Feb 22nd 1992-
It was just the day
after my 9th birthday and I was quite on cloud 9. I had devoured the contents
of that week’s ‘The Sportsar’ World Cup Edition; I had a good birthday and that
cute Gujrati girl in my class consented to sit next to me in our hindi class. Hormones
seemed to have arrived earlir than expected and to say it in Ravi Shastri’s
words, they were ‘alive and kicking’. Quite a charmed life it was! As
Feb 21st gave way to the 22nd, the little suburb of Adayar in Chennai
had more snores than the sounds of TV sets being on. I was sleeping in a small
room next to my grandmother. It was 3 am. Quite the time, when Sachin
Tendulkar and I were batting in our partnership for the ‘C Block’ team, tearing
to shreds the bowling of the B block team. My little dream was not progressing
much, due to the noise in my room. I hazily stared at the light source at the
end of the bed, and the TV was on. My grandmother was fumbling with controlling
the voice on the TV. My parents were asleep in the other room. The
next 5 minutes were spent getting used to the bright light that invaded the privacy
of my dreams of batting with Sachin. The immortal voice of the holy trio of
Richie Benaud, Bill Lawry and Tony Grieg got me wide awake. My first cricket
world cup had begun.
Tony Greig and Bill Lawry were shrieking at John Wright’s wicket
off the bowling of Craig McDermott, as the Kiwis and the Aussies opened the
1992 World cup. My granny in Tony Greig’s shriek and words was “Alive and
Kicking” listening to the match commentary, even though she understood little
of their accents. She fervently got up at 3 am and followed the scores and kept
giving her version of her analysis that usually differed from mine. She would
say The Indian team should drop Shastri and Manjrekar, and try out Amre to bat,
as they used to slowdown the innings. Her other gem used to be being David
Shephard’s virtual soul mate, being superstitious when it came to nelson
scores(111,222). She’d say if a team actually reached the nelson’s score,
without bypassing it they would win. As a 9-year-old kid, her word was the
bible for me though I never checked if her predictions on nelsons actually
worked. She didn’t have much knowledge about the game, but many years of
cricket on radio and newspaper reading had made her a fairly discerning grandma
when it came to cricket. To come to think of it, she would have made a good
fantasy cricket player, but back in the days, computers and televised cricket
were rare to come by.
The World cup in 1992 with the Indian team in the Australasian
continent was my first experience getting up with her and watching cricket
matches. My parents never exuded so much interest for a live match. My parents
preferred to watch cricket, as long it didn’t interfere with their household
chores and sleep. They never took offense to me getting up early or sitting up
late, watching cricket on the television, until I got caught for dozing off in
school due to lesser sleep at home.They then asked me that pertinent question
that every Tambrahm parent asks “Cricket a Soru Poda Pogarathu?” [Is
cricket going to feed you?]. I’d happily say yes. Watching cricket for a
profession looked far more interesting than clocking hours in a bank. My
grandmother never quite understood the fuss behind me occaissonaly sleeping in
class, and gladly allowed me my transgressions of waking up in the
morning. When the world cup was around, a few marks lost in remembering where
Cape Comorin was on India’s map, could be traded happily for watching Kapil Dev
take a wicket or for Manoj Prabhakar getting one to swing in. Thanks to my granny’s
passion, I decided to let the cricket mood set in. I started putting cricket
pictures, neatly cut from the Sportstar magazine all over that room, with
a huge poster of the fixtures. Thanks to that image, I always will know
the 1992 World Cup grounds at the back of my hand from Pukekara Park to Albury
to Ballarat to Mackay.
Quite a few moments from the 1992 World Cup come to my mind,
when my granny and I watched the world cup in the first week. The standout
moments in the first week were
▪
Disappointment we had when Javagal Srinath got out at Perth,
giving India a 9 run loss in the opening game.
▪
The way Australia were mauled by South Africa at the SCG, and
had lost 2 in 2 then.
▪
The way West Indies polished off Pakistan with a 10 wicket
victory in a 220 chase.
Cricket was fun with my grandmother, with both of us seeming to
enjoy the white ball, colour dress version of the game, a pleasant change from
the ‘whites and leather red’ version that we were used to watching.
The match which we vividly remember were the last 10
overs of the India Australia game at the Gabba. My granny felt that India had a
chance chasing 234 despite being robbed off 3 overs in a crazy rain rule. She
was praying for Ravi Shastri to get out, after he trudged his way to a 60 ball
20 odd. Both of us remember having a collective gasp seeing Sanjay Manjrekar
swat Merv Hughes to the midwicket boundary for a 6. Maybe her prediction was
working, until Kiran More had his stumps shattered by Tom Moody and we lost the
game due to a lazy Raju who forgot to run off the last ball. My grandmother
never managed to forgive Raju whenever she used to see him on television in the
subsequent matches. There was redemption in 3 days when the scene shifted
from the Gabba to the SCG,when India took on Pakistan and beat them
convincingly. Even though I had school, I came home just early enough to see
Aamir Sohail, fall to Sachin’s gentle medium pacers. She and I would celebrate
in our own way, resonating to the high pitched tone of Tony Greig,who also added
character to the whole celebration. While there very few India moments to
rejoice to except India beating Zimbabwe in a rain affected game, our love for
the game kept us hooked on to the live telecast and the highlights. On
reflection, that quite defined my world back then.
Back in the 94-96 season, I remember using my school’s( Bala
Vidya Mandir-Adayar) PCO booth to figure a hack to get cricket scores.
I was already reprimanded for bringing a radio set to school in 1993, during
the India-England series. A reprimand was like the equivalent of a parking
ticket and I could not dare to bring a transistor again to school. I still
needed to find a hack to find the live scores in between classes Thanks to my
grandmother, I found one. When I dialed a number from my school PCO without
putting the coin in, it would ring and I would hear the person on the other
end, but they would hear me only if I put in the coin. So I would tell my
granny to recognize that if no one spoke on the phone from the other end for 10
seconds, it would most probably be me. She just had to tell the cricket score
and tell me who’s batting. I had figured a hack, but the lady at the admissions
office near the PCO figured out, I was upto some mischief in coming 4 times a
day, daily to speak on the phone.[Google and Cricinfo were yet to happen]
My grandmother was hooked on too watching cricket till 1998 ,
when the tele-serial world invaded her “Cricket watching time”. My granny who
would usually a Bangladesh vs Kenya game, with enthusiasm slowly grew out of
the habit of watching cricket,and changed her stance to “watching India
matches only”. With time her eyesight, went on the Downhill and her earlier
Glaucoma condition flared up again. My grandmother could then only make out
that a ball was being bowled and hardly had any idea as to how the match would
go on, and this reduced her interest levels and she would hit bed by a
predefined 10 pm bedtime, which made me wonder, how her interest levels in
watching cricket has ceased over time.
10-12 years back she could see only 10% from her eyes and when
my grandfather passed away(2005), she couldn’t even see his dead self properly.
It hurt me a lot when she told me that, when we were by our grandfather’s side.
She became a little isolated in her thoughts. Cricket was hardly in her mind.
My mother was still trying to see if something could be done to rectify and
restore partial vision, so she consulted many eye specialists. A few doctors
who said, that she would never see, in years to come, were proved wrong when a
doctor in the Egmore Eye Hospital(Chennai) suggested an operation. With nothing
to lose, we went ahead and did the operation. In less than two months, we saw
that her vision improved dramatically and she was able to see with both the
eyes and perfectly. It must have been a feeling of rebirth for her, getting her
eyesight back. That was in September 2006 during the DLF cup in Malaysia, as
shown in the image. Its 9 years post that now. Her eyesight again has
gone back to being bad, but her enthusiasm in cricket has not dulled one bit.
So
while another world cup sprang in Australia and New Zealand this year, with I made my granny my valentine on the 14th of February 2015, told her
opinions beaming from twitter on the match, told her what the commentators are
saying, and of course waited to listen
to her quips and pulse on what happened. Maybe I am reliving that golden Australian summer of 1992, sitting in
Chennai with my grandmother and my new 3D HD TV. When I hear Bryan Adams
strumming “Summer of 69”, I’d look back at the summer of 2015 and possibly
say “Those were the be
This entry is written in celebration of being #together, (via www.housing.com) my life”.
