A Discussion to End All Discussions

“The coach refuses to play with a team who is least bothered to play on the field and instead indulges oneself in things all else- politics, mind games and the rest: sabotaging a long drawn methodical process and ruining it all.”

The man known to be a one man army tough nut seemed lost and disoriented as he left the room…leaving his players to deal with deafening silence!
The shock…
The silence…
And then a familiar sight…
The whispers grew louder, the silence was replaced with loud talks and there were murmurs no more; groups formed out of thin air and the blame game began…
The players screwed up for the umpteenth time and finally the coach walked out…cutting a sorry figure…deprived of hope…he gave up on us!
It seemed to be a scene out of a movie…except that this wasn’t one….this was happening for real!
The fault lay with no one but us alone!
We screwed up and it was time to pay a price!
Our seniors did this before us…but the great ones that we are…we followed their footsteps and made the same mistake…it was like we shot ourselves with our own gun!
Some of you who read this…might think that the blame game, this note and all the goody goody looking things in it are all expected- just a way of passing off the guilt from within…taking it all out of the system to make space for new guilt to fill in….but…
that’s far from the truth…
in fact nowhere near it.
Getting into the discussion would unnecessarily be like adding salt to injury but not mentioning that this has happened three times before would be a crime!
Each time it happens…we stay as silent as idols and then the next day it is back to square one!
Nothing seems to affect this thick little skull of ours and that is a sad issue…a fault we might find useful to overcome!
The blame is always put on the “back- benchers”, the seniors and the strictness of the faculty but what about us as individuals?
Are we, each one of us not to blame….why is it that one particular member is scrutinized while the rest are scot free when the whole team has failed as a bunch! why is it that the batch cannot take collective blame?
Against the coach or the other staff…we feel content in winning smaller battles when at the same point the whole war is being lost!
We fail to realize a very simple fact…the coach and the team members are of the same team! No one gains from losing out on some project or internship.
I sit, in the corridor and listen; spying on peoples’ after thoughts of the coach’s walkout and all of the talk of “improving” etc. seems so fickle and fake!
They say one thing one day...something new the next and yet we return to square one the very next day! The gravity of the whole situation is somehow lost on us and that is what is the most saddening or if I may use…scary!
On a more personal note…as I sit there the entire gamut of emotions wash over me- acute sense of anger, sadness, grave disappointment but the one that rules over it all is the sense of fear!
At the end of the day we seem to ignore the fact that through our own follies we are losing out on an amazing coach and by deriding what the coach says it is not him but us who suffer! It is not he who needs us but something quite the other way around!
We just don’t seem to create a bond that, if not a lifetime long one, seems to fail surviving even the two years that follow! That is how badly we have screwed up,
Today I guess we lose a man who has done so much for us but still resigns because of our own histrionics! We just fail to appreciate what he has done for us!
And it looks like this time we are going to pay real bad!