CRICKET SEASON 2004

~ Live commentary from my living room…
(With inspiration from the khewlest writers-Sudhish Kamath and Shonali Muthalaly)
Howzatt! sin2x+cos2x=1! That’s a googly! Saki wrote ‘The Open Window’. Bouncer! Oh…curse this lesson! Smashing four Jammy! My god, so much portions left! Sachin tujhe salaam! Where’s my notebook? Zaheeruma, we want a wicket!
Boy! That was a piece of commentary… no not direct from the mouths of Charu, Shastri or Harsha (no…not even Sidhu, if you were wondering about the language) but a straight eruption from my living room.
Begin cricket season and my house acquires a totally ‘cricketty’ dimension. Be it Samsung or Videocon or why… even Colgate Cup from some remote corners on Earth, my home plays host to a pitch invasion!’ As Ravi Shastri would chip in, “It’s always cricki first!”
Enter my study…ahem, could you call it one? A HUGE Rahul Dravid poster, a Sachin blow-up and a ‘Zaheer-in-mid-air-and-out-to-bowl-a-yorker’ picture adorn the walls. Exit and enter the bedroom or living room-NO BETTER!
The Cricket season is a ‘rage’ amongst the young, old et al! This time round is no exception. The green fields simply allure cricket fans and otherwise (these will oft quote G.B.Shaw) into its trap. It will soon be ‘ahoy’ to cricket! Back to those times when everything takes a backseat and all that looms large is CRICKET.
September 10- ICC Championship Trophy. Follow it up with Australian and South African visits to India. Well what more could an average Indian (who definitely IS a cricket fan) want? One wonders, sometime, who it was that christened hockey as the national game of the country! Wasn’t there definitely a mistake (Hey there, I can see you vigorously nodding your head)?

The hype and hoopla surrounding a series begin much before it starts and continues much after the finals. “Did you see that shot?” , “Wasn’t Sheppie funny, hopping?” , “Hey,liked his new hairstyle?” – every cricket fan has his own interests and queries.
And…every cricket fan knows different amount of his cricket (oh don’t we call them apun ka dada, namma Bala or my Irfan?).
There might be those who are ‘time pass fans’-those couch potatoes THAT NEED TO WATCH SOMETHING whose fingers itch to grab their remote controls and stuff mouthful of Lays or popcorn having a face displaying (c’mon yaar TV fans ka face ‘Display’ hee hota hain naa?) ‘This-is-bliss’ expression.
Then there might be those ‘spirit lovers’ (no… these are non-alcoholic ones. Oh well, maybe…) who watch it for the pep, josh and definitely for the oh-so-wunnerful ‘Great Indian Huddle’.
Make way for the next in line- ‘Kabhie Haan Kabhie Naa’- they watch if India plays and don’t if it doesn’t. They know a bit here and bit there about the game and troop around with ‘C’mon India-Dikhao’ posters even if within their homes but well will never accept their aragora knowledge. (Any resemblance to the writer’s household is purely coincidential! AHEM!)
Next comes… ‘Love You Hamesha’ (No… this is DEFINITELY not a write-up on movies…at least not yet. Mebbe if we start talking about the cricketers, we could begin!). These ones would lap anything, which starts with a ‘C’ and ends with a ‘T’ (obviously dumbo, has to have R-I-C-K-E in between!!!).
Ah well…however you are, whatever way you like it, cricket rules and THAT is THAT! Accept it plain and enjoy it hot (This, incidentally, is no surrogate ad for any FM station and if it does look like one…ah…never mind). If you still insist that cricket is trash, then maybe I should tell you about the ‘100 reasons why people SHOULD like cricket’. But then, that would be another story…