Cricket and its life-lessons
I feel so good looking at a vintage photograph that just popped out of nowhere. I am 6, holding a Kashmir willow bat with a gentle shimmer and a sense of pride in my eyes. The bat, by the way, is not an ordinary piece of wood; it is the finest present someone ever gave it to me, considering the fact that it was the time I got involved with the game. You see how the word MRF inscribed in red over the willow can exponentially increase its significance for a kid and assure him that he possesses a run-producing machine in his hands.
Today, as I pen it down I can see another bat kept in one of the corners of my room that says GM English willow on the cover. Presented last summer, like the one in the photograph this, too, is a gift and looks brand new; however, the grim reality is it is not. It is rarely used and that, too, over occasional weekends. For your information, this word “weekend” exists significantly now.
On a broader prospect, the transition from the first bat to the second defines my life journey from a carefree kid to an IT professional. The priorities, friends, relationships and the contexts might have changed with the course of time, but one thing that has stayed throughout is my love for this game.
I have inherited many values at different fronts, be it academically, personally or professionally from this friend of mine. I feel even my parents or my teachers wouldn’t have taught me this directly. Just like goodwill of an asset cannot be measured on a sheet of paper, my bond with the game is priceless and poise.
Going back to my school days where academically everything revolved around cricket, a subject like geography wasn’t about learning the topographies or attending map filling classes; it was simply about remembering the locations where Sachin Tendulkar scored his tons and visualising the co-ordinates through the pre-match postcards shown. By the way, I still cannot correctly mark the European nations on a world map if you ask me to do so. Alas! They never played the game, man.
You automatically become a champ in mental mathematics when all the factors of 4 and 6 are on your finger tips and you are effortlessly practising multiplication and division while you calculate the projected score, the current run-rate, the economy or the strike-rate on a regular basis. Life is good when a Tony Greig or a Harsha Bhogle is your language professor. I sucked at economics, though. I won’t lie. Well, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) wasn’t that rich, and the Indian Premier League (IPL) was nowhere in the frame.
Anatomy was a child’s play especially if you were a Tendulkar fan, as you already had a technical expertise on the fundamentals of hamstrings, tennis elbow, groin or a webbing even way before the curriculum started. The Ashes also cultivated a great virtue in me; I can get up at 3, 4 or even 5 in the morning. Thank you so much Channel 9. So, in case I had to get up early morning for a revision before the exam, I would sleep thinking that it’s an Ashes encounter the next day.
Cricket had become a habit by then, and it continued to prove its effectiveness even in college. The fact that I developed a cricket wagon wheel for my computer graphics project and even wanted to simulate a hawk-eye as a final year project would support my statement. Unfortunately, I couldn’t, as some smart ass had scared my teammates that the prototype required an expensive system to be imported, which made enough sense to scare them; it was a baseless argument, though, and finally the idea had to be dropped.
Meanwhile, my dear friend had kept a parallel loop of grooming and embedding different attributes, running for me. I have always admired different aspects of different personalities and wanted to cultivate them in mine. I’ll share my accumulated set of experiences over the years that led to those mappings.
Honesty - If you want to see what honesty means, rewind your memories to 2003. One simply doesn’t walk off in a World Cup Semi-final after being signalled not out unless his name is Adam Gilchrist.
Hard work - There cannot be a better example of hard work, humility and selflessness other than Rahul Sharad Dravid. Be it the victory at the Eden Gardens in 2001, Adelaide in 2003, the wall performance in England in 2011 or the speech at Bradman’s oration, there is enough justification there for every quality of his. Dravid proved to the world that even your defence could be a deadly weapon. I still remember once Shoaib Akhtar ran a mile to bowl to him, and all he did was an elegant leave outside the off stump; it left the bowler baffled and did a major damage to his ego. He is too much of simplicity and dignity packaged in one soul.
Being oneself - Time and again Virat Kohli has shown to the world what fearlessness and being Virat (not the next Viv or Sachin) is. Yes! He abuses! He is bold, aggressive and fearless, but, first and foremost, he is an exceptional batsman. That pretty much gives him the authority to not justify himself to anyone till he doesn’t breach the code of the game.