All this talk of "attacking football" and "direct play" — mone, I see it and I think of my daughter’s MBA case studies. They always say, keep the ball, control the tempo, don’t panic when the pressure comes. That is FC Goa's doi maach — slow, patient, the fish absorbing the mustard until it's perfect. My guava tree never grew fruit in a hurry either; the best ones wait for the sun. If we throw away the ball too quick, we are just feeding the other team’s profit, na? That is not progress.

Mone, when my daughter was small, the Ganga near Rishikesh looked like a different river — I saw it from the train window, chhele, all frothing white, and thought, "If the government had the sense to share the water fairly, nobody would need a raft to cross their own sorrow." These kayak-lads spend lakhs on carbon-fibre paddles, but the monsoon damp still gets into their safety gear the same way it gets into my account books — nobody talks about the mould that eats the foam from inside, like the neglect that eats our villages from inside.