Seeking heaven...

The year 2006 draws to a close and along with it comes the dawn of another year. Not that the passing of an year holds any more significance than waking up to another day... 'cause personally I dont give a damn about these passing milestones that people around me keep tom-tomming about. I mean ya, we might go out 'n kinda get drunk and ogle at other women, talk about how crappy the job scene is, bitch about a few people who aren’t around us and hog on the food that is served...I mean more or less we do the things that we generally do when we hang out with others. We maintain a semblance of political correctness depending on the crowd we are with...but no big deal.

I didn’t want to write about what 2006 meant to me or if 2007 is going to bring me nirvana...'cause am sure, life will still be as beautiful as it was till now and I will still try 'n be myself...which means I will remain the bastard I am. I just wish I could muster up enough energy and drive to concentrate on my writings.

Lemme just try and jot down a few lines about some of the sports personalities of 2006. In the world of sports, there have been a lot of sporting icons, who defined and epitomised greatness by their single minded devotion to enhancing the craft with which they identified themselves. These are those greats who have stood the test of time, competition, fame and everything that today’s world of hype and hyperbole bestowed on them. In today’s competitive world, where sporting excellence is accompanied by commercial interests...these few people have strode over their individual sporting arenas as colossus who wrote their own scripts and left in their wakes pretenders - amongst whom you would find highly skilled practitioners, but who remain just that practitioners and pretenders.

Michael Schumacher. Tiger Woods. Roger Federer. Shane Warne. Ian Thorpe

These are few gentlemen who lit up their areas of sports and tread a new path and became master practitioners of their chosen areas of specialization. These men sought boundaries and horizons and plundered through, breaking traditions, records and hearts of other mere mortals who tried in vain to keep pace with them.

Tennis is elevated to the stature of a Rembrandt painting, when you see Roger Federer execute a near impossible forehand cross court that finds the spot just an inch from the baseline, a Tiger Woods put that traverses a curvaceous path towards the hole or Schumacher’s deftness and control of a machine taken to the limits of its capabilities. When sports is taken to a realm of artistic brilliance, they illuminate a path that till then was not visible to other exponents.

These few men tread to a different tune…a different drummers beat, that rang only in the recesses of their minds where they fought against…not their fellow competitors, but against themselves...against the limits of excellence. Seeking heaven, seeking perfection.

As Richard Bach wrote, heaven is not a place Jonathan…heaven is perfection.