Sports - A paradox!

   

     I love sports. I've played almost all sports for which my school PET room had equipment for. Like many i hate losing. So i cheated quite a few times so that i slept happily that night thinking i played better than others. As years passed i started taking wins and loses more or less equally. I started having more peaceful sleeps thinking that i exhibited better sportsmanship that day. It was then i started questioning why we play a sport. More accurately why would have humans invented sports.
     I was able to arrive at two probable reasons. One that man wanted to wile away time in a more interesting fashion. The other that man wanted to satisfy his Egoes without much of a blood shed. The second more or less goes to express a continuity with the way today's society treats sports. Most of us today love sports because its a more peaceful way of quenching ones animal instincts engulfed by ego. Probable that is why some of the widely followed sports are all about power, hitting hard, smashing and the likes.When India beats Pakistan in cricket we tend to take it as a victory in a battlefield. There have been many days when i couldn't sleep properly because India lost a match that day. But we have given sports a more elegant and Utopian picture. We have coined a term called "Sportsmanship". We try to portray sports as something which is beyond hatred. To our knowledge we treat sports as being the human activity closest to humanity (Probably that is why we have been banning a few sports terming them inhuman).
    This to me looks like a paradox. On the one hand we attribute all positive human emotions as the basis of sports. On the other each one of us including the sportsmen treat it like a war most of the times. The paradox according to me hasn't benefited sports or the society as such. Nevertheless it has great commercial value. I strongly believe that using sports as peaceful medium of exhibiting hatred is doing more bad to our civilization than good.
     Such a treatment of sports some may say is a vent for human emotions. A stress buster. While i agree with that, It can only be a temporary fix. Its like a stressed man getting relief from smoking cigar or consuming alcohol. The sooner we relieve ourselves from its clutches and start using it for the real betterment of the human community as such the better its is for the survival of the both. I strongly believe that the civilization lives only as long as sports breeds true sportsmanship not only among the players but also among the audience. Long live true sporting spirit. Long live the civilization.