Pity India and Pakistan aren't at World Cup battle

The Statesman, Asia News Network, Calcutta

India and Pakistan will spend the month of June plotting strategy, planning moves and anticipating adversarial countermoves. So will 32 other nations. How fortunate the 30-odd are compared to the South Asian twins. The advantage of playing in the football World Cup is not only that America, even though it is a participant, cannot dictate your moves.

It is that the contest affords simultaneously the most raucous expression of nationalism outside the theater of a just war, if such a thing exists.

So, Argentina, battered by economic and social crises, can try to rediscover national pride and collective confidence through its team, among the favorites this time. France, shaken by Jean- Marie Le Pen's shock success, can find reassurance in its football squad full of gifted players who are French but not white. China has qualified for its first World Cup for the same reason it successfully adapted to capitalism.

A remarkable policy turnaround -- professional league, foreign coaches -- wiped out a long history of pedestrian domestic standards. South Korea and Japan share a mutual and near- atavistic dislike, which both countries are trying to get over. What better way to accelerate the process than co-hosting the greatest show on earth.

Not for nothing have West Bengal MPs, cutting across party lines, petitioned Sushma Swaraj that Doordarshan telecast all the matches live. The pressure tactic didn't work and this is perhaps the time to genuinely regret Mamata Banerjee's absence from the cabinet.

But Kolkata's cable operators know that withdrawn subscriptions will be the least of their problems if they do not add to their list the private channel which has bagged Indian telecast rights.

Boys from Bhavanipur go batty over Brazil, and dream of bending the ball like Beckham because football is a truly global passion. Zinedine Zidane, a French-Algerian and arguably the most gifted of current stars, may or may not know that Albert Camus, author, philosopher and another French-Algerian, had once said he owed to football all his knowledge "about the morality and obligations of man".

But an English coach, who had no literary abilities, put it even better, especially for countries looking at the prospect of war -- "Football is not a matter of life and death. It is much more important".