Waka Waka means Do It

It took me quite a while to figure that all I needed to do was Google Shakira's 'Waka Waka' and figure what it meant. I love the song and sang it anyway – at least the easy parts. And so it brought to sharp focus, a telephonic interview I had with a journalist from the Deccan Chronicle. Here’s the link, and you need to navigate to the ‘Bengaluru Chronicle’ page:

http://www.dc-epaper.com/DC/DCB/2010/07/01/INDEX.SHTML

The journalist had asked me a simple question: When an Octopus named Paul could pick the winner of the Germany vs. Argentina match correctly, why is it that fortune-tellers are shying away from making a prediction? It was a very valid question and my instinctive reply was that Numerologists work with birth data and names – there is very limited intuition involved. And since the team names ‘Germany’ and ‘Argentina’ are not limited to their endeavours in any specific direction, for example football, my guess would be as bad as anyone else’s. Also a firm birthdate for a team would be hard to arrive at.

But the call did get me thinking – and I was a little ashamed of myself for not having the courage to make an ‘educated’ guess. After all, a numerologist shouldn’t be as clueless as the rest of us.

So here, like in most everything else, we have some known knowns and known unknowns:

What we know is: Good and bad times of the people involved – for example Captains and Coaches, players and managers and so on. We also know that any numerologist would go insane trying to make sense of this vast amount of data, let’s say at this stage it would involve about 50 people.

And what we are clueless about is: How much of the above data points towards victory / defeat in each match.

Nevertheless, Shakira appears on the screen relentlessly – urging us to Waka Waka – to just Do It!

And so here I go with my predictions – it’s my best guess, with the info at hand:

1. Spain (Yes!!!)
2. Netherlands (No!!!)
3. Germany (No again!!!)

So there you have it, it does look a little ludicrous, but this is what the numbers (that I have and used) foretell.

Don’t kill me if you lose your bets :-)

Arun Peter

www.namemylife.com

Bangalore