An Unwise Imbalance: Overpaid Sports! Underpaid Artists!

Sports is an invaluable part of education. It teaches more life skills - team work, perseverance, determination, grit, willingness to work through difficulties and fatigue on the way to success and fair play - than many other activities put together.

Sports is also an amazing way to stay fit and you gain flexibility, strength and stamina while enjoying yourself tremendously.

But when it comes to sports as a profession, only a very few that have a clear well defined aesthetic and artistic aspect at the level of composition - such as figure skating - make sense.

Any activity *must* make a tangible, recognizable, contribution to society to qualify as a valid profession. Most sports do not meet this criterion 😊.

We pay way too much to watch people making runs, scoring goals, winning and losing - activities that are alright for short term fun but make no long term contribution - while we pay too little to artists, poets and musicians, who make this world a more beautiful place, or teachers, nurses, soldiers and (hawaldaars) police constables, who keep our society educated, healthy and safe.

The general principle must be to insist that sportsmen also engage themselves with professions that make a contribution to society (this can of course include coaching!). And we must rethink our readiness to give away crores of rupees to sportsmen while severely underpaying many other useful professions.

Our priorities are upside down. Hence the world also always seems full of trouble and upside down 😊. The way to start correcting the world is to start correcting our priorities 😊.

PS 1: Any sport that results in serious injury or death is an idiotically designed sport. Given my personal background, my favourite example is the cricket ball! It is embarassing that with all our knowledge of material science we are unable to design a ball that swings, seams, spins, but does not injure and kill.

PS 2: And yeah, don't just watch sports, go out and play one 😊! That's what will give you the real pleasure as well as health benefits 😊!