If only life was like that Cape Town Stadium

The ICC World Cup opening ceremony held at Cape Town’s Newlands Cricket Ground was spectacular with 4000 performers regaling the audience that packed the stadium. It is amazing how a country where Africans were not even allowed to swim on beaches with their previous apartheid masters is now so cosmopolitan though society still has a few remnants of those sick minded people who believe that one race is superior to the others. 

The World Cup opening show had a local theme with participants coming from all ages between eight to 80. Billed as an “African Spectacular’’ that cost more than 1.6 million Pounds, the organisers boasted this as the “biggest ever extravaganza witnessed in the cricketing world,’’ and the largest event of its kind in Africa. 

The Olympic-style ceremony was beamed to some 1.4 billion people around the globe, marking the biggest event of its kind ever staged in Africa and a boost to South Africa's hopes of hosting the much larger soccer World Cup in 2010. The organisers made extra effort to ensure the World Cup Cricket start be spectacular enough for South Africans to be proud of after missing out on the hosting of the 2004 Olympics and the 2006 World Cup — by a single vote.  

The opening showcased the continent at large and South Africa in particular and the gloss and allure provided for a frenzy that overshadowed the low-key opening the 1999 World Cup saw at Lord’s in England, an event described as “pathetic’’ by the media.  

The opening ceremony showed Africans alongside whites and Indians painstakingly performing their roles. One thing that was not on the programme for last Saturday's opening was politics, although political tensions continued to crackle off the cricket pitch. When one thinks back of the days when Nelson Mandela decided that he wanted peace in South Africa rather than revenge against the whole society that practiced apartheid, one can see the foresight that he had and can understand why peace and rational thinking always lead to stability in a country and in the world at large. 

Had Mandela declared war against the entire white population, many of who never even supported apartheid, South Africa would be much less respected around the world and could also have been among the countries classified as abusing human rights. Had Mandela decided to fight wrong values with wrong methods, probably South Africa would today not even be hosting the World Cup. 

Peace, rational thinking and tolerance do bring a lot of calm in the world.  When individuals and countries think peacefully, the world becomes a more stable place to live in.  Most world leaders, international organisations and so-called peace summits tend to define peace in the shadow of war, as ‘a situation where there is no war’ between nations. By doing so they are actually taking a negative view. By viewing the positive element in contrast to the negative, they end up underrating the former’s potential. By defining light as the ‘absence of darkness’ or, life as the ‘absence of death’, they assign greater importance to the powers of darkness and death, or in the case of peace, to war, rather than peace.  

Wars are an after-effect of initial antagonizing between people, between countries and between races. For countries that have avoided war or suppression of some of its citizens, this is not something that happens by chance. This happens because they strongly believe that social or political ills can best be handled by refined methods rather than forceful means that often create more enemies than friends especially when innocent individuals are killed. 

Inside the Cape Town Stadium last Saturday there was cordiality among the races. Similarly there was refined tolerance among the representatives and players from different countries as they walked past in harmony with smiles and waves. Some of the participating countries are at loggerheads with each other but in the stadium only peace prevailed. If only the world could be like that Cape Town Cricket Stadium during the opening of the ICC World Cup!