A male friend calls up and enquires about my whereabouts. I tell him I am watching the football match between Argentina and Nigeria. There is laughter at the other end. “What do you know about football? Hey, don’t mistake that man with the whistle running after the ball to be a player. He is the referee!” And laughter again. Even if I screamed out the names of all the players, he’d think I was quoting them from some newspaper. His closed male brain cannot fathom a woman’s interest in sports. 

This might be news to many men, but women are not dumb sports watchers. There are many among us, and it’s an increasing tribe, who enjoy sports just as much as men but with a slight difference. Unlike men, women are an honest audience, and when we do not follow something, we say so. Men will never do that. Even if a man has no clue what’s going on, you will find him assessing who the majority are rooting for and then do exactly the same. 

I have heard men say that women watch sports only to check out handsome men and that’s the secret behind the female interest in the Fifa World Cup. By that logic, in India, the TRPs of the English Premier League should be right up there with Balika Vadhu. There has always been an intelligent female audience for sports in India and there has always been a puzzled man to every such woman. A case in point was my late mom. She was obsessed with cricket and understood every nuance of the game. My soldier father had no clue about the game, neither could he figure out her fascination, and, I suspect, it annoyed him. 

Women are not counted among sports lovers because we do not feel the need to shout out our interest or enter into inane conversations. Women are quiet watchers. We do household chores when the commercials are on and come back to the game when it starts again. It’s true that women complain about the time their partners spend watching sports, but that’s mainly because, unlike other activities, men don’t involve them in it. For a man the concept of watching a game is ‘alone, in peace or with male buddies’. It is time that a man respects a woman’s interest in sports and starts considering the possibility that she may know a little more than him.

Vaisala Oyj, the Finnish company that specialises in instrumentation for weather predictions, may help forecast weather for the upcoming Commonwealth Games. This is the same firm that had supplied equipment for real time weather predictions during the Beijing Olympics. According to the company spokesperson, there has been a proposal to set up a network of weather stations in Delhi at 60 locations, including stadiums and other key areas to provide real time location-wise information, which will be useful for athletes and sports officials.

When China becomes the next superpower, it will be one with really week teeth. A survey by Beijing Stomatological Hospital shows that no more than 1 per cent of people in Beijing use dental floss, and less than half of middle-aged residents clean their teeth even twice a week. Not surprisingly, a national study also revealed that nearly 69 per cent of 5-year-olds in Beijing have dental cavities. Besides poor dental hygiene, a possible reason is that China’s one-child policy has created pampered children who have a diet high in sugar and fat. China’s dismal oral hygiene is really not surprising. In 2002, officials found that many people use twigs or green tea to clean teeth, because of tradition or a lack of money. The late Chaiman Mao Zedong himself was famous for having had stained green teeth in old age.

There is a shadow over the prestigious Princeton University museum of art. The Italian government has served a chargesheet to J Michael Padgett, the curator, for trading in what they term ‘stolen artifacts’. The New York Times had reported that the Italian government has listed about 20 pieces, including vases, bronzes and sculptures that an art dealer based in New York allegedly obtained illegally and sold to other American institutions in the 1980s and 1990s. Besides Princeton, these include the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Toledo Museum of Art. Meanwhile, we sit pretty on the Kohinoor gem and celebrate the Commonwealth Games, though the British queen cares little about returning it.