Drive Towards Excellence

Badminton. Wow!!! What a game. I just love the moments every morning I am with my badminton playmates. These 30 minutes of my daily mornings since last 6 months enrich my entire day like nothing else.

The laughter, the fun, the positive spirit of competition, sometimes conflicts and what not. We share and enjoy so much in these moments. And today I realized something which I had read and heard before but never experienced.

Four of us - Mr. Uday Kumar, Dubey Ji, Raj and myself were playing a match of 15 points. The play started and was going bit dull. Myself and Udayji on one side and Raj + Dubeyji on the other. We started scoring points whereas Raj and Dubeyji stopped on there first point. The score reached 10:1. The game was losing fun.

I thought of trying something at that point to give the game a fun lift. I started returning the shuttle to Raj and Dubeyji simply on their rackets rather than trying to dodge them to get more points. Soon I could see their confidence building up. They started scoring quickly. On our side Udayji was trying hard at his end but wasn't able to manage increasing our points because of my support to our opponents.

Soon we reached equilibrium. We were at 11:11. Now I came back to the killing sporting spirit of our original game. And all four of us were giving our best to win the game. The last 4 points till 15 gave us so much fun and excitement, we enjoyed like nothing.

I heard Raj and Udayji say, ohh it was great feeling reaching 11 from 1, the feeling as if we had already won. And ofcourse we on our side were joyous of the win.

Now the moral I derived from this unplanned and spontaneous incident was basically my control over the game was such that I allowed me to take it in whatever direction I want. I decided to infuse fun and excitement in the game and was able to successfully add it for all of us.

Drive towards excellence.