I was watching a sports event on TV and noticed a curious irony of life: the athletes were running with all their might, their faces taut with concentration, every sinew straining towards the finishing line. Yet there was one figure who seemed to mock the very idea of competition. The cameraman, holding his heavy instrument and jogging backwards with an agility that seemed almost acrobatic, was not only keeping pace with them but was actually ahead of all the runners.
It struck me then how life is filled with such inverted images—moments when those who should be centre stage appear eclipsed, while others, by accident of circumstance, steal the spotlight. The athletes had trained for years, sculpting their bodies with discipline and endurance, yet here was this man, not a contestant but a chronicler, commanding the frame. The irony was delicious, almost Dickensian in its quiet satire: “It was the best of races, it was the worst of races,” I found myself muttering in mock homage to the old master.
As the camera panned closer, I could see droplets of sweat sliding down the athletes’ foreheads like tiny beads of fire, the crowd roaring with rhythmic repetition. But my eye, traitorous as it seemed, was transfixed not by the race but by the cameraman’s choreography. The heavy camera perched on his shoulder gleamed under the stadium lights, like some modern-day armour. He ran backwards with balletic balance, dodging hurdles that were invisible to us, capturing the moment yet inadvertently becoming the moment himself.
How often do we find ourselves in such misplaced positions? I remembered my own school days, when at a debate competition I had painstakingly prepared to quote Keats and Eliot, only to be overshadowed by a boy who had misread his paper yet delivered it with such comic gusto that the audience roared louder for him than for all of us combined. The prize slipped past me not because of my lack of preparation, but because fate had handed him the limelight. Life, I realised even then, is less about choreography and more about coincidence.
Watching the cameraman glide past the athletes, I thought of Shakespeare’s words in “As You Like It”: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Perhaps the cameraman had unintentionally claimed the role of lead actor while the runners, sweating and striving, were reduced to stage props of his moving picture.
There was also something almost poetic in his posture. The athletes moved with desperate determination, their arms pumping like pistons, but he floated—yes, floated—backwards, serene as though he had discovered some secret shortcut to success. It reminded me of the times when, in our careers or friendships, someone drifts ahead without seeming to try, while we stumble breathless in the background. The wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time—yet somehow ahead.
And yet, as I lingered on that thought, I felt a pang of tenderness. The cameraman was not racing for glory, after all. His victory was not in crossing the finish line first but in ensuring that the story of the race lived on. Perhaps in life, too, when we find ourselves “ahead” where we do not belong, we are not always usurpers. Sometimes we are carriers of another’s story, unacknowledged chroniclers who run not to win but to witness.
The race ended, the athletes collapsed in exhaustion, and the camera cut to replays of their magnificent strides. The cameraman vanished into anonymity. But that fleeting irony stayed with me, a small parable of misplaced presence and unintended prominence. For in the grand race of life, as Virginia Woolf once hinted, “we do not see things as they are, but as we are.”
And yet, I could not resist smiling at the satire of it all—what if one day the gold medal went not to the runner but to the runner’s recorder? Life, after all, delights in such delicious distortions.
Ritu Kamra Kumar
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