Down under in Adelaide
Waking up at 5.30AM on cold, wintry mornings, snuggling under a blanket in front of the TV, and watching the world come alive on TV – these are my first and abiding memories of life as a cricket fan. A paradoxical life, both disappointing and highly rewarding, at the same time.
Disappointing because supporting India more often than not led to heartbreak and an unending litany of ‘what-if’ woes; rewarding ‘cos watching cricket telecast by Channel 9, and the sheer spectacle of seeing green fields and fast pitches, with the hook and the cut played in utter disdain of the crazy pace was an experience in itself.
Australia, to me as a young cricket fan, was the ‘final frontier’ where India would go with hopes and be completely cut down to size. Except for the 1985 World Championship of Cricket, where Shastri and Srikkanth and S Vishwanath wrote themselves into the hearts of every Indian fan, while also winning the trophy and a luxury car with an unpronounceable name. All other visits ended in complete humiliation. With or without a certain Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. Even when he was driving McDermott and Hughes and Whitney to a sublime century, at the WACA (of all places), or playing a boy-on-the-burning-deck innings in 1999, there was always an air of inevitability about the final result.
Till 2003, and Ganguly’s greatest Test innings, and a drawn series which made me and a bunch of other Indian fans believe. Come 2008, and we could do the previously unthinkable. But it ended with a whimper at Sydney, and an aborted charter flight which took the Indian team to Perth, and perhaps one of the greatest Indian test victories of all time. Hope was reborn.
2011, and it was India versus Australia time again. This was the series where everything would change. The magnificent Indian batting lineup, certainly on its last tour Down Under as a unit, against an Aussie team fighting its own battles of succession and adjusting to life without any consistent success. Surely, the stars had aligned.
As a fan of the last 25 years, I couldn’t let this chance go. Watch a test in Australia, with the seagulls and beer and fast scary bowling and bright sunshine. And with an Indian team looking to scale it’s own pinnacle of achievement. (Forget England and 4-0, that was an aberration, and Australia was always the final frontier.)
The die was cast, and I booked my tickets to Adelaide to watch the last test. Before I could board the flight, reality bit. The Indian cricket team was hammered, and might even be whitewashed atAdelaide. (I still think not, and hope for a magnificent turnaround, with Dravid playing a magical innings.) But here I am today, in Adelaide, excited to go watch the test in a few hours, and still hoping for a fighting Indian performance.
I have few expectations. I hope the team plays well, and fights hard. And I wish to see the trio of Dravid, Laxman and Tendulkar play the way the Aussie crowds remember them. They are great cricketers, each one a legend in his own special way, and a few poor innings does not make them any lesser cricketers. I, and most other fans, would still remember the many magical innings they have played.
Just go and make yourselves proud, all over again. And sign an autograph for me. And I will come back from Adelaide a happy fan.
2011 – the year that was!
It is later than that time of the year but I am a procrastinator.
A week into the new year, I am trying to put 2011 in perspective. And turns out I did not do a bunch of the things I had set out to do. On the whole, a not-so-great year.
Did not complete my Spanish lessons, let the blog go to rot (yeah, this one!), took a lot of photographs but hardly printed any… The list goes on. The most galling aspect of 2011 though was the lack of work-life balance (too much work) and the one-dimensional nature of socialising (dinners, drinks, parties). The latter, especially, makes for a very boring ‘life’ in the work-life equation.
There were some high points – watched a test match in Mumbai, in which SRT almost did the unthinkable, and traveled a bit. Of the travels, the highlight was the time spent at Koh Phi Phi, reached after almost 7 hours of travel from Bangkok. Phi Phi (’Koh’ means ‘island’ in the local language) is a tranquil blue-water island in the middle of the West Andaman Sea, with great food and marine life. Good ’twas.
So much for 2011. What does the new year hold in store? Although a very hypothetical question, it is still an interesting one. As Winston Churchill said ‘The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.’.
Here are some of the things I will do in 2012.
1. Travel around India, around local and musical events. Do more travel-blogging, put up pictures more regularly. Spend 4-5 hours each week on keeping this site updated.
2. Spend more time with family and friends. In more productive ways.
3. Pay more attention to my health. Being on the other side of 30, need to start doing that. 
4. Read more books. Take the 52-book challenge, and see what comes of it.
5. Be more positive. Change situations rather than complain.
There it is. Now that I have blurted it all out, will get to work on keeping these promises to myself.
Khotachiwadi – a slice of history
A Bombay lesser known. That is what I would call a place like Khotachiwadi. The common metaphors used for the megalopolis have nothing to do with quaint neighborhoods, clean alleys, afternoon siestas and a slow pace, and those are exactly the metaphors that would be used for Khotachiwadi.
I went to Khotachiwadi on a Sunday afternoon, armed with a camera and instructions on how to get there, and promptly lost my way. Eventually, after a lot of wrong turns and direction-seeking, I chanced into Khotachiwadi, and there was a sudden difference in the vibe. No car horns, no pedestrians walking hither-thither, no roadside shops hawking their wares – there was just a narrow alley, with multi-colored houses on both sides, and ending at a very brightly painted red-and-yellow two-storey house. It was heart-warming.
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17 families, 1 house
The ‘Committee Chawl’ which houses 17 families in one structure – all the 17 families are, or were, associated with the Khotachiwadi cricket club. The interior of this chawl, by the way, is a striking example of efficient usage of space and good design.
First look at Khotachiwadi
The bright colours, wooden stairs, balconies, tiled roofs and the narrow bylanes had me blink a few times. On a hot Bombay March afternoon, the air was surprisingly cool and unsurprisingly tranquil.
