I want a life in hockey. Perhaps the pitch will reveal that I am not the person I imagined myself to be. If so, let me discover that there. Let the failure be earned. I can live with that.
A few dreams of life retreat instead into that obscure interior province of the mind where unrealized possibilities acquire a strange durability, neither sufficiently alive to be called plans nor sufficiently dead to be called memories.
I have often wondered whether this is the peculiar psychology of vocation. I could not become a player, and I have no wish to sentimentalize that fact; but my inability to enter the game through the playing field did not extinguish my attachment to it.
On the contrary, it compelled me towards its margins (history, tactics, writing, analysis and intellectual structures), and eventually towards the possibility of entering it through another door–as an umpire and, perhaps one day, a technical official. What began as an unfulfilled sporting ambition has therefore become uncertain whether the institutions governing that game will ever permit such belonging to become a livelihood.
Raghu Prasad (photo courtesy Rediff)
There is, I think, a peculiar humiliation in having to explain such a desire to a world which has already decided what constitutes a respectable ambition. The difficulty begins when the individual discovers that his inward vocation does not correspond with the outward economy of opportunity. One may have spent years becoming intellectually equipped for one kind of life while remaining temperamentally drawn towards another, and the result is what I would call vocation drift. It is not that one ceases to desire the former; rather, one learns the disciplines of postponement, and postponement, if repeated often enough, begins to resemble renunciation.
This peculiar erosion has shaped my own relation to hockey. I became an after player who, having been denied the most obvious entrance into the game, continues to search for another. The more closely I studied hockey, the more convinced I became that one need not have been a great player to possess a profound relationship with the game.
I do not romanticize umpiring, nor do I mistake the whistle for a symbol of easy authority. The international umpire must know the rules with sufficient precision that they become almost instinctive. Yet, he must not become so mechanical in their application that he loses sight of the human circumstances in which those rules acquire meaning. In this sense, umpiring possesses a curious kinship with hermeneutics. The good umpire sees the developing collision before the collision, the emotional temperature before the argument, and the tactical consequence before the spectator has understood the tactical event.
Yet the more closely I have considered the profession, the more obvious another difficulty becomes, and it is considerably less philosophical than the question of judgment: Can a person afford to become an umpire in India? It is a question which sounds almost vulgar when placed beside the elevated language of sporting development, but perhaps precisely because it is vulgar it has been insufficiently asked.
We speak endlessly of experience, exposure, development and international standards, as though these were virtues that could be acquired through enthusiasm. But experience requires appointments; appointments require travel; travel requires money; accreditation requires money; fitness requires money; international tournaments require money; and, perhaps most importantly, the time required to become an excellent official is itself an economic resource.
This produces the remunerative void and career friction, which is rarely dramatic; it consists instead of small and individually defensible obstacles which, when accumulated, become decisive. I have encountered the smaller, almost comic face of this problem myself. I have gone to one-day invitational tournaments, given my time and expertise, and returned with a shawl and a memento. I do not object to either; indeed, I understand the cultural generosity behind the gesture.
Photo courtesy Hockey India
But a shawl is not professional remuneration, just as a memento cannot constitute a career. The railway does not accept gratitude, the hotel does not accept ceremonial recognition, and the institutions through which one acquires further qualifications do not accept applause as payment.
This is the shawl-economy, a peculiarly Indian tendency to substitute symbolic honor for material recognition, and when it becomes sufficiently entrenched it develops into what I would call mementocracy, a system in which contribution is remembered rather than remunerated. The distinction may seem pedantic until one attempts to construct a professional life upon it.
In India, the person who loves hockey is expected to finance his own attachment to hockey; his willingness to endure is then interpreted as evidence of the institution’s generosity rather than as evidence of his own sacrifice. Perhaps this is why the problem has become personal for me. I have spent years constructing a professional identity around education, research, and writing. I have studied, published, taught, analyzed, and written because I believed, as many educated people are encouraged to believe, that intellectual cultivation would eventually produce a reasonably stable professional existence.
Yet beneath that acquired identity there has remained a persistent desire to work in hockey. I can write about hockey, study hockey, analyze hockey, and think about hockey. Yet, these activities do not necessarily grant the one thing I have increasingly wanted – the right to say that hockey is my profession.
Hockey has been near enough to shape my intellectual life, yet sufficiently distant to prevent me from making that relationship economically secure. Such an exile is not dramatic enough for tragedy and not trivial enough for indifference. It is a prolonged ambiguity, and ambiguity, when endured for years, develops its own melancholy.
The modern language of meritocracy is uncomfortable here because it encourages us to believe that talent naturally finds its way to the surface. It does not always do so. Talent requires an ecology. Without opportunity, mentorship, money, time and institutional encouragement, talent can remain invisible.
A serious hockey system ought to understand this. If India genuinely wants Indian umpires at World Cups, the answer cannot be confined to the familiar complaint that our officials require greater international exposure.
Certainly, they do. But it must be funded, organized and sustained. There must be a credible development pathway beginning with meaningful domestic appointments and extending through technical education, fitness preparation, communication and cultural training, mentorship by experienced officials, performance analytics, video assessment and carefully structured international exposure.
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There must be a financial progression sufficiently intelligible that a young official can look at the pathway and reasonably conclude that excellence may eventually become a livelihood. Without such a progression, the pathway becomes a filter which selects not merely for talent but for the ability to finance one’s own development.
Allow me to be dangerously vulnerable, a bit. Indian hockey lacks structures that can turn love for the game into sustainable professional usefulness. Many who cannot become players may possess the tactical intelligence, discipline, temperament, and judgment required to become umpires, officials, analysts, or administrators. Yet, when institutions demand experience without financing the process of acquiring it, passion is forced to subsidize professionalism.
I want a life in hockey, the discipline, responsibility, and authority of the whistle. Perhaps I will fail. Perhaps the pitch will reveal that I am not the person I imagined myself to be. If so, let me discover that there. Let the failure be earned honestly. I can live with that.
What I find harder to accept is the possibility of never knowing, and spending a lifetime standing at the edge of the game, understanding its language, loving its rhythms, studying its history, and still never being allowed to discover whether I could have belonged to it.
