TODAY as I’m flying back home from New York, something that stands out vividly in that city is it’s passion! A passion for enjoying work with subways and roads filled with millionaires and billionaires on their way to make a million or billion more. A passion for enjoying a holiday, even if it’s a cold winter day.
I remember how I spent an afternoon watching a baseball game between the Yankees team from New York and the Detroits. There were forty thousand people in the Yankees Stadium when I entered, and they were all in a holiday mood, beer spilling over frothing glasses, men loud and boisterous and women equally loud in their hugs and kisses which they gave liberally to their men at the drop of a hat. Well I’m quite used to the average American but to see forty thousand of them at one time seemed quite an intimidating experience: The smell of popcorn filled the air, mixed with the enticing aroma of hotdogs and candy.
And then the game began, the Yankees team is New York’s favorite, though not that of the rest of the nation, because the players are the best paid some even signing contracts of over a hundred million dollars, which other poorer states can ill afford to pay. So there’s an attitude problem, but to the New Yorkers this was their home team, and the applause and cheering that rose when the hitter hit the ball was resounding.
Suddenly I was not in New York anymore and sitting in India in an IPL match, the noise, the energy, the focus, it was all the same. It was the thrill of the game, the hope that the in a normal moment the spectacular would happen.
The man selling beer, the hotdog vendor, the ice cream seller were all ignored as one and all the New Yorkers rose in unison, sighed in frustration and crescendoed their applause as their beloved boys in the centre hit or missed or pitched or caught.
What was familiar was passion. You could smell it, taste it, feel it. Ah passion it’s the fuel of achievements, alive, vibrant, pushing energy, more explosive than a nuclear bomb, more laser focused than a ray of light.
That’s the stuff that makes heroes of the ordinary, changes cowards to brave men and women. That’s the petrol makes the Bill Gates of the world. Passion is there for all of us to use, whatever your call, whatever your job, it’s free, just fill your tanks, build speed, and take on the world..!
