Life too is a game!

When the Indian cricket team does well, the whole nation is in jubilation. When it fails, the entire country goes into mourning. Heroes turn into villains overnight, and again into heroes when they manage to win.

It is sad; not the team not doing well, but a whole nation caught up in something so insignificant. Ours is a country with a tradition and culture that is well over 5000 years old. Not even the marauding Moguls and the colonizing Europeans could destroy our culture. This culture was built upon the teaching that one should look at success and failure in the same manner, with equanimity.

An imported game that one writer famously said was eleven fools playing and eleven thousand fools watching is now taking a whole nation on a roller coaster of emotional rides. What for!

You may say, it is only a game. I say to you, you whole life is a game!

When you watch you team play poorly and you cringe as the wickets fall, it is not a game for you. So many things seem to be at stake; your pride, for instance. The patriotism that you never felt when a fellow Indian asked for help in a foreign land suddenly surfaces and your blood boils. How can these guys let my country down?

You watch a movie. You know it is not real. Yet, you cry, you laugh, you jump and shout. When the projection stops, all you have is a blank screen.

So is your life. Whatever you experience is another game and another movie. It is real when you experience it. It is very real when you get hurt, when you bleed and you are in pain. It is very real when you eat your favorite sweet and you enjoy the taste.

When you treat life as a game, and the game too as a game, you truly start enjoying the experience. You can leave your emotions behind as the experience passes.

Do not carry the emotions with you. It is that connection which disturbs you. When you expect the team to win, and they lose, you feel sorrow. When you hope to get promoted, and your colleague is promoted instead, you feel sorrow, jealousy and vengeance, all combined.

The choice is yours, whether to watch the game knowing it is only a game and enjoying it, or to wallow in sorrow treating it as real.