Choose Your Sport Wisely

Someone very wise has remarked, ‘Something is a sport only when the other side knows that there is a game on’. And by this definition hunting is NOT a sport.

Hunting for food is an activity, hunting for pleasure in this modern-day and age can be achieved by a nice simulation in a video game. Hunting is bad and injurious for health. And I am not proclaiming this based on my love for animals nor is this post sponsored by PeTA, for this proclamation I am drawing on the lessons in the great ‘Puranas’ of India.

The fundamental cause of all suffering in Ramayana is a folly committed by Raja Dashrath. The Raja (king) during his younger days, when he was a Kumar (prince) accidentally killed Shravan. Why? Because he was on a hunting expedition. Such was the tale that the prince shot an arrow based on the sound of bubbling water. For him, the sound of Shravan filling a vessel with drinking water on the river banks resembled the sound of an elephant drinking water.
The wise Lord Rama has remarked, never trust your senses. However, in the above case, the Lord was born later, hence it is technically impossible that he could have imparted this wisdom to his father. Anyways, the key conclusion is that the whole cycle of Karma in Ramayana began with this folly: Hunting.

Even Mahabharata, another great epic of India, carries a cautionary tale on Hunting. Another Kumar, Pandu while ‘hunting’ a deer accidentally kills the Rishi Kindama and his wife. This incurs the wrath of the Rishi and a curse, another cycle of Karma.

I have always maintained that the ‘Smoking Kills’ infomercial screened at the start of every movie, will never work in India. You can bring on Suresh, Sunita and line up all the people with names that begin with ’S’, still it will never work. Because cautionary tales do not work in this nation.

Amongst the many tales in Mahabharata, the biggest cautionary tale is about the perils of gambling. Yet, we are still a nation of gamblers. For some, the festival of Diwali is incomplete without a game of cards. A game of Chaupar (not Ludo) had the genesis of a great war in Mahabharata. Yet gambling prevails in this nation of bhakts. And the greatest irony, if ever a superlative can be applied to a figure of speech, is when a bhakt (devotee) seeks divine intervention in gambling, that too from none other than Lord Krishna.

A sport by definition is not war, hence it should be something where the stakes are low, and the game ends with a handshake. Anything having higher stakes than that should not be classified as a sport. Because defining something a sport, makes it trivial, gets rid of the gravitas from the consequences of any actions during the ‘play’.

On a side note here, (Diagressing off course), the retelecast of Ramayana on Doordarshan is not adhering to norms of repeat telecasting. I mean if you are advertising telecast times as every day 9 am and 9 pm, an ordinary soul like me would presume that the same episode is being telecast at breakfast and dinner time. When the story jumped too fast from one day to next, Initially I thought it is unfair, just because we know the story, it doesn’t mean you skip portions of it and rush. Only later I realized, I needed two alarms a day.