gets up and staggers on, bleeding, and muddy, and awful --- like the ghost of Rasputin… it haunts you …

But, perhaps, I’m too battle-weary, tired and exhausted
How in hell can you handle love without turning your life upside down? That’s what love does, it changes everything..

Love is like the measles – all the worse when it comes late in life …

But here I am, I’m growing accustomed to his face … he makes the day for me begin …