Being the Sport! - IGIT IEEE STUDENT BRANCH

CAFÉ LATTE
Being the Sport!
From the lower Palaeolithic to the Mesolithic and Neolithic man, right down to the “Modern” man of the
21 st century (“man” being politically incorrect but an unbreakable habit despite my feminine origin!),
activities of leisure have changed albeit gradually from cave paintings, musical story telling (“Katha” as
the Indians called it, which led to the naming of Kathak) and crude sporting congregations to Art galleries,
orchestras, and all pervasive sport associations of today.
As you have no doubt heard a gazillion times, the sports we know of today may safely be laid down, to a
large extent, at the doors of Ancient Greece. I don’t need to talk about the Olympics of Olympia, the
Marathon, or even Chess that we now attribute to India known earlier as Chausar. Persia, China, and later
England has given us games that ensure today that no matter what the weather is there is no dearth of
sports in one’s leisure.
Leisure, of course, neglected as it is, being the operative word here. In almost a century, more than a few
sport forms have developed into whopping worldwide phenomena, annually, seasonally (literally
speaking), once in two couple years and so on. The drama, or melodrama, the money involved, the
cheerleaders, the drugs or not, and the high voltage politics cushioning sports and sport stars, amidst
changing rules of the game, association constitutions and glamorous sport stars (who often fall before their
rise), has the world wrapped in the last four pages of every paper daily. It is difficult to look at the sporting
arena today and imagine this was actually something one did at “leisure” once upon a time.
Of course, that is not to demean professional sportsmanship in any way. Yet the kind of hideous and
insensitive reactions one sees after a lost match, or crazy fanfare that could lead to the end of sporting
careers (read Monika Seles in particular), political wielding (Ganguly and Paes got the boot, but who’s
going to forget K.P.S. Gill in Hockey?) and the gallons of money poured into games makes one wonder at
how much sport is a uniting factor (as many have and will point about India and its neighbour) and how
much is it a diversion tactic to drag the unhappy middle class away from socio-economic problems.
This special edition of e-expresso tries to find a platform between technology, society and sports, as our
columnists explore kaleidoscopic dimensions of sports in our lives. This will also be my last editorial as my
team of editors and I relinquish control of our little beloved coffee house to the next hosting batch.
As they say, the flames of the torch never says die!!
IEEE Chairperson and Student Editor
3