Sadhguru: Sport inspires people to come together by ignoring differences

QUESTIONER: What role does sport play in community building or community harmony?

Sadhguru: India is a country where we had 365 different festivals for 365 days of the year; that means the whole culture was in a state of celebration.

Everything was a celebration. If today is ploughing day, it is a kind of celebration.

Tomorrow is planting day, another kind of celebration. Day after tomorrow is weeding, that is a celebration. Harvesting, of course, is still a celebration.

Such a celebratory culture has now slowly moved into a state of depression. A large part of the Indian population, which is in the rural areas of the country, has lost this celebratory mood completely, mainly because of a few generations of abject poverty.

Sport is a simple way of bringing this celebratory mood, to make a human being function beyond his limitations.

Sport naturally makes a human being function in a certain exuberance of life. The English expression, ‘Are you game?’ simply means ‘Are you ready for life?’ So, playing a game, or being in sport, is an essential ingredient for building a healthy life.

Physically, mentally and even for a spiritual process, it is important that one knows how to play a game. The most important thing about being in a sport is you cannot do it half-heartedly.

You can go to your work half-heartedly, you can even handle your marriage half-heartedly, but you cannot play a game half-heartedly. Unless you involve yourself, there is no game.

Absolute involvement in what you are doing is an essential part of being in sport or in a game. Why does a game of football make more than a billion people in another part of the world stand up and scream? It is just because of the level of involvement the players show.

This tremendous sense of involvement in whatever you are doing – the focus that it takes – and the human ability to stretch beyond their limits to fulfil something they wish to do at that moment are essential ingredients for a successful life.

The significant thing about sport is that it levels communities. Whoever is playing the game well becomes visible, or important. Nobody is concerned about his caste, creed or his parentage. This is the significant thing about sport, that once you are into sport, who you are and what you are doing right now becomes important – who your father was, what he was doing is not important.

Every man is valued for his worth, not for what he has been. Nobody in this country asks, ‘What caste does Mahendra Singh Dhoni belong to?’ because nobody is bothered about it; what he does on the field is all that matters to us. So sport is a huge levelling factor.

Playing games or bringing sport into communities builds a sense of community better than a million teachings that you can give. Moral teachings, scriptural teachings, religious teachings have not brought in the sense of community that sport brings in, because sport is a natural inspiration for people to be together and move together in one particular direction.

When you play a team sport, it brings in a certain sense of inclusion. When you want to play a game with a team of people, unless you bring yourself into a certain space of inclusiveness, you cannot play the game well. This sense of inclusiveness – going beyond your likes and dislikes for individual people and including all of them as your team – and this whole group of people striving to achieve a common goal definitely brings in the necessary fundamentals for community building.

Social transformation, economic revitalisation and the spiritual development of a human being can be very easily introduced into societies if sport is used as an entry point. The idea is not necessarily about developing competitive sport, but the important thing is to bring in the spirit of sport to make every human being ‘game’ for life.

Ranked among the fifty most influential people in India, Sadhguru is a yogi, mystic, visionary and bestselling author. Sadhguru has been conferred the “Padma Vibhushan”, the Indian government’s highest annual civilian award, in 2017, for exceptional and distinguished service.