My little two year old breaks into a dance the moment she hears music. I wonder why I cannot be so uninhibited.
She always announces exactly how she feels about anything. I cannot. It seems pointless to announce "I am sad!" or "I am happy". Which adult does that?
She says "I love you" with the ease that only a child can possess. I cannot. That's not something adults say.
She eats only when she is hungry. She does not feel the need to sit down and eat three times a day just because those have been designated as meal times.
When she does eat, she eats with all her senses. Every meal is an adventure, an orgy of smell, sight and touch. I eat mostly because its something I have to do. For adults most meals are brief punctuations in the daily routine.
She wears what she wants. She picks clothes in an instinctive way. She does not care if pink and yellow do not go well together. Adults dress for others. With us its more about how others think we look. A child will never ask you "How do I look Mommy?" because she is sure that she looks great. The Mommy on the other hand......
She is comfortable naked. Totally not self-conscious about her body. We adults on the other hand get nervous at the swimming pool wondering how are bodies are being perceived.
She moves on and never lingers on a past issues. She will never tell me two days later that she was hurt by my refusal to take her to the park. Adults on the other hand.......we will hang on to a perceived slight for days.
And then she will "grow up". Become more of an adult. Responsible, practical, calculating, the child in her gone forever.
I have posted a link to a talk on children's education. It talks about how we need to tap into our inner child to be creative and how our education system is built to kill that kind of creativity.
How schools kill creativity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
The Little Giants
Sachin Tendulkar is India's greatest sportsman. A living legend who has broken all batting records and at the age of 36 is still going strong. At 5'5", he is a small man and an anomaly in the sporting world where mutant giants are more commonly found now than ever before. The list of small men who have gone on to do great things in the sporting arena is a very small one. The lack of stature has to be compensated by a freakish talent and a scheming mind. Today a small person can all but forget about a career in sport.
Individual sports have become the domain of the big and strong. Only a team sport like soccer and basketball allow for a small person to contribute by playing a specific supporting role. Ussain Bolt and Juan Martin Del Potro are just the start of a new generation of sportsmen that are bigger than any we have seen before. Old thinking used to be that the big guys will never be able to move as well as the smaller guys but modern training methods and nutrition is resulting in big fellas who can move like cats!
Where does that leave the Indians and the Chinese? The average height of the Indian male is 5'4". How are we expected to compete in a world of giants? Maybe we need to be smart about which sports we choose to play. The reason why Indians have had success in cricket is because it is predominantly a skill-based game. Its also the reason why we produce many great batsmen and spin bowlers but not enough fast bowlers because that's when being big and strong is a prerequisite.
Soccer is one game where we might have a chance. Skill and speed on the soccer pitch can go some ways to compensate the lack of height. It would still be a huge challenge. Imagine trying to stop a rampaging Didier Drogba; all 6'2" of him! Baseball is another game where you would think that being big would not be too much of an advantage. But this is far from true: Fast pitching requires big strong bodies and so does hitting home runs off those pitches. I looked up the Yankees roster for height information and was shocked to find that Derek Jeter, who does not look too big on TV, is 6'3"!
And so I live out my sporting dreams vicariously by watching the real "giants". Nothing gives me more pleasure than watching SRT coming down the track and hitting Glenn Mcgrath (all 6'5" of him) back over his head for a six. Or watching Maradona hustle and hoodwink his way through a wall of massive defenders! It is the ultimate triumph of will over circumstance, of guile over brute force, a real-life David-v-Goliath: how can you not cheer for that?
Human height averages around the world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height
Individual sports have become the domain of the big and strong. Only a team sport like soccer and basketball allow for a small person to contribute by playing a specific supporting role. Ussain Bolt and Juan Martin Del Potro are just the start of a new generation of sportsmen that are bigger than any we have seen before. Old thinking used to be that the big guys will never be able to move as well as the smaller guys but modern training methods and nutrition is resulting in big fellas who can move like cats!
Where does that leave the Indians and the Chinese? The average height of the Indian male is 5'4". How are we expected to compete in a world of giants? Maybe we need to be smart about which sports we choose to play. The reason why Indians have had success in cricket is because it is predominantly a skill-based game. Its also the reason why we produce many great batsmen and spin bowlers but not enough fast bowlers because that's when being big and strong is a prerequisite.
Soccer is one game where we might have a chance. Skill and speed on the soccer pitch can go some ways to compensate the lack of height. It would still be a huge challenge. Imagine trying to stop a rampaging Didier Drogba; all 6'2" of him! Baseball is another game where you would think that being big would not be too much of an advantage. But this is far from true: Fast pitching requires big strong bodies and so does hitting home runs off those pitches. I looked up the Yankees roster for height information and was shocked to find that Derek Jeter, who does not look too big on TV, is 6'3"!
And so I live out my sporting dreams vicariously by watching the real "giants". Nothing gives me more pleasure than watching SRT coming down the track and hitting Glenn Mcgrath (all 6'5" of him) back over his head for a six. Or watching Maradona hustle and hoodwink his way through a wall of massive defenders! It is the ultimate triumph of will over circumstance, of guile over brute force, a real-life David-v-Goliath: how can you not cheer for that?
Human height averages around the world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height
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