Meet Vashisht Manikot - the man with poems on football in FIFA's magazine

Football is known as the ‘beautiful game’, a game which defines joy, passion, love and unity, a game which is played all over the world – on the streets, in the stadiums, beaches, you name a place and football is present there.

The passion of football is scintillating across the world and in India, and one person which defines this passion is the Head of the Department, History, Malabar Christian College Calicut’s Vasisht Manikot.

The professor is an ardent football fan and his passion with relentless commitment has earned a name for himself at the international stage.

Manikot has compiled 14 poems on the beautiful game under the name ‘The Last Penalty Kick’ out of which one poem ‘A Game so called Football’ was published in FIFA’s magazine in 2001.

The FIFA World Cup 2018 has started in full flow in Russia and Manikot is extremely excited as always to make a mark and make football popular by means of different languages.

“I am the head of the Department of History of Malabar Christian College. I am love football and had started to make efforts to make it popular in our country 20 years ago,” Vashisht said.

“I am not from the Hindi belt and therefore I understood very quickly that without the Hindi and regional language football cannot be made public in India. 16 crore is the only Uttar Pradesh's population and hence to make it popular, the use of regional language was must,” he added.

Manikot believes that football can be made popular through Hindi and this time he has uploaded a video in YouTube and is already going viral. In the video, he has used his poetry and music, which was composed by himself.

Vasisht Manikot’s poems have been translated into French, German, Portuguese, and Chinese languages so far.

We salute the commitment and love for the game of football and hope more people like Vashisht Manikot come forward to support the game in India and throughout the world.