Tendulkar-I

I have played a lot of gully cricket. A lot of in house cricket. A lot of cricket with plastic ball, rubber ball, tennis ball. I don't remember when I started playing, but I do remember the time when I started watching. I was around six or seven, I used to try to adjust my black and white crown TVs channels, to catch cable signal, so I could watch a blurred match; ofcourse in my fathers absence, cause he would scold me for doing "ched-chaad" (tinkering) with the TV. My parents thought electronic and costly things like TV should be given utmost care, and were paranoid about disturbing the status-quo. They thought the TV would go bad if I changed channels.

Those days, I eagerly awaited the evenings, the time of 4'o'clock, when my parents would let me out after finishing my homework. And with the makan-maaliks (landlords) kids and the other colony kids, I would play "catcham-catch" or "stopping the boundaries" or "teams". We would make imitation dives, glorious catches, jubiliations of won games, all in imitation of the matches we had watched. The fervour of watching cricket was transported to our little grounds. And the excitement of the little grounds, was transported to watching the matches.

When you are a kid you usually learn things as "mine". My school, my tiffinbox, my teacher, my parents, my ball. Naturally, watching TV, India became my team, having no idea, why it was my team. But yes, I used to cheer for it, become sad when it lost, and would go and tell my parents "india haar gaayi". And in evenings, us kids would discuss and try to imitate the six that we saw some Indian batsman hit. And I remember, I used to be fascinated by Kapil-Devs bowling action, and he siddhu and srikkanth, were the batsmen, who batted like we wanted. Trying to hit the ball, rather than playing like Shastri and Gavaskar. We wanted action, and excitement. And something we could imitate.

In a few years life changed, my family moved from gujarat to mp, halol to ujjain, I lost my evening friends, but cricket stayed with me. By that time I had already learnt to bowl with proper bowling action, which is like learning bicycle. It's easy once you can do it. And by that time, I was hooked to cricket, and Indian team. In ujjain, I made new friends, started playing cricket again, and we would discuss, how slow Indian team batted, that they made 100 runs in 27 overs (yes, there used to be a time). That was the time, when hits were supposed to be made only in slog overs. And then, there was hardly a batsman in India team who played aggressive (except maybe kapil dev). Aggressive like Vivian Richards.

But this one day, I saw sachin tendulkar bat. He had probably come 5th down. We were playing pakistan. And this guy, was pulling and hooking the balls of waqar, akram.