Courage in the face of prejudice

A version of this story appeared in Real Page 3, the weekly section in the Sunday Express.

Last week, as the Gay Pride March came to a brief halt near K G Marg, a middle-aged woman stood alone at a distance carrying the placard – Proud to be a Mother. She had come here in support of her daughter. Did she feel apprehensive? “Not at all,” she said. “Awareness creates an understanding that being gay is not unnatural.”

At one of the most vibrant gatherings in recent memory, what was she going through? “I feel very proud that she is part of the community. It is poignant to see the support we are getting today,” she said, just days before the landmark judgement de-criminalised homosexuality.

While denying that she had to overcome any mental barriers when faced with her daughter’s homosexuality, she accepted it may be harder for other parents to take. “In the absence of a liberal environment, parents find it difficult as they fear social ostracization.”

How did she transcend the prejudices of the society? “If you have the conviction, then you fight for your rights.”

However, the fear of a social backlash remains. When I asked her name to take it down for The Indian Express, she tried to evade the query. “I don’t want any names. I’m talking to you as a proud mother, as a human being.”

And as the rally resumed its course to Jantar Mantar, she dissolved into the crowd – a lonely warrior for equality among people of her generation. It may come as some form of redemption for her today to know that her daughter is not committing a crime by being herself.

Senior citizen killed, wife injured by help in East Delhi

A rare crime story I did, a version of which appeared in today’s Indian Express.

An elderly couple was attacked by their long-time servant at Shrestha Vihar in east Delhi. Yashpal Soli, 63 years old and suffering from various heart ailments, died as a result of the attack. His wife, Sudha Soli, 60, was brutally assaulted with a hammer and received severe head injuries. Currently recuperating at the Max Healthcare Hospital in New Delhi, her condition is considered stable and she is thought to be out of danger.

In a tale resembling last year’s Booker-winning novel The White Tiger, the servant Surjeet had returned only a week ago to the Soli’s house. He had previously worked for them for two years as a young 12-year-old, but was later sent to work at the house of Swati, Mr Soli’s daughter, in Gurgaon. Clearly, much had changed when he returned after five years in Gurgaon, and the consequences were fatal for the Soli family.

Last night, Surjeet let two accomplices in and helped them hide on the terraces of the house. Sudha Soli, as a matter of habit, locks the house herself and that did not change. However, sometime after midnight, Surjeet unlocked the terrace door. They tied and gagged the couple and beat them.

In what looks like a case of strangulation, there were no injury marks on the body of Yashpal Soli. Apparently, his breath was muzzled with a pillow. Sudha Soli was hit on the head with a hammer and remained unconscious till early morning. By then, Surjeet and his accomplices had robbed the house, though the details for this are yet to be confirmed, and absconded in the silver Fiat Palio, that Yashpal Soli used to drive himself from place to place.

Somewhere during the crime’s time period, Surjeet and his accomplices found the time to have a few drinks. When police reached the scene of the crime, they found bottles of alcohol and glasses strewn around, along with packets of Kellogg’s cornflakes.

Panic started to creep in when Nishtha, the Soli’s younger daughter living in Mumbai, found that the parents were not responding to her repeated calls. Alarmed, she asked her sister in Gurgaon to verify the circumstances. Later, the neighbours broke into the house to find Mr Soli lying dead in the office from where he practised as a chartered accountant for the last few years, due to his deteriorating health.

Meanwhile, the neighbourhood is stunned by this act of audacious violence. As police vans arrived, members of the RWA could be seen arguing about the safety measures adopted by the colony. Especially under fire are the security guards at the gate, who let the assailants slip away in the Soli’s Palio. An elderly neighbour, who lives in the same lane, was especially critical. “They are usually lying drunk,” he said. “After 8 pm, they are so sloshed – you cannot expect anything from them.”

Other neighbours fondly remember the Solis as sober and polite, who usually kept to themselves. A middle-aged neighbour, who did not wish to be named, said she had prepared tea for her maid while she had gone out for a household chore. “When she did not return for a while, I went outside to call her as the tea was getting cold,” she said. “Only when I stepped out to the great commotion in the neighbourhood, I came to know of the tragedy that had happened.”

Festival of love marked by spirit of reconciliation

A version of this piece on the Delhi Gay Pride 2009 will appear tomorrow in The Indian Express.

As the Gay Pride March took a brief halt near K G Marg, a middle-aged woman was standing alone at a distance carrying the placard – Proud to be a Mother. She was one of many parents who had come here in support of their children. Did she feel apprehensive? “Not at all,” she said. “Awareness creates an understanding that being gay is not unnatural.”

The 2009 Annual Gay Pride March was marked by this spirit of reconciliation. Bisexuals and transgenders had, in earlier years, felt marginalised by this movement. But this year, they were out in full strength. Kiran, 30, a person from the transgender community, was delighted by this show of unity. “We are one soul, one thought,” she said. “Together, we are stronger.”

Nor could this be dismissed as detached upper-class activism. They came from the villages of Khanpur, Kapashera and Ashram, as they did from the elite neighbourhoods of Defence Colony and Jangpura. Mohammad Akhtar, who works as a tailor, had come all the way from Mumbai. He had been to gay pride rallies in all parts of the country, but he had never seen anything of such fervour and magnitude. Delirious and lost for words, all he could say was, “Bahut accha lag raha hai.”

The gathering had also been enthused by reports that came in yesterday that the government was considering repealing Section 377 and de-criminalise homosexuality. There were an air of optimism and the sense that, after years of hard work, victory was near. Pulapre Balakrishnan, who insisted I use his full name, and has been part of the movement for 15 years said, “The government’s reaction has been very positive. This has been long overdue.” Fashion designer Suneet Verma was ebullient. “Bravo to the new government and the sensitivity they have shown,” he said.

The most heartening aspect was the solidarity shown by people outside the gay community, as placards with Homo Hetero Bhai Bhai could be seen in abundance. Though accurate numbers cannot be known, it would not be far off the mark to say that almost 50% of the gathering comprised of heterosexual people. Kanta Advani, in her mid-60’s, walked carefully through the raucous crowd while holding her husband’s hand. “I’m here in support of freedom,” she said.

The march began at 5.30 p.m. from Barakhamba Road and continued for more than two hours until its culmination at Jantar Mantar. Sulekha, a gay activist, took the stage and announced, “I have nothing to be ashamed of. I’m proud to be gay.” Balloons soared over the crowd, whistles rent the air and people of all hues and colours danced to the beat of Asha Band. Once the band stopped briefly, the crowd chanted, “Hum Dilli lene aaye hain, hum Dilli lekar jayenge.(We’ve come to conquer Delhi, we will leave after we conquer it).”

By the time the march dispersed, nobody was left to argue that it wasn’t the case.

Through an astute lens

For almost three decades, cinema has been a perceptive mirror to the forces shaping modern Iran

Mania Akbari in Abbas Kiarostami's Ten

As the crisis in Iran escalates, the pictures of protests and unrest would not have surprised those who follow Iranian cinema closely. Since the 1979 revolution, Iranian cinema has developed a subtle language of dissent, circumnavigating the dreaded censors of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture and holding a mirror to the country’s fissures. Film critic Godfrey Cheshire wrote in Newsweek, “Iranian films show us a society struggling with itself, trying to reconcile cultural traditions with political choices, vaunted ideals with thorny realities.”

The most visible struggle, for those of us who view Iran from the outside, is the issue of women’s rights. Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple, a film about the forced confinement of two women, and Jafar Panahi’s Offside, which trained its lens on the exclusion of women from football stadiums, are among several such acclaimed films.

But to understand how Iranian cinema articulates its political protest, Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten is particularly revealing. In the film, a dashboard cam eavesdrops on a divorcee’s impromptu conversations with fellow passengers in car journeys across Tehran which bring Iran’s sexual and social policies into sharp focus. In one scene, a camera focusses on a character as she scratches wildly around her hijab in the summer heat. In another, the veil drops in a moment of catharsis but is quickly put back on — Kiarostami has made his point by showing us the exhilaration of the unlocked genie. In an environment where dialogue can swiftly be clamped down upon, Iranian cinema has mastered the art of subversive suggestion, without leaving any footprints.

The picture of Tehran that has emerged in recent days has been that of a city divided — the pro-Moussavi supporters who have crowded the elite, affluent neighbourhoods in the capital’s north distinctly separate from the poorer neighbourhoods in the city’s south where support for incumbent president Ahmadinejad is strong.

In a country where one-fifth of the population accounts for 45 per cent of the household income, the class divisions point to irreconcilable narratives. Iran’s cinema has observed the chasms that separate the westernised elite and the middle classes, who long for greater freedoms and a secular state, and their poorer fellow citizens, who support religion’s primal defining role.

Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold is the tale of an overweight pizza delivery boy who, in encounters with Tehran’s wealthy classes, realises his inability to transcend his social class. Majid Majidi’s The Song of Sparrows takes this even further — portraying the working classes as powerless and inconsequential, he shows the primal role of religion as a form of social glue that gives them a sense of community and belonging.

What gives Iranian cinema its significant political weight is how often its films blur the distinctions between fiction and documentary. Solely relying on dialogue and minimal use of supporting narrative devices like background music, Iranian cinema regularly comes up with genre-defying films —Ten and The Apple being two examples — impossible to determine whether their realm is fiction or non-fiction.

At other times, they can be remarkably prescient. In 1997, Kiarostami’s most celebrated film, Taste of Cherry, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in the same week that an assertive electorate chose reformist intellectual Mohammad Khatami as president. Taste of Cherry, the tale of a nihilist who drives on the outskirts of Tehran looking for an accomplice to complete a task after he commits suicide, was distinctly at odds with the euphoric mood in Iran at the time. However, reformist hopes withered away as hardliners prevailed, leading to an environment of frustration and failure similar to the predicament of the protagonist.

But its role as an instrument against authoritarianism retains primacy. In his book, Close Up Iranian Cinema: Past, Present and Future, Hamid Dabashi has written, “In the cinema, we were re-born as global citizens in defiance of the tyranny of the time and the isolation of the space that sought to confine us. In cinema, everything was possible, and in that possibility we defied our paralysing limitations. The cinema revealed our hidden hopes as nation.”

Armed with the radical fervour of artists under siege, Iran’s filmmakers have created a searing chronicle of a fascinating and complex society — its tenuous social fabric, the weight of history, the arduous battle between tradition and modernity — as it charts its way forward in the modern world.

This piece appeared in the op-ed pages of The Indian Express on June 20.

Taking coins out of a jar

In conversation with Sharanya Manivannan

AQUAMARINE: Sharanya Manivannan's Witchcraft traverses questions of identity and gender.

The first time I met Sharanya Manivannan was at a reading at the Park Hotel in Chennai, early in January. A friend of mine, Mridula Koshy, a writer based in Delhi was reading at the event and had invited me. Later, some of us had gone for a drink at the Bamboo Bar in Savera Hotel, on Radhakrishnan Salai. Sharanya and I barely spoke that evening, although she did give me a card with her e-mail address.

Therefore, I could only vaguely summon up her appearance after she agreed to meet me for an interview. We meet at The French Loaf, a charming cafe on Harrington Road, sitting comfortably on wooden benches under the shade of two huge trees. “I was born in Madras,” she says, as I try to sound interesting, despite itching for the facts.

Born in 1985, she spent the early years of her life in Sri Lanka (her mother is Sri Lankan Tamil) before moving to Malaysia. “It was the worst decision my family ever made,” she says. In 2007, Sharanya caused a controversy by terming the practice of racism in Malaysia as ‘apartheid’. “I thought I was stating the obvious,” she says. “Any country that practices segregation, based on race and class, can be accused of apartheid. And to name something is to give it power.” She recounts horrendous incidents of being at the receiving end of a backlash by the Malaysian establishment. Finally, she gave up, left college and moved to Chennai 15 months ago.

This condition of exile and dislocation permeates her work at some level or another in her debut collection of poetry, Witchcraft.  Described as a “startling, sensual book of poems heralding the debut of a new voice”, Witchcraft traverses the questions of identity and gender. It is a mature work, and belies the voice of someone so young. Sharanya says that being brought up by her grandmother has made her ‘wiser’ and while listening to her, there is clarity of thought unusual for a 23-year-old. It is almost as if she has lived many parallel lives, and her perception is the aggregate result of the experiences she has accumulated.

I mention her poem Blood Lotus, and how I feel that the conflict between nature and culture underpins many of her poems. Suddenly, she gives a shriek of delight (”You’re very perceptive. You just made me understand my work better”) and then goes on to talk about the social taboos linked with menstruation. “The ancient idea was that a force rests in objects and the body. But this has been appropriated by conservative thinkers to see menstruating women as a polluting force.”

She takes out a copy of Witchcraft and talks about her poem Ananku, which deals with the trauma of the ceremony that accompanies female puberty. She says, “The poem is about the relationship with my parents.” Towards the end of Ananku, there is a line where without any warning or explanation, the script changes from English to Tamil. The question of language is a delicate one, for anyone from the subcontinent writing in English, and I found this innovation particularly striking.

She says, “The language in my head is a hybrid of Sri Lankan Tamil and English, though English was my first language.” She points out the use of non-italicised Romanised Tamil in other sections of the book and then says, “The idea is also to obscure things from the reader. I’m saying to them – Listen, I’ve already told you too much. So, this is a medium of inaccessibility to me for a largely non-Tamil audience.”

I tell her that one of my favourite poems is the powerful and nostalgic You Bring Out the Sri Lankan In Me. She says, almost immediately, “I would like to say here that, in that poem, I made some politically irresponsible statements purely in the interest of lyricism. I do not and have never supported or believed in the separatist terrorism that the country suffers under.”

The statement has a rehearsed quality to it, but when I talk about the various protests across the state, she pounces on it. “Oh, these armchair activists! They don’t understand our culture and let me say that we are a different culture. We are a clannish community (laughs) and like all clannish communities, we look down on other cultures.”

She mentions with dismay about the self-immolation of Muthukumar and saves her contempt for the irresponsibility of the political class. “They go for their own motives, and get the people excited by making them feel part of something bigger. Now, we have schools and colleges closing down. They don’t understand conflict and history. I don’t understand it either, but they just pontificate to serve their own interests.”

She talks with passion and feeling about the Sri Lankan issue, but the conversation moves away when I ask about the novel she is working on, Constellation of Scars. “It’s got all the usual clichés – love, loss, longing,” she says. “It is the tale of a 20-something photographer, who is obsessed with the preservation of transitory moments.” She expects the novel to be finished in a few months and says, “The protagonist has been in my head since I was fifteen. It’s been inconsistent over a lot of years. Only now, I have found the right voice. But I want to finish it first and then talk about it.”

We hang around for a little while more, talking informally. She tells me she is looking for an opportunity to move out of Chennai, where she currently lives with her family in Nungambakkam. She is considering writing the rest of her novel in Pondicherry, and quitting her job as a copywriter. “I need to quit my job,” she says, while asking me not to take it down.

“I have a really cushy job. And someone once asked me – do you want to be a full woman or a writer? Because a full woman is supposed to have money and financial independence, all the feminist nonsense about the woman who pays her way. But a writer is someone who, at times, takes coins out of a jar.”  On this final, beautiful note, we end our conversation. Sharanya walks away, stops an auto, mutters something in Tamil, and then she’s gone.

The indefinite deferral of closure

Naseem’s continuing narrative can be defined by all that has happened since 1992

Watching Naseem with the advantage of the retrospective context of the last 14 years, one can only admire Saeed Mirza’s prescience. Released in 1995, Naseem was created with the clay of those tumultuous times, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Through the relationship between the young girl Naseem and her grandfather, it portrays the escalating communal atmosphere of that period.

Yet Naseem is not a secular film, not at least in the way secularism is conventionally defined. Naseem’s grandfather, who represents the epitome of religious tolerance, frequently delves into the nostalgia of his days in Agra, spent with his mates Tripathi and Niyaz. In recounting memories of his youthful days, he never emphasizes even once on Tripathi’s Hindu religion. Mirza is drawing our attention to the matter-of-fact nature of such inter-religious social relationships. The grandfather’s Agra of pre-Independence is not just an idyll of religious tolerance, but united by language and regional culture. Mirza is interested not in the nature of erstwhile secular ethos, but in the inextricable syncretism of the two religions that held society like glue.

Therefore, the deteriorating health and inevitable death of the grandfather (on December 6, 1992) with his love of poetry and ethos of religious tolerance is seen as the irreversible decline of shared values. The death of a Hindu shopkeeper’s wife, with whom Naseem shared a friendship, is a metaphor for the severing of communication links and inter-religious interaction in the increasingly fractured social climate. What may be seen as an ‘ending’ in Naseem could also be interpreted as an indefinite deferral of closure. The continuation of the film’s narrative can be defined and described in all that has happened since, including the 2002 Gujarat pogrom.

As a nation dies slowly

Two decades on, Amma Ariyan has lost none of its evocative power and political relevance

CONTEMPORARY RESONANCE: Released in 1986, Amma Ariyan remains a masterpiece

Early in Amma Ariyan, Purushan enters a hospital in Calicut where he has come to identify a dead body. As he walks in the hospital compound looking for the mortuary, we can hear the seething cries of a newly born child. It is not coincidence, for this death of a former acquaintance would midwife the birth of a new movement.

It becomes clear in Amma Ariyan, or Report to Mother, that the mother is a metaphor for something much larger, the nation itself. Purushan has set out to Delhi to pursue his research, promising to write to his mother from wherever he is. After finding the dead body of a person he faintly recognises, which is later revealed to be that of Hari, he decides to go to Hari’s house to inform his mother about her son’s death. The film takes the form of a letter written by Purushan to his mother.

Amma Ariyan therefore becomes the account of those who have been left outside the system and the narrative of the nation that promised to embrace all its citizens. On the way, Purushan meets some of Hari’s friends and they join the journey. Director John Abraham traverses the memory of this group to unravel the character of Hari, and this is closely interwoven with the turbulent political history of Kerala in the 1970’s. Brilliantly shot in black-and-white, the film weaves fact and fiction (Abraham filmed actual protests) to create a powerful narrative of political unrest faced with an increasingly corrupt and oppressive state.

Towards the end, the group finally reaches Hari’s mother to give her the news. Soon we find that the group has metamorphosed into a crowd, which Abraham uses to suggest that the journey begun by Purushan will not end here. The ending of the film could be seen as the people finally uniting to question those in power, but critics have often wondered if Abraham prophetically was satirising the de-ideologised tamasha of political activity which never endeavours to investigate and demolish root causes of oppression.

In one memorable scene, the travelling group reads from Guatemalan revolutionary Otto Rene Castillo’s poem Apolitical Intellectuals – “One day the apolitical intellectuals of my country will be interrogated by the simplest of our people. They will be asked what they did when their nation died out slowly, like a sweet fire small and alone.” This is of immense resonance in an age such as ours when civil society begins to speak the language of power instead of representing the concerns of the subaltern.

Amma Ariyan was released in 1986 as the first film of the Odessa Collective, which obtained the funds by collecting money from the ordinary people of Kerala. An example of effective cooperative filmmaking, the film also serves as a reminder of the social and political possibilities of cinema once it is let loose from the hegemony of business and power interests.

This review was published in Mise en Scene, the journal of the 2nd Women’s Film Festival in Chennai.

Occupying an imaginative space

Even the most dedicated cineastes often struggle to name 10 women filmmakers in response to an impromptu ambush. This is because filmmaking has almost entirely been seen as a masculine enterprise. The intention here is not to disregard the enormous achievements of women in all fields of the filmmaking craft. All evidence suggests, especially in the last decade or so, that women are increasingly occupying spaces that were previously considered exclusively domains of men.

Therefore, it is surprising that despite their pedigree and excellence and increasingly substantial contribution to the craft of filmmaking, they have occupied very little imaginative space in the psyche of the film viewer. Even today, it is far easier to spark furious debate and discussion on the films of Jean-Luc Godard than on the work of women filmmakers such as Agnes Varda and Sally Potter .

This failure to occupy the imaginative space is a peculiar predicament. On the one hand, we have more women filmmakers than ever before yet they are only a footnote in the dominant canonical history of film. No woman has ever won the Oscar for Best Director in the 81 years since the conception of the Academy Awards. It is not to say that the Oscars are the pinnacle of cinematic achievement or confer a greater legitimacy to any body of work. But it is only evidence of how hard it has been for woman filmmakers to find equal representation in mainstream cinema.

Thus, anybody who is dismissive of the idea of a women’s film festival must put into perspective the lack of proportion between achievement and recognition. The battle has not been won. The purpose is not only to positively discriminate in favour of filmmakers of a particular gender. The idea is also to challenge the hegemony of mass culture that has effortlessly seamed into the status quo of society reproducing ideas not only of patriarchy, but of class and power.

In its breathtaking range of films, the 2^nd women’s film festival has the possibility of not only broadening the horizons of those who love film, but also posing as a site of contestation of the dominant narratives that today pervade our lives.

This piece was published in Mise en Scene, the journal of the 2nd Women’s Film Festival in Chennai.

Pakistan’s deepening political crisis

The Supreme Court ruling to bar the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz Sharif from elected office has plunged Pakistan into political turmoil once again. It is the last thing the country needed as it reels from the Taliban’s offensive in Swat on one hand and India’s aggressive diplomacy and US pressure over the Mumbai attacks on the other.

The optimism that enveloped the country following the elections last year and the return of genuine democratic rule is nowhere to be seen. The task of restoring autonomy to institutions such as the judiciary should have begun with the reinstatement of Iftikhar Mohammed Choudhury as Chief Justice. Instead, the failure to honour the Murree declaration severely harmed the spirit of political unity. The verdict of a Musharraf-appointed Supreme Court, whose legitimacy is constantly under question, has set the discord that began over differences on restoring the judiciary along an irrevocable path. Mr Nawaz Sharif has already denounced the court ruling as politically motivated by saying, “It’s an edict, not a verdict.”

Allegations by the PML-N of PPP’s offer of a business deal to Mr Shahbaz Sharif granting amnesty in return for legitimising the Supreme Court and dropping the demand for the restoration of the judiciary has further damaged the PPP’s credibility and commitment to empowering democratic institutions. The deployment of police to disallow the convening of the Punjab provincial assembly, where Mr Shahbaz Sharif is chief minister, has only highlighted the PPP’s unwillingness to uphold democratic norms. Lawyers throughout Pakistan have condemned the decision, calling it a ‘presidential’ verdict and protesting in large numbers at the Mall in Lahore and outside the locked Pakistani parliament in Islamabad.

Pakistan is unfortunately heading for the divisive politics of the 1990’s that created the justification for military rule. Mr Zardari’s contentious decision to assume the post of president has only deepened the mistrust between the two major parties, especially since he has not shown any inclination to curtail the extra-constitutional powers invested in the post during Musharraf’s reign. At a time when the political establishment needs to stand united to root out the menace of rising religious fundamentalism and other challenges facing the country, the recent events do not bode well for democracy’s future. Mr Zardari has repeatedly raised a call to the spirit of ‘reconciliation’, but he has increasingly taken steps to isolate and vanquish the PML-N in the political arena. A year later, democracy’s early promise once again lies battered.

This appeared as an editorial in The Daily Word, the paper at the Asian College of Journalism.

Clash of champions

Why the Champions League is the best football tournament in the world

To the avid soccer fan today, it is clear that the pinnacle of the game is not the World Cup, but the Champions League. A major reason is that national teams are no longer what they used to be. We would struggle to find contemporary equals of the glorious 1970 World Cup winning Brazil side, or anyone to match the brilliance of the 1974 Holland team’s Total Football.

One of the reasons for this is the growing international composition of the top club sides. Earlier, international football had greater resonance because the best players of each country played in their own domestic league. An international game was more than a mere competition to win the tournament, it was the contest of supremacy between rival football cultures. Thus, the victory of Holland over England was also in a larger sense an assertion of the superior technical skill of the Dutch league.

The overwhelming international composition of the best clubs in Europe means that rivalries of the earlier kind are all but redundant. Arsenal is the most extreme example of this seismic shift over the last two decades. Despite being one of the top English clubs, it has only one English player who can claim to be part of the first team set-up.

It is the case with almost every marquee club side. The majority of South American international players are based in Europe. La Liga and Serie A are their favourite destinations. Messi is the most important player at Barcelona, and Kaka remains indispensable to the cause of AC Milan. Gone are the days when Pele played for Santos in the prime of his career. The Latin domestic leagues only serve as stepping stones to greater riches and glories in Europe.

From all this, it becomes easy to deduce that the 16 clubs that compete in the knockout stage of the Champions League tonight boast of the most dense concentration of footballing talent on the planet. It is why international football cannot match up. It is hard to find an international team that could boast of Ronaldinho, Kaka and Beckham (Milan), Messi, Henry, Xavi, Eto’o, Dani Alves (Barcelona) or Ronaldo, Rooney, Tevez and Berbatov (United). Spain is the only national team at the moment that can match the organisation and fluidity of the best club teams. But it is revealing of the nature of club football that the maximum number of players in the Spanish national team come not from domestic giants Real Madrid or Barcelona, but English club Liverpool.

The decline of the national team is a direct result of the astounding growth of club football, both in terms of revenue and popularity. At any given time, it is likely that you will find more Manchester United fans than supporters of the Selecao. The biggest clubs are no longer bearers of simply regional aspirations, they are international corporate monoliths. The fervent support for Liverpool or Milan in corners of the Far East or other parts of the world is no longer seen as unusual or particularly striking.

With the best of resources and talent, it should not be any surprise that the premier competition between these sides often reaches levels rarely glimpsed in international competitions such as the World Cup. Of course, it also helps that club teams play more regularly than international teams. But the growing chasm between the Champions League and the World Cup is becoming more and more visible. Roy Keane had once said, “The Champions League has better football than the World Cup. The last great World Cup was in 1986, but every year in the Champions League you see better games with intense competition.”

The intense competition of the Champions League that Keane talked about finds evidence in the fact that no team has been able to successfully defend its title since its inception in 1992. Almost two decades on, nobody can really dispute its status as the best football competition in the world.

This appeared as an op-ed in The Daily Word, the paper at the Asian College of Journalism.