The Cup of Life

Having watched football for over a decade now, I was quite confident that I’d watched all kinds of violence in the relatively tame European football. Of course, Joey Barton gave us all kinds of off-field violence, including dousing his lit cigarette in his teammate’s eye. European football is quite tame, protecting players from even raised studs by immediately declaring fouls for such an offence. I’ve even seen the relatively rare studs-up challenges which have resulted in broken legs and broken ankles. Elbowing isn’t seen too often, but it is prevalent.

International football’s most famous incident will always be French and Real Madrid great Zinedine Zidane’s head butt on villainous Italian defender Marco Materazzi. There has been no incident that has been covered in greater detail, no foul which has had a greater impact on football, no stage greater than the finals of the FIFA World Cup, than this straight red card in the France vs. Italy World Cup 2006 final. Eight years have passed, and there is still no clarity on what Materazzi said that caused Zidane to head butt him. Even though this happened in the 110^th minute, just a few minutes before the teams went to a penalty shoot-out, Zidane was the fulcrum of the mental strength of the French side. Without their penalty-taking maestro, the French national team collapsed in the penalty shoot-out with David Trezeguet missing a vital penalty to hand Italy the World Cup. Did exhaustion get the better of Zidane? Did Materazzi really have something “foul” to say to Zidane? We might never know.

Another one of those horrible World Cup matches was termed The Battle of Nuremberg. It was a Round of 16 game between Portugal and The Netherlands at the 2006 FIFA World Cup. This match set a record for the highest number of sending-offs and yellow cards in a single match. There were 4 red cards and an astonishing 16 yellow cards in this ill-tempered match. Deco and Costinha were sent off for Portugal, and Boulahrouz and van Bronckhorst for the Dutch. Even though the Portuguese won the match, the number of players with single yellow cards who would later be suspended for the semi-finals was too huge for them to overcome. The Netherlands were similarly horrible in the final game of the 2010 World Cup where Nigel de Jong only received a free-kick against him for a chest high tackle on Spain’s Xabi Alonso.

This brings me to my real reason for writing this post. The minute I saw Suarez bite Chiellini, I knew that that was the end of the World Cup for the Uruguayan maniac/genius. He had bit far too many people before. Luis Suarez had already been suspended for 10 matches for biting Branislav Ivanovic in an FA Cup game. This time, he has been banned for 9 matches and 4 months. This means that he will miss the rest of Uruguay’s campaign in the World Cup and 10 matches for Liverpool in the PL season as well as Liverpool’s whole group stage at the Champions League. It is a pity why such a brilliant player has to resort to such childish tricks to gain attention. Unfortunately, that same player is going to miss the biggest stages of football due to indiscipline.

 

Temple of the King

She contemplated the meaning of life. But for the life of her, she couldn’t figure it out. She realized that she was going down a hopeless path. The answer to why Yusuf took this drastic step was beyond her imagination. What possessed him to vent his anger in this way was what only he could answer.

But what was done was done. Pooja’s face was destroyed forever. No amount of plastic surgery by the best surgeons in the world could help her regain her old face. Her life was over. She remembered the days when she would win praise for her almond-shaped eyes, her aquiline nose, her full lips and her long smooth hair. Those days were over now. She would have to live out the rest of her life in ignominy.

She got up from her bed to look at her face for the thousandth time in a mirror. She could not believe what had happened to it. The skin, which had recently been re-repaired by Bombay’s most prominent plastic surgeon, appeared sloughed off even though she could barely look at herself in the mirror.

She had spent weeks sobbing to herself and to her friends, her family and anyone she could find solace with. She remembered the days when she was madly in love with Yusuf and him with her. They spent the monsoons together, the summers together and the winters in each other’s company. She had never felt better in life than when she was with him. They had met at a mutual friend’s party about 4 years back and he had seemed dreamy and carefree. She fell in love with his personality immediately, and she guessed that the same had happened with him. He wooed her for a long time and she finally agreed to go out with him. All was hunky-dory until a few months back.

Her parents had decided that she could not be permitted to marry a guy whose religious beliefs did not match theirs. They had arranged for a very rich guy for her, a boy she’d known since she was a kid and whose family knew theirs for decades.

When she told Yusuf this, he seemed to handle it pretty well. But she did not know the rage that he hid behind his cool demeanour. He was jealous of the man who was going to get the girl of his life, the girl of his dreams. But instead of hurting the other guy, he decided that if he couldn’t have Pooja, no one could have her.

And as it turns out, no one would want her after this. She was ugly, she was hideous. But she had to keep her courage up. She could not wait for Yusuf to be punished for what he had done to her. In the back of her mind, as she flicked through the pages of a glossy magazine, she knew she was missing out on the happiest years of her life. Yes, the once beautiful Pooja was jealous of the models in the magazine who seemed so happy.

Novocaine

It all started 5 years ago. It was a good week for me in my second year of engineering. I’d started with football practice again and I was feeling ecstatic to have passed the first year so easily. Suddenly, in the middle of practice, I felt a twinge in my back. It was a nice, cool day and I ignored the pain and went back to lectures.

After college was done that day, I went home and told my mother about the twinge. She wasn’t worried and applied some Relispray to my back. I carried the aerosol can to college the next day, thinking it was just a muscle spasm that might return. The same thing happened that day and I decided I should stop playing for a while.

A week later, and my back still ached. My mom decided it was high time we consulted a friend of hers, Dr. Shishir Shah to check if there was a problem with my back. We went to him and after a quick diagnosis, he asked us to get an X-Ray scan of my back.

We went to a nearby Radiology clinic and got a quick scan done. As soon as we took our scan back to the doctor, he said within minutes that I had tuberculosis. The tuberculosis was in a state called a pleural effusion, which means it wasn’t a pulmonary/contagious form of tuberculosis. I heaved a sigh of relief at that. Since then, I have had an unbreakable bond with my medicines. I was started out on the basic Tuberculosis medication called AKT-4 and as my condition fluctuated between horrible and better, the bond between my drugs strengthened or weakened. But it was unbreakable. To this day, I take my pills religiously and will have to do so for another year or two.

My condition didn’t cure quickly because what the doctors treating me didn’t realize was that I had a condition called multi-drug resistant tuberculosis or MDR-TB, in which the patient is resistant to most first line drugs and some second line drugs. This resulted in me wasting 3 years of my life battling a condition which has plagued our city for a decade now and continues to because of the apathy of people.

So, I was in and out of hospital for the past 3 years, battling an illness which caused me meningitis which worsened my condition and which has resulted in me still taking my pills to prevent seizures. But I cannot deny that I am grateful to my doctors and these pills, with which I’ve formed an unbreakable bond, and which have kept me alive and in moderately good health. Enough to attend college and write these stories and which have me looking forward to a better future, a disease-free future.