Thursday, October 25, 2007

Evolving Cricket

we live in a apartment in my hometown. It has a good, empty, big space in front of it. There used be 7-8 people initially who wanted to play cricket. So we started playing cricket there, with common fielding (means players from batting team have to field also). But that was too bigger ground for us; we had to run a lot and matches used to take a lot of time.So one crooked minded find out the solution (Guess Who?), plastic ball cricket. We had open space in our apartment and we made it as our ground


As you can see in the (attempted) drawing the pitch used to be approximately (I am very bad at measuring units) 10 feet long. So to make the cricket interesting we had some cool rules.

1. Direct tappa (pitch) outside compound wall-OUT
2. If you hit direct tapp in somebody’s balcony/window-OUT
3. (Usual rule) No fast bowling as we were playing short pitch cricket.

So after making these initial rules we started playing our games. It was fun and matches used to finish quickly as match used to be 5 over per side. Initially things were going smooth and quit, nobody had complaints. But cricket is not a silent game, slowly and steadily our game became noisy and passionate. "दोन घे" (take two runs), “थ्रो मार ना बे” (throw the damn ball) were shouted out with lots of passion. Now the trouble started, the sleepy people started complaining about our cricket (Observation: Only those people complained whose children were not playing J).
Some THE uncle/aunty will come in the balcony and shout “अरे तुम्हाला काही अक्कल आहे कि नाही, लोक झोपलित इथे आणि तुम्ही काय गोंधळ घाल्ताय.” (Are you people crazy, we are trying to sleep here). Then we would say “sorry uncle/aunty…no noise now” then we will play quietly for 10 mins, but as you know cricket is very involving game, automatically shouting starts. Then THE same uncle/aunty comes out says, this is your final warning or I will tell your parents. So again quit play for 10 mins but again slowly noise increases, but THE uncle/aunty will not come out now because he/she knows that we wont listen to him/her (previous day a big fight had happened between parents of playing and nonplaying children, which ended in no conclusion).

One day we were playing cricket and I was on strike. Bowler bowled a good length ball, which I thought should go for six. I hit the ball really hard it went in the air what a timing; बंग ....damn it hits an aunty who just opens the door of their balcony. …everybody runs for cover. I ran with bat in my hand and hide in one of the corners. After 10mins THE aunty comes out searching for us. What a fortune and she finds me. Now I get a big lecture …..and finally “where are your parents?” I say “office” (this was the good excuse for me as my parents were working they used to come late)

Another fine afternoon we were playing, we had one family living on the ground floor with two little children of age 5 and 4. One of our good batsmen hit a good shot which directly crashed their window glass. Everybody was running for cover, I ran to my house. Nobody came out of their homes for 2 hours. No news of anybody getting caught. So in the evening we came back to play cricket, we were amazed how come uncle didn’t say anything. So the report came from somebody, the time we were playing cricket, two children in their family were also playing cricket in their house and uncle thought their children broke the glass. He punished them. After hearing the story all of us decided to admit our crime and went and told the whole story and promised to repair their broken glass.
Ureka…..We find the solution. If we break anybody’s glass, we will just repair it and continue playing. We had contracted a glass repairer also.

Continued….

No comments: