When the Building Came Alive

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Kasturi Dhama Apartments — the play area where many evenings came alive. The lights would go out without warning. For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt. “Yayyy!” It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission. Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside. Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades. My earliest memory is of living in a vatara —a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vy...
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India v/s Brazil

As the soccer fever is gripping the world, the obvious question to us is Why is India not able to make it to the World Cup Finals? Instead of finding fault with others, let us sit back and analyse the system that is prevailing in our country. That is exactly what myself and Karthik Chandramouli did. As a young kid, one has a lot of aspirations to make it big in something other than academics. But is he really able to pursue what he wants? There is a notion among the elders that their children can come up only in the conventional way. Score good marks right from first grade to engineering, get placed in a good software company and earn good money for the rest of the career. Why can't our thoughts progress beyond this? Why can't we deviate from the normal and try to seek a career by pursuing our interests rather than the beaten path?

Coming back to football, how many schools in India support a good extracurricular system? I come from a school where let alone a football field, we did not even have sufficient space to play running and catching (remember?). We were always infused with academics right from the start. We are forced to believe that that is the only path to assured success. How in such a situation can we produce world class sportsmen? A handful of them play cricket and that too against a backdrop of tremendous peer pressure to concentrate on academics. How many of us were involved in athletics, football, cricket, tennis or even table tennis? So, there is no point in hurling an accusing finger at one another at the state of affairs of the Indian sports system. It is not just a few changes, but a major overhaul is required at the grassroot level to take Indian sports to a new level. I hope to see the light of the day when India might be playing Brazil in the finals. What a dream come true that would be!

Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 14, 2006 at 7:47 AM

    seriously man, even if u had played with ronaldo or federer right from the time u were born, would it have made the slightest difference to ur ability to play sports.
    remember how u grip the cricket bat, u SUCK!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJune 15, 2006 at 11:28 PM

    hi praveen,
    nice thoughts on ur blog. on this post as to WHY INDIA IS NOT ABLE TO MAKE IT TO THE WORLD CUP FINALS, I have a couple of funny takes on that in my blog. do visit it at:

    http://ramblingwithbellur.blogspot.com/2006/06/soccer-world-cup-winner-is-predestined.html

    and

    http://ramblingwithbellur.blogspot.com/2006/06/soccer-its-at-my-fingertips.html

    keep blogging.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJune 15, 2006 at 11:37 PM

    and just now read that u stayed next to MSIL apts. i have been staying in 16th cross, and me too visited CCL with my friend, though not a member. I was a member of DISCAB Circ. Lib. next to Expert dry cleaners, remember the place?

    nice to know about old malleswaram boys. glad i stumbled upon ur blog!

    do visit mine.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Praveen KrishnanJune 16, 2006 at 8:29 AM

    Hi RK,

    I have visited Discab too. I used to get the books from my friend who was the member there.

    ReplyDelete

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