A is for Aficionado
I’m so excited to kick off with the letter A!
If you missed my last blog, this year I want to see what stories come from using just the alphabet as a prompt. So I bought a physical dictionary - it’s oddly nostalgic to see one - to choose a word from the letter of the week.
This week is…
Let’s go.
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Aficionado: an enthusiastic fan of an activity
I’m a sucker for an activity - it’s why I love living in Melbourne, there are always so many unique ones to choose from.
Axe throwing, bootscootin, sea shanty singing, running away from zombies in virtual reality, smashing plates with a bat, re-enacting dance moves to the Wuthering Heights song en masse (my personal favourite) - tell me where and when and I’ll be there. I’ll try almost anything twice.
But I am an aficionado of no activity. I deeply obsess over one activity for a short period then I move on to the next one. I don’t know if it’s because I lack a certain passion gene, the one that would have me live, breathe and die for one activity.
Even with comedy, the activity that currently gets me out of bed every morning - I like it for the foreseeable future. I love being on stage then watching everyone else on the lineup. But I can’t guarantee that I won’t wake up one day and think, oh - next.
There are comedy aficionados out there who can quote the punchlines of many comedians and spend their free time watching everything they can fix their eyeballs on. I avoid them at parties.
But I am slightly jealous. Am I ever going to find that activity that hooks me so hard and grabs me so completely that I must consume every aspect of it voraciously, like a hungry giant who has woken from a deep slumber and just remembered what food is? Or am I not made that way?
Charlie - my husband - is so different. If he loves a song, he’ll do a deep dive on the artist’s whole back catalogue. If he loves a movie, he’ll do a deep dive on the director, the cast and all the behind the scenes clips. He’s a fount of information on a range of topics and definitively meets the definition of aficionado on three.
He lives, breathes, eats and sleeps the AFL (Aussie rules football), politics and AFL politics. His YouTube algorithm comprises a combination of all three. After years together, he knows that I can only pretend to be interested for a moment before my eyes glaze over and I mentally moonwalk to a place where I never sat down next to him on the couch and casually asked, What’s going on?
When I watch him arguing with the television during a game or a press briefing, I wonder if it’s hard to care so deeply. Is it better to feel passionate about a few things for a long time or obsessed with many things for a short time? I think the former may be a deeper experience of life but it comes with significant risk because you don’t seem to get to choose your obsessions.
It seems to be a force that enters you and overrides all your rational functions. Every time I read about another body discovered on Mount Everest thanks to the always melting snow, I think about how many steps removed I am from ever joining the 300 strong body count of people who perished trying to get onto a summit they could have easily looked at and said, oh - nah.
Perhaps my way is not worse it’s different - I do get a wider experience because of my jumpy attention span. My most recent obsession is kabaddi, a game that is watched by hundreds of millions around the globe, but one that I only heard of because it’s the national sport of Bangladesh and my dad worked in Dhaka many years ago.
My brother and I thought he was making up the rules he relayed to us on a video call from Dhaka because a) it sounded bonkers and b) if it was as popular as he claimed, we would have heard about it.
He wasn’t kidding. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard about a sport that is the most watched behind only cricket in India. And one that women are boss in.
Its been played for centuries across Asia but - much like AFL - its rules are generally only known by people who live on, or have visited, the continent.
In a kabaddi game there are two teams on opposite ends of a court. There is a line in the middle dividing them. One player (called a raider) must to the opponent’s zone, tag as many players on the other team as possible, without getting tagged themselves, and return to the safety of their home zone.
It sort of looks like a mix between tag in a school courtyard and wrestling.
The rule that sounds made up is that each raider must do all this in a single breath. And to prove that they’re not taking multiple breaths, the whole time that they’re in the opponent’s zone, they have to repeatedly say: kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi.
Try to say it while breathing in. Do it, I’ll wait.
I know, it was a total surprise to me that it can’t be done.
Who thought this up?! There are differing opinions on where it started. Some say it was in India over two thousand years ago - kabaddi is a Tamil word combining the words ‘hand’ and ‘catch’. Others say it was in Iran about five thousand years ago, where the game is called ‘zu’.
Whatever the source, it’s been played for a really long time with both the Buddha and Lord Krishna noted in ancient texts as playing kabaddi. Not many sports can claim religious figures as former players.
I watched my first live game last month when an exhibition game was held in Melbourne for the first time. It was at the John Cain Arena and it was a team of Indian athletes taking on former AFL players.
If I woke up knowing I’d have to be a raider on a court outnumbered seven to one by former AFL players, I would call in sick.
The team of Indian athletes won, by a lot. The whole game was genuinely impressive - there is no ball to distract the opponents, all you can use is your body. I don’t know how anyone got any tags in without getting tagged themselves.
I’m hoping my attention will hold to watch the Kabaddi World Cup in March this year - it’ll be held outside Asia for the first time ever, in the West Midlands of the UK.
Unfortunately, I’m cursed to know that my attention will wane long before I hold any chance of becoming a kabaddi aficionado. There are too many other activities to obsess about out there and the next one is always just around the corner.
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Okay that was fun! Next week we hit the letter B.
I hope you’ve had a good start to the year. My shows are now on sale for Singapore and Melbourne and I’m appearing at the Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka soon.
Big hugs,
Sashi
P.S Are you an anything aficionado?
Please come to the West Midlands UK to Watch the kabaddi World Cup and you know, do a show for us here as well! 🥰
I love west coast swing. Google the jack and Jill competitions. They are a lot of fun.