Auckland '94

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 27^th 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?