After 1983 - the year when 'Underdogs' - Cricket team of India won the coveted world cup under Kapil Dev; cricket zoomed into the gullies of Indian cities, towns and villages. Most of the kids where playing cricket even in their sleep - when one was asked to go buy a packet of cookery item, he would catch the money, hit a six and walk to the shop, defend a short pitch or hook it as Kapil supposedly had done it in the famous Zimbabwe win (175*). That was one another topic which most of us talked. Unfortunately that one day match wasn't on telecast schedule and i hear there aren't many videos around the world.
So one could imagine the cricket fantasy of 1980's/90's and not to mention, after the advent of Tendulkar into cricket arena, the crazy wave hasn't set still. Given the cricket passion and fervour, all our minds were set on cricket. So we started playing cricket even in our classrooms but in a canny way. We used our textbooks to play cricket - which is unofficially known as 'Book Cricket'. We chose teams that we liked best and mostly all of us wanted to choose - India; no surprise yeah? The second obvious choice was West Indies, then England and other teams. So we had to first toss a coin to choose our teams, then toss again to find who played first. The rules were simple - a kid had to choose the team and if won the toss, then he would have to turn the pages of textbook, then look onto the left hand side of the book to score his run. If the page number ended in 2,4,6 then those were his runs, if it was 8 - a no ball and if it was '0' then the player was called out! If you took a couple of pages with no clarity in counting the run, it was called a dead ball! Interesting yeah?
We chose our own teams, we used to shuffle Gavaskar a opening player to 3rd or 4th if the opener got out cheaply; Sometimes the very final pair used to score double hundreds, of course never or very rarely happens in real cricket. Hat-tricks were sometimes happening too often, Middle order rarely stayed together - a cricket of whole different type but played with books! Teachers did sniff the mischief and severely warned us and sometimes had landed us in punishments as well. Like any other school student, we continued to play. The biggest asset of the game: at times you are bored and don't have a companion ? no worries, you could play on your own. A eleven man game played by single boy in fact for both teams, a thing which can never happen in reality. When we played in lunch intervals, the kid - so called the player would also provide an interesting running commentary as he flipped through the book's pages. A commentary of completely different kind; when games were stopped and restarted, either for the reason that a teacher caught us or for other 'genuine' reason, the commentary would resume with a reference that crowd got wild, hence the officials had to postpone for sometime etc etc. The imagination was there in each and every aspect of book cricket!
Interestingly after many years today i played a match in Pakistan (and hence the blog)- Ind vs Pak; India all out for 184 and Pak 78 all out. There was a intermittent delay owing to crowd reactions :) hey you need to keep the child in you amused yeah?!
So one could imagine the cricket fantasy of 1980's/90's and not to mention, after the advent of Tendulkar into cricket arena, the crazy wave hasn't set still. Given the cricket passion and fervour, all our minds were set on cricket. So we started playing cricket even in our classrooms but in a canny way. We used our textbooks to play cricket - which is unofficially known as 'Book Cricket'. We chose teams that we liked best and mostly all of us wanted to choose - India; no surprise yeah? The second obvious choice was West Indies, then England and other teams. So we had to first toss a coin to choose our teams, then toss again to find who played first. The rules were simple - a kid had to choose the team and if won the toss, then he would have to turn the pages of textbook, then look onto the left hand side of the book to score his run. If the page number ended in 2,4,6 then those were his runs, if it was 8 - a no ball and if it was '0' then the player was called out! If you took a couple of pages with no clarity in counting the run, it was called a dead ball! Interesting yeah?
We chose our own teams, we used to shuffle Gavaskar a opening player to 3rd or 4th if the opener got out cheaply; Sometimes the very final pair used to score double hundreds, of course never or very rarely happens in real cricket. Hat-tricks were sometimes happening too often, Middle order rarely stayed together - a cricket of whole different type but played with books! Teachers did sniff the mischief and severely warned us and sometimes had landed us in punishments as well. Like any other school student, we continued to play. The biggest asset of the game: at times you are bored and don't have a companion ? no worries, you could play on your own. A eleven man game played by single boy in fact for both teams, a thing which can never happen in reality. When we played in lunch intervals, the kid - so called the player would also provide an interesting running commentary as he flipped through the book's pages. A commentary of completely different kind; when games were stopped and restarted, either for the reason that a teacher caught us or for other 'genuine' reason, the commentary would resume with a reference that crowd got wild, hence the officials had to postpone for sometime etc etc. The imagination was there in each and every aspect of book cricket!
Interestingly after many years today i played a match in Pakistan (and hence the blog)- Ind vs Pak; India all out for 184 and Pak 78 all out. There was a intermittent delay owing to crowd reactions :) hey you need to keep the child in you amused yeah?!
