Do you feel left out during intense
arguments on serious issues – political, social, economic, religious and the
like? Do you have a little angry terrier hidden inside you desperate to leap at
somebody and rip their clothes and portions of flesh out? Do you feel
frustrated for lack of any strong beliefs to defend? Become a sports fan. You
can fiercely defend yours beliefs without having to attend to administrative
details such as having beliefs.
Done methodically, becoming a sports fan is
a piece of cake. But first, you need to choose a sport. Here, you have to
strike a balance between popularity and differentiation. Go for Cricket, and
your little terrier will die a premature death, mauled by experienced Great
Danes, Chihuahuas and stray dogs alike. Go for Underwater Hockey, on the other
hand, and you will feel as ignored as a managing director during lunch hour. A
wise strategy is to hold on to Cricket as your bread and butter, and diversify
into another niche. An important rule of diversification, though, is that the
sport cannot possibly be relevant to your circs in life. You should never have
played that sport, your country should never have played that sport, you should
stand lesser chance of doing well at it than a duck at a shooting range and you
must recently have even heard of the sport in the first place. Any American
sport will do.
Regardless of which sport you choose, you
must choose a team or player to root for. And when you do start rooting for
someone, root like you’ve never rooted before. Root like they’re the one person
carrying the antidote to a terminal disease infecting the whole planet. Root
like they’re the underdog of underdogs – say a handicapped female foetus from
the backward classes in Ethiopia in a wrestling match against Hulk Hogan.
However, your rooting is not complete until you express, on various forums,
utter disgust for everyone who is not your team or player. A typical
conversation, on facebook or otherwise, should go like this:
Friend: Go Raccoons!
You: Dude! Your sports team I-can’t-even-utter-the-name-of sucks so bad
I can vacuum my carpet with it and they should be rounded up and attacked with
weapons of mass destruction. The Sulphur-Cats will kick their sorry asses BIG
TIME. Go Schubert!
Friend: Buddy, Raccoons and Sulphur-Cats don’t even play the same game.
You: SCREW YOU!!! By the way, Schubert should replace Bach after that
amazing touch-down. He is the pride of us Californians!
Friend: Sure. Are you taking an auto home or should I drop you till
Dahisar?
With such periodic outbursts, tirades,
celebrations etc., you will slowly begin to gain prominence as a fan. However,
to really move into the senior league, you have to move on to the next level –
worship. Wear your team jersey to random sports events or dinners or wedding
receptions. Spend lakhs of rupees on air tickets to go to a foreign country for
5 days and spend 2 days visiting stadia (although this is useless until you
post pictures of them on facebook. An alternative cost-effective strategy is to
pull images off the web). Link your
emotions and psychological diseases to the fortunes of your team.
An important fact you should ignore and dedicate
your life to suppressing from detection is that your team, in fact, is just a
name. It comprises completely different sets of players at different points in
time; these players can be from any domicile; and most importantly, given that
you have no connection whatsoever to the place represented by the team, you
have no reason to feel emotional about it. Forget about all that nonsense; put
on your jersey, paint your face, shout war cries, wake up at 3 am and write
long rants about matches or team selection on facebook. Your little terrier
will get its share of the action, and you will come out of social oblivion.
Don’t thank me yet. If you have any further
questions on how to develop your sports-fan profile, ask here and I will throw
you a bone. Unless, of course, you say something against the Raccoons; then, I
will kill you.
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