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Cameroon, football and Nixon

Syed Badrul Ahsan
HERE'S the unabashed truth: 1 am a nonsports person. Yet I have been going around telling people why I am a Cameroon partisan at this year's World Cup football. And I have been getting strange looks, followed within seconds by loud guffaws. The other night I waited for Cameroon to win. It did not. My combative friend Sadya was soon texting me: "Your Cameroon lost." I went back to Charles de Gaulle, and paraphrasing his eloquent view of
France's capitulation to the Nazis in 1940, told her: "Cameroon has lost a battle. She has not lost the war."
Now, you may not agree with me. Maybe Cameroon will once again turn out to have been a mere blip on the global football screen. That is not the point. The point is that some people should be out there to speak up for the underdogs of the world, a thought you may not agree with. Well, dissent is a democratic right. It is also a huge spur to informed argument. But let me not digress. I will come straight to the point. Over these past many days, I have been travelling, with something of intensity if not intrepidity, through Argentina and Brazil and France and Germany and what not, here in the rainy, rather humid soil and sizzling weather of Bangladesh.
Of course I refer to the World Cup. Now, I have nothing against football, having played the game to my heart's content for quite a significant number of years of my life. I stopped playing it when I was ten. And that, I keep telling myself, was not very long ago. You will, I presume, not agree with me. Believe you me, I once scored ten goals on an empty field. All the other players were then reclining against the pine trees around the field. They were too tired to play. And that included the goalkeeper.
But let that be. Let us get back to this World Cup affair. As things stand in this city today, perhaps in other regions of the country too, there is a ubiquity of foreign flags hanging from nearly every window and rising on every rooftop, so much so that you might be lulled into thinking that this country has suddenly been peopled by men and women come from South American and Europe. That got a bureaucrat, a deputy commissioner to be precise, annoyed here. A true patriot, he decreed a ban on a flying of foreign flags. He was soon followed by a minister. Jaws dropped, smiles vanished. Those two men appeared to be telling us that those foreign flags in Bangladesh were slicing away at the country's sovereignty. But then the prime minister intervened. Good that she did. She came down firmly on the side of the flag flyers. Good to know she is still head of government. And Bangladesh is yet a free country. Our sovereignty remains undefiled.
That said, people will have every reason to make their soccer preferences known. The problem, though, is in all that chaos of the flags. Let me not crib here. It is perfectly all right to back a country in a game, maybe even in international politics. But whether it is all right as well for you to drench your streets and your cities in foreign colours just because you love foreign football teams is something else. It is a matter not to be made light of, mind you.
Have you noticed that a lot of Bengalis have also taken to displaying the Argentine and Brazilian flags on their vehicles, which happens to be quite a bother? And it is because once you spot such a vehicle near you or approaching you, you are quite liable to think that the ambassador of either of these countries is passing by... until you realise it is one of your own kinsmen happily engaged in sports propaganda for the country of his choice. Come to think of it, you can't really do anything about it. Ah, but can't you, really? Think of any other country where you will come across such a ubiquity of foreign flags. You will likely spot none.
No, do not get me wrong. Far be it for me to question anyone's patriotism here. And sports go beyond frontiers. Anyone who tries to inject politics here deserves to be put into the doghouse, unless of course you have alternatives in hand. But what really puts you on edge here is the thought of these football fans' inability to demonstrate their World Cup preferences in a more subtle way.
They could do it through conversations, through high-pitched arguments if you like. But plastering an entire locality or city with non-Bangladeshi flags is really going overboard in a demonstration of excitement.
Ah, well! Don't forget that in all these years some idiosyncracies have crept into the way we think. In our general deportment there is something which speaks to us of the beauty of things foreign or alien. Think of all the people who regularly speak in public, on television or somewhere else. Think of yourself, if you don't really take offence at my effrontery, if it is effrontery. In our quotidian conversations, the chances are that we will bring in English terms and phrases when we really shouldn't. Don't you find it a tad disturbing when a Bengali, despite being acquainted fully with his own language, deliberately or carelessly injects English words into his conversation? Language, you see, is a matter of delight... as long as you do not make a mess of it.
But enough of polemics! Let us go see how many more Argentine and Brazilian flags have come up in the neighbourhood. And if you spot a Cameroon flag in all that crowd, do let me know. I love people who fall and get up again. It is one reason why I loved Richard Nixon. I still do.