So, I was sucking at sport as always and this time particularly at table tennis and making an ass out of myself, until I met this short but affable guy, who was playing with his friends at the adjacent table, with a bunch of non-players like me. For every serve he plays and there goes the opponent’s bat right up the sky as if they were replicating the shots of MSD from world cup finale, and there was this chimpanzee jumping around the table as if it is not table tennis but ‘who wins the Super-Mario crown’, the other star fish girl, she is a real limelight stealer. It has been weeks since we used to play at our games arena post lunch and it has become my habit to observe these characters every day. and on one fine day I noticed improvement in each one of them. I mean come on, this society cannot straighten up a dog’s tail but something has surely taught these chimpanzees and star fish to play table tennis.
Then I remembered, it wasn’t much of a miracle because I recall hearing the phrases during our play, nice, awesome, what a shot, it will go – it will go, keep on, now that is called a shot and let me remind you these words of wisdom weren’t the ones, I heard post miracle. but those were the words of encouragement which has made the transformation during their naivety. Sometimes it happened so that, I have seen others play a normal pass and heard him praising and brimming each one of them with the confidence they needed to be in the field, to not give up because of some silly shots or because someone might be watching or laughing. because the aura that he was scintillating around that table, was sort of a shield to fight both the inner doubts and the outer prejudices to keep these at bay and lure them to just play with their full focus on the table.
And then I look back and ponder over my sport interests and see that bucket completely unused, and wishing to had someone like this ‘guy at the TT table’ at my early days of sporting. I guess we all have encountered this lack of support at different stages of our life, which could have made a huge impact on our lives to become what we all have always dreamt of. may be a supporting father for a salsa dancer, a supporting friend to win an argument, a supporting mother for a women cricket player, a good mentor to get you through the bridge and all it takes is the simplest words of encouragement in its purest form. Imagine the power of this composition of sound and vibrations which can be as transient as a real person’s effort, which can really help someone to jump from bad to good, good to better and to the best.
Wonder what a society would have been if we had so many like this ‘guy at the TT table’, around us, if we could just try to be like him once in a day. I believe we all can make a difference and make someone good at something with just two words of encouragement. I have mine, do you have yours?
