While I was reclining on my couch (metaphorically, for the past two decades) witnessing the cadence of the most thrilling to the very humiliating moments of my country's premier sport, Rahul Dravid played out an entire career, and retired. And, with that single stroke ended my journey which began with a juvenile craze that once became a fervent passion and eventually tempered to an almost geriatric understanding that Cricket is just a game.
Yes, it is just a game; But one that threads together my adolescent years. Without it, the memories lay strewn, tattered and unconnected. Without it, those classrooms seem like interrogation rooms; the school corridors like haunted alleys; friends and teammates like faceless strangers. Without it my teenage years are devoid of an identity of their own.
In '96 while the promising greenhorns in the national team were struggling to establish a name for themselves, I was doing so too (or so I had thought) in my own way. The class team had Aritra, Sreekanto, Debarshi, Partha, Partho, and myself (stereotypical Bengali nomenclature as you would expect in a school located in the heart of Bengal). But in our heads we were McGrath, Ganguly, Dravid, Klusener and Azhar. Ironically, we had never touched the leather ball. All our repertoire remained restricted to the naivety of the tennis ball. But just as a wooden sword in a gladiator's hand fails to diminish his valiance so did the tennis ball in reducing the bravado in our fledgling minds. We had our own demons to fight against though. There was no "pitch" to play on. So we laid plans to level a patch of land in the front lawn of a friend's house. There wasn't money enough to spend on cricket balls, so we planned to buy nets that would prevent the ball from landing all too often in a nearby gutter. Days and hours for practice were chalked out on the penultimate pages of every notebook. We kept planning as the years passed, as the classroom courses of history geography, physics,chemistry and mathematics whizzed by.
As the national team kept galloping and occasionally stumbling over obstacles on and off the field, so did we. The delicate balance between gleefully spending hours in the cricket field and returning home to cajole a guilty conscience to study kept my adolescent mind busy. Exams came an went like milestones along a highway. With them came the agony of a mediocre result and the ensuing ecstasy of a hiatus to breathe free. Strange is the world in which an adolescent mind dwells. Sometimes, parents seem the worst enemies; Neighbours, even the few well-wishing ones seem like utter nuisance; And relatives seem at times like Dr. Jekyll and at other times like Mr. Hyde. I had cricket, to sail through those years of insanity. I just kept playing it, watching it on TV, and revisiting the catches I had taken and the strokes I had played in my prolonged dreams. It shielded me till i opened the Pandora's box of adulthood.
The national team had matured, and so had I. No longer was Ganguly being cursed for his refusal to carry drinks. No longer was Dravid's slow batting being questioned. Nor was my future a talking point among semi-literates housewives (who had moved on to better gossips). The national team was travelling well overseas, and so was I (the proverbial shaat shomudra tero nodi). I was not afraid of the exams anymore. They came and went as before like bouncers from a bowling machine that I had learned to duck under. The pitches were alien and greener, but the national team was standing tall. I played occasional cricket in college, but it did not have that fervent feel. I missed my team, as much as I missed the teenage me. I kept watching the national team though, fighting tooth and nail (as I did much the same to grab a seat in an overcrowded TV room in the hostel). Like everyone in a country obsessed with the game, I appended my desire, ambition, expectation and frustration with the boys in blue (and on occasion in whites). The cheers and curses sounded hoarser though. The voice-box was indicating that time has run itself out.
What has followed is the inevitable slide. Those greenhorns, who have become the stalwarts and the pall bearers of the very game are eventually putting down their gauntlet, one after the other. I keep watching the game, like an octogenarian gazing at the television set not registering the events transpiring before the hazel eyes. I think i understand now why a generation still talks about Sobers, Vishwanath, Kanhai or Marshall despite witnessing the likes of Lara, Sachin and Wasim more recently. That Rahul Dravid would walk away one day was inevitable. But that he, along with the rest of his pack has gifted a basket of grandfather-tales to our entire generation is absolutely amazing and warrants celebration!
Yes, it is just a game; But one that threads together my adolescent years. Without it, the memories lay strewn, tattered and unconnected. Without it, those classrooms seem like interrogation rooms; the school corridors like haunted alleys; friends and teammates like faceless strangers. Without it my teenage years are devoid of an identity of their own.
In '96 while the promising greenhorns in the national team were struggling to establish a name for themselves, I was doing so too (or so I had thought) in my own way. The class team had Aritra, Sreekanto, Debarshi, Partha, Partho, and myself (stereotypical Bengali nomenclature as you would expect in a school located in the heart of Bengal). But in our heads we were McGrath, Ganguly, Dravid, Klusener and Azhar. Ironically, we had never touched the leather ball. All our repertoire remained restricted to the naivety of the tennis ball. But just as a wooden sword in a gladiator's hand fails to diminish his valiance so did the tennis ball in reducing the bravado in our fledgling minds. We had our own demons to fight against though. There was no "pitch" to play on. So we laid plans to level a patch of land in the front lawn of a friend's house. There wasn't money enough to spend on cricket balls, so we planned to buy nets that would prevent the ball from landing all too often in a nearby gutter. Days and hours for practice were chalked out on the penultimate pages of every notebook. We kept planning as the years passed, as the classroom courses of history geography, physics,chemistry and mathematics whizzed by.
As the national team kept galloping and occasionally stumbling over obstacles on and off the field, so did we. The delicate balance between gleefully spending hours in the cricket field and returning home to cajole a guilty conscience to study kept my adolescent mind busy. Exams came an went like milestones along a highway. With them came the agony of a mediocre result and the ensuing ecstasy of a hiatus to breathe free. Strange is the world in which an adolescent mind dwells. Sometimes, parents seem the worst enemies; Neighbours, even the few well-wishing ones seem like utter nuisance; And relatives seem at times like Dr. Jekyll and at other times like Mr. Hyde. I had cricket, to sail through those years of insanity. I just kept playing it, watching it on TV, and revisiting the catches I had taken and the strokes I had played in my prolonged dreams. It shielded me till i opened the Pandora's box of adulthood.
The national team had matured, and so had I. No longer was Ganguly being cursed for his refusal to carry drinks. No longer was Dravid's slow batting being questioned. Nor was my future a talking point among semi-literates housewives (who had moved on to better gossips). The national team was travelling well overseas, and so was I (the proverbial shaat shomudra tero nodi). I was not afraid of the exams anymore. They came and went as before like bouncers from a bowling machine that I had learned to duck under. The pitches were alien and greener, but the national team was standing tall. I played occasional cricket in college, but it did not have that fervent feel. I missed my team, as much as I missed the teenage me. I kept watching the national team though, fighting tooth and nail (as I did much the same to grab a seat in an overcrowded TV room in the hostel). Like everyone in a country obsessed with the game, I appended my desire, ambition, expectation and frustration with the boys in blue (and on occasion in whites). The cheers and curses sounded hoarser though. The voice-box was indicating that time has run itself out.
What has followed is the inevitable slide. Those greenhorns, who have become the stalwarts and the pall bearers of the very game are eventually putting down their gauntlet, one after the other. I keep watching the game, like an octogenarian gazing at the television set not registering the events transpiring before the hazel eyes. I think i understand now why a generation still talks about Sobers, Vishwanath, Kanhai or Marshall despite witnessing the likes of Lara, Sachin and Wasim more recently. That Rahul Dravid would walk away one day was inevitable. But that he, along with the rest of his pack has gifted a basket of grandfather-tales to our entire generation is absolutely amazing and warrants celebration!
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