Guwahati, June 14 -- Written by Sanjay Gurung

The Borderless Beautiful Game

We live in a season of closing doors. Across the globe, the dominant language of our politics has become a rhetoric of retreat-a loud, anxious demand for tighter borders, economic decoupling, and rigid, frozen definitions of who belongs and who is cast out. The most abrasive voices of our time insist that identity is a zero-sum game, summatively captured by the cold, dismissive command: "Go back to where you came from." It is a phrase that foolishly assumes human history can be neatly unspun, and that the infinite complexities of a human soul can be sorted back into singular, isolated boxes.

Yet, as the 2026 FIFA World Cup takes the field this week, a completel...