Thank You,
You have shown me
The way to the well.
Where I can drink
When my mouth is dry.
Where I can bathe
When my skin is sullied.
Where I can be refreshed
When my eyes are weary.

The way to the well
Is strewn with stones.

The way to the well
Is the way home.

Funny how in simple moments like sitting on the Victoria Line, hurtling through London’s network of tube tunnels, listening to the notes of Tracy Chapman’s voice, surrounded by sound, slipping through the seemingly mundane world, I feel so alive.

Beautiful how in such moments one can feel a deep sense of one’s own consciousness and some delicate intricacy of life’s weavings.

“Can they not see that this conduct ultimately leads to violence?”, a remark made by a French friend of mine recently. He was really upset by the world cup final incident largely because of the conduct of the players. Speaking yesterday, Zidane said “My act is not forgivable, but they must also punish the true guilty party, and the guilty party is the one who provokes.” In this light, do we condemn the violence or the conduct which causes it?

Zizou was under immense pressure in the final - the whole French team had been formed around him, and the final result arguably rested heavily on his shoulders. It was one of these shoulders which was almost dislocated in an Italian challenge just prior to his headbutting incident as he was relentlessly marked and hounded by the Italian team. However, Materazzi took the hounding to a new level by insulting Zidane’s family on top of nipple tweaking, shirt pulling and all the other crude insults. If you take a man and pile more and more pressure on him, at some point he will break. To me, the measure of the man is how much pressure he can take before that point is reached. In Zidane’s case, I take the measure of his worth as pretty high. Read more…

In a moment of testosterone-fuelled animality, a billion viewers cried in shocked unison, “what on earth is Zidane doing?” For, the captain of France’s football team, in their chase for the World Cup, had just launched a charging headbutt at Italian player Materazzi, knocking him to the ground. The Frenchman was shown the red card and sent off the pitch.

It was an iconic moment – one that will surely be stamped into the collective memory of this year’s tournament and of Zidane’s largely brilliant career. This was his last game before retirement and the manner in which he chose to exit left the crowd dazed with tension and confusion.

The game seemed to sour from that moment on. It became difficult to root for France… They had lost the moral advantage. Read more…

“The darkness of evolutionary night began to fade centuries ago when the first ape-like creature deserted his tree-branch kingdom and shambled out into the light of the plain. He was guided by something he could not understand: something un-apelike and impossible for his comrades. Somehow, somewhere in his seething body chemistry, something had changed. In his brain lay the seed of humanity; in his strangely bright eyes, the dark shadow of a hidden dream.
Read more…