" Don't take risks when you the last man with the ball !! " - I shouted to Siddharth Bhaiya , also known more as 'Mata' due to his allegiance to Chelsea and mostly his admiration for Juan Mata. Juan might have changed colors but the name remained. The ball was duly passed back to me and I cleared it, following the trajectory of the ball. Ideally, you should be following the ball to where it lands finally. However while it was in mid air something else caught my attention...
We were in certain village called Golapally, some fifty kilometers away from my residence here in Hyderabad. The Infosys Football team was participating in a tournament as a preparation for ITSAP, which, as I have been told was easily the most prestigious sports event in the corporate calendar. We were playing against Microsoft. The ground was situated right beside the runaway of the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport. It was lush green all around. Seemed to be right off the face of earth.
.......it was an Emirates Aircraft. I drifted away. An overflow of emotions. Dreams. The sunny mornings at St. Patrick's. People you love. Life ahead. Journey till now. Mistakes made. A different world. Unfulfilled wishes. Dreams again. It was a fleeting moment. It's difficult to articulate all the emotions at one go. Don't get me me wrong. I don't have a thing with the middle east. It could have been almost anything else. Anyway...
We played extremely well and won comfortably. Turned out to be more of an uncomfortable bike trip with heavy kits and all than anything else. Life is all about moments to be savored. Good or bad. Appropriate or inappropriate. Relevant or irrelevant. The good ones stimulate you so that you end up with more like them. Ideally, The bad ones 'should' too, for their own reasons. Then there are moments, which are just moments. You have a hard time figuring out if it falls under any of the categories. Face covered in soot, ready to collapse as I returned home, I was glad I had another one of those.
...Oh, we can be heroes just for one day....
