“In sports, there’s nothing more satisfying than hearing a big crowd go silent and that’s the aim for us tomorrow,” said Pat Cummins, Australian cricket team Captain, the day before the ICC World Cup final match held on 19 November.

And boy, did his team silence the crowd at the Narendra Modi Stadium that Sunday. The silence was deafening.

I’ve been cricket crazy for well over half of my life now. I still remember — I was home studying for my grade 11 exams, and my dad, who was the most hardcore cricket lover in the world, was watching an India-Pakistan cricket match. I walked into our living room, sank into our couch, and asked him what the fuss was about. Eight hours later, I was well and truly sucked into the cricket frenzy that grips most Indians. And the rest, as they say, is history. I went on to watch every match India played for the next few decades.

So, I was one of the ‘over a billion’ silenced spectators of that World Cup final match a few weeks ago. After the utter heartbreak at losing a match we were so confident of winning subsided, it struck me that there are several life lessons neatly tucked into this loss, which could even translate into New Year’s resolutions for 2024, if you are on the lookout for some.

I’m listing five life lessons for you to ponder on below:

1. Don’t get predictable

The Indian cricket team played sublime cricket all through the tournament. They won all ten matches in the run up to the final. You can’t help but feel for them. But when I think about it, they stuck to the same game plan in every match. The game plan worked like a charm — Rohit Sharma came in, smacked the ball around, got India off to a flying start; once he got out, Virat Kohli aggressively took over… it was a set formula that they’d perfected over ten prior matches. Which brings me to the lesson here — India became predictable.

When you are predictable it’s easy for your opponent to ably counter you. Keep your opponent guessing, have a few plans in the pipeline, change things around constantly… stay unpredictable, stay impossible to conquer.

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World Science Day for Peace and Development is celebrated every year on the 10 November. It is an important day to highlight and reflect on the important role that science plays in every aspect of our world today.

This day was declared as an international day by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and was celebrated for the first time on 10 November 2002. Science covers almost every facet of our lives and the thought behind this day was to have a day for citizens in our ever-changing world to hear of new and interesting discoveries, improvements and developments in science today. The key thought was to link or bring science closer to society while never losing focus on the sustainability angle which has a direct impact on every one of us.

The theme for World Science Day this year is ‘Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development’. Each annual theme works towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). These SDGs were formulated and adopted by all U.N. member nations in 2015. The aim was to put clear goals in place and achieve a cleaner, healthier planet by the year 2030.

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Apart from our doctors and nurses, I feel the only other profession to get hit the hardest due to Covid-19, was teaching. Our teachers were flung into an almost alternate world — planning lessons and teaching them online with absolutely no notice or training. Whoever saw this coming? To have to do this for a day or a week is understandable. But to do it two years in a row is rather inconceivable. And yet our teachers did it. They dug deep as they always do, and delivered perfectly.

A teacher who was modern, open-minded, with a social media presence, for example, was more proficient in having an online classroom. He/she adapted faster. A teacher who was shy and avoided the camera his/her entire life, felt awkward and put on the spot.

And the children went through the same thing. A shy child versus an outgoing one, a reserved one versus a confident one, an awkward one versus a sure-of-himself/herself one. You might argue that this was the case in physical school too, and you’d be right. But it came more to light during online school.

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