These big union men talk of "protecting the spectacle" with these new kick-charge laws, but did they ask the mother in Gangtok who sold her wedding bangles to send her son to rugby academy in Delhi? My class three student’s father drives a taxi through the night—he doesn’t care about the spectacle, he cares whether his boy’s tackle will get him a scholarship. I see this in our own state board exams: the rules always favour the ones who already own the playing field, and we just keep debating the shade of the grass.

My students think the All Blacks' haka is just intimidation, but I tell them—like the old folk songs we sing at harvest, it’s a story of who you are and what you owe each other. That’s why Fiji’s sevens team moves me more than any northern hemisphere machine: they play like a village that knows everyone’s name, not a corporation counting sponsors. Perhaps if rugby shared its cardamom profits like we share our dal across the farm wall, the World Cup wouldn’t look like a rich man’s feast every four years.

The trailer for the new *Odyssey* made me think of my father walking all the way from Rangpo to Siliguri to sell our cardamom, just to get my brother's college fees. My students struggle with long poems in English, but they never give up—like Penelope waiting, but also like Odysseus fighting every wave. I wonder if the film will show the ordinary people left behind on the island, not just the hero.