Football World Cup, India, and Patriotism
A little child asked:
“As a patriot, who should I love and support in this Football World Cup?”
“If India isn’t there, then who?”
Answer: “You ask this because you don’t know where a nation begins and where it ends.
In truth, a nation begins everywhere — but this question arises because you don’t know that a nation never truly ends.”
The nation begins in you.
The nation is you, you are part of it.
Without you, there is no nation.
The nation is people like you.
Without people, there is no nation.
Mere land is not a nation.
Mere land is just land.
People created the nation for people.
The nation is also a movement of mutual protection and cooperation, for the people.
People are not for the nation — the nation is for the people.
Therefore, it is not the worship of land or nation that should happen.
Instead, what should happen is loving and honoring the people of the nation.
Loving the people of the nation is patriotism.
Patriotism that does not love the people of the nation, that sets them against each other, does not exist.
Such “patriotism” is nothing but pure malice and hypocrisy.
Patriotism is not merely loving the soil of the country.
Instead, what exists — and what should exist — is a patriotism that grows out of an expanding love for humanity.
Therefore, the one you will and should love and support most, in every way, is yourself — for your own sake.
After yourself, your love and your nation begin and grow — for your home, for your family.
Your home and family become where your love and your nation shrink and expand.
And so, just as you support yourself, your support grows beyond you — to your home and family.
But it doesn’t stop there.
From your home and family, through your neighbors, the nation grows further.
Your village and panchayat become your nation growing and changing.
Then your nation becomes your district, your state.
Then your nation expands to include the neighboring district, the neighboring state.
Growing and continuing this way, the nation expands into neighboring countries and the whole world itself.
If you and your home are not in the competition:
You will support your neighbor, your village.
You will support the neighboring village, panchayat, neighboring panchayat, district, neighboring district.
Similarly, if your country is not in the competition: your love — your patriotism — will grow from your country outward to neighboring countries, to the continent your country belongs to, to the other countries of that continent, and so on.
India is not in the Football World Cup.
India is nowhere near World Cup football.
There is little chance India will get close anytime soon.
When the World Cup expanded to 48 teams, even CuraƧao — a country with a population of barely 150,000 — made it to this World Cup.
One can’t entirely blame us: the arenas where we grow genuinely strong are the ones where we are taught to hate ourselves, where RSS-style shakha classes are held to destroy us.
The arenas where we grow genuinely strong are the ones spent hating our own people, stabbing and trampling them from behind, turning them into “traitors.”
And so, when it comes to the World Cup, you won’t know how to channel your intense patriotism.
We are living in a time when extreme, narrow nationalism is used as a smokescreen for all wrongdoings.
We are right in the middle of a time and space where hyper-nationalist sentiment is wielded as a fog of war.
That is why your question — about the World Cup, India, and patriotism — deserves serious attention.
Whether the ultra-nationalist “cow mother” brigade will demand patriotic loyalty toward Israel — the father-turned-nation, since the mother is absent — one cannot say.
There are many world sporting events and games where India shows little strength, or sometimes simply cannot qualify.
In such moments, you won’t know how to express the patriotism welling up inside you, or for whom.
Must we wail it away like donkeys in heat?
Should we become such donkeys?
Therefore, in such moments:
We must know how to define patriotism.
We must be clear about how and where patriotism begins.
We must grow our patriotism in an orderly way until we become patriots who love the entire world and everyone in it.
Thinking, learning, turning it over again and again — in ascending and descending order — we must come to understand such patriotism.
If your own country isn’t there, then the neighboring country. If not the neighboring country, then any country on the continent. Patriotism must grow this way.
All of the above was said only in terms of patriotism — only within the frame of narrow, intense nationalism.
But you must not remain trapped and confined within narrow, intense patriotism. Beyond it lies:
Your love of the game itself,
Your courage to accept truth as truth,
Your right to live with integrity to your own conscience,
Your freedom to oppose and defeat lies and cruelty, whoever commits them,
Your ability to see human beings as human beings,
The common sense that it is not the borders we drew on this earth that determine right and wrong,
Your own conviction that love — for anyone or anything — does not mean standing beside lies and cruelty within national borders,
Your own conviction that love — for anyone or anything — does not mean rejecting truth and justice simply because they lie beyond the border.
You must be able to acknowledge what is right as right, no matter whose side it comes from.
You must be able to recognize the merit of people from any land as merit.
You must have the wisdom to hold no hatred toward anyone — for any reason — in a way that leads you to commit injustice.
Your patriotism must help you hold your conscience like the needle of a scale — steady at the center.
Holding your conscience like that needle, standing as a neutral witness to everything, you must be able to see — and show others — which side of right and wrong rises and which falls.
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