I don’t know if my Dad was a cricket
person. I know he watched a fair bit of cricket and at times gives me little
nuggets of nuance that I haven’t heard from anyone else, but largely I was
confounded.
Like many of his generation, he tells
us how Sunny would never offer a shot to a ball outside the off stump – Thanks to
YouTube, we know how wrong he was. He
rarely talks about Bradman’s average but always about him scoring 300 runs in a
day. No one plays spin like Brijesh
Patel. Sandeep Patil taking on Bob
Willis is his most cherished cricketing memory I suppose for he never grows
tired of repeating it. Viv is just chance-e
illa. Prasanna was a magician with a cricket ball as his only prop. But
curiously he doesn’t go overboard with his Viswa stories – the most dubious
part of the puzzle.
When I started watching cricket,
though he watched a lot of cricket with us, he almost always talked about
cricket in the past tense. With his mix of rare anecdotes and bland stereotypes
I could never figure out if he ever organized his life around cricket….till
Auckland ’94 happened.
Sachin as the poster boy of post-liberalized
India is such a widely written and acknowledged narrative that it’s almost
blasphemous to deflate it down to size. That
Sachin was a phenomenon even before satellite television came in or became more
accessible is an unwanted detail.
Away from the big cities, in the town
of Kanchipuram where we lived then, satellite television meant two channels –
Sun TV and a local channel showing tamizh movies. Whenever there is a cricket
match, the local channel would shift to Prime sports or ESPN – this involved an
elaborate manual exercise by the cable operator of rotating the dish to a different
angle to catch the signal. Usually this is a smooth process except for those
movie watchers on the local channel who would be cut off mercilessly.
But when cricket was played in New
Zealand, things got a bit complicated. We had to set an alarm and wake up at 4 AM and then pray that the cable operator had done so as well. We missed an hour of the first ODI in the ’94
tour because the operator didn’t get up on time. Another 4 AM start on 27th
March ’94, Pathimoonam Number Veedu still
playing in place of cricket. Switch on the radio and they announce that Sachin is going to open. Whaaaaaaaa! My brother and I were looking around restlessly for
some divine help in this ungodly hour to somehow wake up that damn operator.
In the meanwhile my Dad went to his
room, changed his clothes, took his bike key and turned around to ask us: who is
coming with me to the cable operator’s office?
