Live India, Love Football

I was recently listening to my new favorite podcast called ‘Wisdom of the Sages’ and one of the hosts shared an interesting analogy. He said that if we want to successfully navigate life's challenges, we just need to ‘learn how to surf.' What this means is that life is like an ocean and the waves are all of what life throws at us over and over and over again.  We can either let the waves push us down to the surface or drag us to a place where we don’t want to go. Or we can learn how to surf; maintain our balance and make best efforts to determine our own path on the face of each wave knowing that the rest is out of our control.    Covid-19 is a tidal wave that is only gaining momentum and most people are either swimming wildly to stay afloat or on the verge of getting pulled under. Over the past six months, I’ve primarily had the experience of just being able to keep my head above water for long enough to come up with a plan to ensure survival before getting knocked down ...

There are already countless articles, podcasts, blog posts and WhatsApp messages talking about things to do, read, watch, listen to, download and think about during this period of COVID-19 lockdown.  There are also countless articles, podcasts, blog posts and WhatsApp messages talking about how we should practice not doing anything during this period as well.  It can all be quite confusing, kind of like when you read an article from a reputed source about how milk is good for your bones and then, on the same day, come across another article from a different reputed source about how milk gives you cancer. In life, I’ve found that it works better to abstain from letting any external sources over-influence my decisions and, ultimately, try my best to make choices based on what just feels right for me.  This is exactly what I have been doing for the past 1.5 months during this period of forced quarantine.    And, right now, what feels right...

These are truly unique times.  I feel that I’m living in a movie or parallel Universe, sitting at home every day praying that the Pandemic which has killed so many people and paralyzed the entire world just disappears into thin air.  While I wait for this miracle to occur, my team and I have committed to delivering what we promised our students at the Global Institute of Sports Business (GISB), high quality, industry-designed sports management education and this is exactly what we have been able to accomplish over the past month. We never prepared for a situation where we would not be able to access our state-of-the-art campus in Mumbai for an extended period of time and had to act fast as soon as it became clear that the Coronavirus was not going away any time soon. The first thing we did was begin compiling all of the best content that our students could consume during the lockdown period so that default habits of mindless television watching and random social media br...

When I first moved to India in 2009, I was pleasantly surprised with how much the younger generation in the country - especially in tier 1 cities - loved consuming the Premier League. Every youngster I would interact with back then would claim to be the ‘biggest Manchester United supporter on the planet’ or ‘love Didier Drogba more than anyone’ or…well you get the point. I remember a few years later at a Manchester United supporters event in Delhi, I was amazed by the number of people crying while watching Sir Alex Ferguson give his going away speech on the pitch at Old Trafford.  We were thousands of kilometers away from Manchester and most of the people crying had never even watched a Manchester United match live at the ground, yet they were balling like it was Sachin Tendulker’s testimonial. That’s the beauty of sport. I used to think that it was a one-way relationship. That us Indians liked the Premier League much more than the Premier League liked us. That was unti...