When I was growing up....cricket was a part of our daily lives...series would come and go and we used to watch the matches, enjoy them, critique them, and then wait for it to start all over again....I never knew what it would be like to not be able to see a match Live...
Cricket has been in my genes...Grandad follows it (and even makes grandma watch it!), Dad passionately watches it (juggles between office work n somehow manages to watch a couple of overs) and Bro has been in US for over a decade, but still follows every match online... So there is absolutely no surprise that I am a major cricket fan!
When cell phones were only for the lucky few, Dad had a pager...and I remember when there was a match going on and if he was at work, I would send him the score on his pager as a numeric message..the last digit was for the number of wickets and the rest was the score...And now thanks to cell phones, he calls home every hour and either mom or me would tell him the current score...
Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and Ajay Jadeja were my favorites (and some of them still are)...As a school kid, I had their posters on my wardrobe and wrote the Indian team congratulatory messages via the newspaper reader's column...I guess I can owe it to cricket to my first foray into the print media...
Moving to India only increased my passion for the game. The whole atmosphere during matches was something I never experienced in my school days. Living in a hostel meant that we woudlnt get to watch the matches that went up till late, but that's when the radio would help! Radio as entertainment was beginning to catch popularity and what better combination than Hindi songs and cricket updates! I was totally hooked on to it...
I lived so close to the Wankhede stadium, that if there was a match going on...I could actually hear the thousands of people from my room...though all I could see were the shining lights in the black sky... Watching the matches in the hostel tv room was quite an experience too! One match stands out in my mind... the Ind vz Pak match during the 2003 World Cup...when India won.. The girls had gone bezerk watching the match... the room was overflowing the over enthusiastic girls and some of them actually managed to break the sofas in the room... after which all seating was removed from the room and they places mats for us to sit on to watch tv! Sometimes when we did'nt have the time to watch the match, we would be working in our rooms and we would here the ectatic cheers of the girls from the ground floor till the 5th floor every time Sachin hit a six or Bhajji took a wicket....
Another good part about being in Mumbai was that we actually made a girls' cricket team in college and played inter-batch matches...it sure was fun.. One compliment I got from a guy-friend in those days that I shall never forget - "I've never had a gal-friend who would talk so much about cricket with me!" It was true... I never got tired talking about cricket.. and I guess I still dont!
Coming to America was like such a BIG disconnect from cricket.. I had never imagined that it would ever be this way... but this was my new way of following cricket.. cricinfo.com... the only problem I have is of the time difference.. The matches start when you are about to sleep and by the time you get up the result is in.. On most days, the first thing I do as soon as I wake up is pick the laptop and check the score...ya even before I stepped out of bed!
And now I am yearning to watch a Live match... I realise that it sure is such a luxury!
Cricket has been in my genes...Grandad follows it (and even makes grandma watch it!), Dad passionately watches it (juggles between office work n somehow manages to watch a couple of overs) and Bro has been in US for over a decade, but still follows every match online... So there is absolutely no surprise that I am a major cricket fan!
When cell phones were only for the lucky few, Dad had a pager...and I remember when there was a match going on and if he was at work, I would send him the score on his pager as a numeric message..the last digit was for the number of wickets and the rest was the score...And now thanks to cell phones, he calls home every hour and either mom or me would tell him the current score...
Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Sourav Ganguly and Ajay Jadeja were my favorites (and some of them still are)...As a school kid, I had their posters on my wardrobe and wrote the Indian team congratulatory messages via the newspaper reader's column...I guess I can owe it to cricket to my first foray into the print media...
Moving to India only increased my passion for the game. The whole atmosphere during matches was something I never experienced in my school days. Living in a hostel meant that we woudlnt get to watch the matches that went up till late, but that's when the radio would help! Radio as entertainment was beginning to catch popularity and what better combination than Hindi songs and cricket updates! I was totally hooked on to it...
I lived so close to the Wankhede stadium, that if there was a match going on...I could actually hear the thousands of people from my room...though all I could see were the shining lights in the black sky... Watching the matches in the hostel tv room was quite an experience too! One match stands out in my mind... the Ind vz Pak match during the 2003 World Cup...when India won.. The girls had gone bezerk watching the match... the room was overflowing the over enthusiastic girls and some of them actually managed to break the sofas in the room... after which all seating was removed from the room and they places mats for us to sit on to watch tv! Sometimes when we did'nt have the time to watch the match, we would be working in our rooms and we would here the ectatic cheers of the girls from the ground floor till the 5th floor every time Sachin hit a six or Bhajji took a wicket....
Another good part about being in Mumbai was that we actually made a girls' cricket team in college and played inter-batch matches...it sure was fun.. One compliment I got from a guy-friend in those days that I shall never forget - "I've never had a gal-friend who would talk so much about cricket with me!" It was true... I never got tired talking about cricket.. and I guess I still dont!
Coming to America was like such a BIG disconnect from cricket.. I had never imagined that it would ever be this way... but this was my new way of following cricket.. cricinfo.com... the only problem I have is of the time difference.. The matches start when you are about to sleep and by the time you get up the result is in.. On most days, the first thing I do as soon as I wake up is pick the laptop and check the score...ya even before I stepped out of bed!
And now I am yearning to watch a Live match... I realise that it sure is such a luxury!
