The extraordinary cricketing tales of Purvarth Maddhyanakumar - III

“You are the best bowler in the class” - The first, the best and one of the few compliments I had ever received about my cricket.


When our class first started out on its own journey with the game, there weren’t too many fast bowlers. Forget Cricket; there were many budding footballers and police-and-robber-ers and swing from tree-ers and slide show-off-ers and ace ‘swing’-ers. But fast bowling was still a sport in the making for most. Consider for a moment, the flutters little Purvarth must have created when he came in all of a sudden, with a long run up and a Kapil Dev like delivery. New kid on the block and all that.

The honeymoon period during which I had burst on to the scene, as you might have read by now, was absolute bliss. Suddenly, I was a sought after man. People wanted me. During the games periods, when opposing captains took turns to choose their teams, I’d be the first one to be called (an incredible honour I must emphasize), captains tossed the ball to me to start the first over of the innings and so on. It was like being in the shoes of some of the best cricketers in the class then. Like TSR, the left handed boy who everyone thought could do no wrong on the field. Like RM, another cricketing genius on the same level as TSR, if not higher. TSR was the fastest bowler in the class, one of the best batsmen and fielders, in close competition with RM who also was a batsman of prodigious skill and who could roll his arm over quite effectively too. These two lads would invariably be captains of the two teams playing; them being on the same team would be a complete carnival for the team who had them, you see. Then came the second level of geniuses like AR who used to play almost every game we could understand with effortless skill, GR who was one of the better batsmen and some others.

Being called first by TSR or RM was an incredible feeling, let alone being asked to bowl the first or second over of the match. Historic moment in the life of the individual, like for Zaheer Khan when Sourav Ganguly tossed the ball to him in the former’s debut match to bowl the first over. Ha!

Barely a few matches into beginning to play on the main stage, the hallowed football ground, using one of the trees lining it as the batting stumps, I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I used to try and model my bowling like Kapil Dev’s, not that I managed to copy it completely, but got the basic movements right. I’d get a wicket every now and then. Fast bowling was not a common thing and the batsmen wielding the coconut leaf ‘oala’ bats would keep missing frequently. We young kids were still growing; we had little palms and little arms and little legs; catching the ball wasn’t the easiest thing to do. Naturally, most wickets would be claimed through the ‘clean bowled’ or ‘run out’ way.

Then one day I tasted my first big moment. I never thought it was possible. It occurred one afternoon in the games period in a match with players chosen in the manner I’ve mentioned above. I was bowling the penultimate delivery of my last over. GR was batting, standing sedately in front of the tree, tapping his bat against his foot like Praveen Amre did on TV. I ran up purposefully and hurled the ball in the general direction of GR and the tree. GR attempted a wild swing at the ball, missed completely and the ball merrily bounced off the tree, just below GR’s right knee.

Wicket!

What's more, GR’s wicket! After much ecstatic jubilation had taken place, and GR had trudged off to make way for the new batsman, that all sports conquering fellow AR took stance. I had my heart in my mouth as I started my run up. AR shuffled his stance a few times as I ran up, probably trying to distract or taunt me. I wavered not from my purpose and let loose at the popping crease.

WHAM!

The ball thudded on to the base of the tree. AR was out! Clean bowled by Purvarth Maddyanakumar! What a day, ladies and gents, what a day! GR and AR out on consecutive deliveries! Later in class, people would make fun of AR and how he got out Golden Duck style. My heart swelled with pride at these moments. Bespectacled boy from nowhere did this! Ha!

It was time to be inspired by more than just bowling action now. Those were days when Sachin Tendulkar and Kapil Dev appeared in Boost advertisements. After he had drunk his cup of Boost, the cameral would pan across Kapil’s face as he stood at the base of his run up, tossing the ball up repeatedly with a murderous look in his eyes; just before delivering a ball which shattered the white stumps, sending the bails to Beelzebub. Needless to say, little Purvarth did the same, mostly with just the tossing of the ball. Not that I shattered the stumps with every ball or sent bails anywhere. Every time I wanted to take someone’s wicket, I’d toss the ball into the air a few times, glaring at the batsman, before running up to bowl. Whether I got the wicket or not didn’t matter much; it was mostly the thrill of doing something which Kapil would do, perfectly. Whee!

Kapil Dev. The fast bowler who inspired Purvarth M to become one

A few days later TSR came up while we were fielding somewhere on the field and said, “You are the best bowler in the class”. I had no words. It was the best day ever!

My last moment of triumph in the fourth standard came on the last day. It was the day our final examinations had gotten over; the last day of school in our fourth standard and we had the whole afternoon to play. By now, I had graduated from officiating in paper ball games to playing with the top dogs, as you already know. It was one of those rare matches where TSR and RM were playing on the same side, against my team. In this 8 over match, we batted first and scored a respectable 42 runs. As I opened the bowling, RM opened the batting with another chap; memory fails to recollect who it was. But he didn’t last long as he got run out or something. How can you not remember who got out in your over? - You may ask. Well, I think it was because of what happened next. TSR took stance with RM at the runner’s end. Deadly combo! I went tearing round the stumps, TSR tried to heave me on to the on-side, missed completely, and the ball hit the tree where the middle stump should have been!

4 runs for 2 wickets in the first over! We had them by the neck!

What might have been an upset never occurred though, because at that moment the bell rang and it was time to go home for the summer vacations. We all agreed to come back next year and continue the game, but that never happened either. What if the bell hadn’t gone off and we had completed the game? We might have made history, beating a team with both RM and TSR. But on the other hand RM was a fellow who could have swung the game single handed. I guess I will never know. I guess I don’t want to know either, because it’s much better to remember it this way.

Like the people on the Grecian Urn.

The extraordinary cricketing tales of Purvarth Maddhyanakumar - II

It is only fair that you, sweet reader get to know how Purvarth learned his cricket; learned how to bowl; learned to bat; learned to have heart when some batsman carted him for four sixes in an over and still run to the popping crease into the jaws of the waiting monster with a bat; learned how to catch, albeit not very well. And also how it became that he played his first ever game of cricket in school, and earned much fame and lost it too later, and gain some of it back.

Here is what my practice ground looked like. A quiet peaceful colony, around 28 yards of paved lane, neighbor’s gate across the road at one end and a proud coconut tree at the other, just after the road curved away at a right angle. Houses on either side: potential window pane accidents at every swing of the bat! A line drawn on the tree trunk with a brick, about three feet from the ground; the popping crease drawn in brick again, with the afore mentioned brick being the stump at the bowling end; empty plots of land, festooned with coconut trees on all other sides of the batting tree. Now we know why they call it a tree stump. Haha. Ok.

Many a game have I played here, with the neighbors, all of whom were one to six years elder to me. You can imagine what would happen when a primary school kid tried bowling pace to a seasoned senior high school stud. That's right. This is where I learned to have heart. Well, I won't brag; there were times I ran away from all the humiliation to hurl abuses at that guy into my pillow, but yes, I eventually came around.

In the hallowed school grounds, much after the phase where we used to play with cardboards and paper balls and kochengas and chalk pieces, some of my classmates had taken to playing with real rubber balls and anything that could pass for a bat: pieces of plywood or a cut out portion of the versatile coconut leaf. Real stumps and creases weren't necessary. These were compensated for by trees by the playground, or sapling grills. The popping crease stumps were usually a couple of bricks, couple of pairs of shoes from some football playing kids, a schoolbag, or anything which formed some kind of mark. Sometimes even pencil boxes. In a couple of months into the fourth standard, the real cricketers soon identified themselves and would set up the afore mentioned kind of environment and battle it out like real men. I was too shy to go in and start bowling like Merv, so I would watch from the sidelines, like that chap who throws the ball back when hit for a boundary.

I eventually got over my shyness, and came out of the shell during an idle games period. The established fourth grade cricketers were out playing tough competitive cricket on the big stage, which is to say, against one of the casuarina trees lining the main hallowed football ground. A tree on that ground meant that you were playing serious cricket. Otherwise you were playing time-pass cricket. I approached the latter kind of match; a bunch of us were playing with a rubber ball, a stiff cutting from a tree trunk someone found, a sapling grill, and a couple of bricks. Time-pass game meant anyone could walk in a join a team while the game was still on.

"Do you bowl?” AA asked of me.
"Yes".

What followed was that wonderful feeling of first love that you must have felt at some point of time in life. In a class of mostly fragile 9 year-olds, I covered an admirable run up and bowled the first over of my life in school. From the reactions of my mates around, I gathered it was an impressive one. The over included a couple of bat-beats and a full throated appeal for LBW to the batsman himself, as there was no umpire. RP, who was batting, dismissed the appeal saying the ball had hit his ankle so it could not be out. (I learned many years later that it the ball hitting any part of the batsman's body excluding his forearm and fist was eligible for LBW, but whatever). After the over, AA exchanged a running high five with me as he ran past, leaving me exhilarated, beaming with unblemished happiness and all that.

It was only a matter of time before word spread to the bigger cricketing circles and I joined the group of few fast bowlers in class. And I couldn't wait for the experiences to follow.

The extraordinary cricketing tales of Purvarth Maddhyanakumar - I

I didn’t really fit in with the regular crowd. There were over 40 like me, squealing and howling on our first day at school, asking for amma. I, bewildered, being the only bengali in a sea of wailing malayali toddlers, wondering what amma was, and confused as to whether I should be asking for it too looked outside the grilled windows, at the bunch of grownups peering in. I had a distinctive feeling of what the bunch of monkeys in the cage must feel like while the visitors to the Thiruvananthapuram zoo peered in through the grills, making funny noises, as though trying to be monkeys themselves. Hah. As if they didn’t know they used to be monkeys millions of years ago. Or so some chap called Darwin decided they were. The visitors here were anxious, no doubt, worried about their children’s first day at school.

On looking around, I noticed a handful of specimens whose eyes were dry, and who were not bawling for amma and appa and things like that. Probably their ammas and appas weren’t at the window. No amma and appa for me either; my elder brother had taken me to my new class and run off to his own. Brothers in the same school and all that, you know. Such were the beginning moments of my first day in school.

It would be several confusing days, months and a couple of years before I would officiate as umpire in my first ever cricket match in school. Much happened between my first day in school and the day I stood in front of a tree, all sagely and wise adjudging wides, no balls, stumpings and runouts. That, because I was too shy to enter the space between the two casuarinas as a player!

I was 8. That would be in the year 1991.The Christmas examinations were upon us. I of course had no clue about the seriousness of things. The junior school exams consisted of one exam a day; a two hour paper in the morning, after which lunch followed and most parents would turn up to pick up their children, so that they could go home and start revising for the next day’s examination. The remaining children used to live farther away from school, and would take the 3.30 bus back home, until which time they would indulge in all kinds of time pass, including cricket! Now what kind of full blooded cricket could a handful of screaming 8 year olds engage in while they waited for the bus?

Simple: a page from a notebook would be wrapped up into a tight ball (Some of us had the unique knack of making excellent paper balls), the cardboard used for writing the exams on would polymorph itself into a cricket bat, the two casuarinas would serve as the two sets of stumps. The rest of the school would be the cricket ground. It was on one such occasion, when mom was a little late picking me up that I stepped gracefully on to this field as the supreme decision maker. Amid the tossing of the paper ball, heaving of cardboards and squealing of the kids around, I stood sedately, raising my arms this way and that way accordingly, as I had seen Dicky Bird do on TV many a time. I was thoroughly enjoying myself when the mater descended upon the scene and scooped me away to the auto, despite the feeble protests of the junta around who evidently thought I was as fair and just an umpire as ever entered a cricket field.

Such was my introduction to cricket, as we knew it in school. Countless experiences would follow in the 9 years that followed: learning to bat, bowl, field, drop catches, experiences of joy, triumph, complete despair and other feelings I have not the words to describe.

My first ever cricket match took a while coming though, after a full year had passed and I was well into the 4th standard. That was when I had burst into the scene, the young fast bowling novice who took the cricketing lives of 80 fourth graders by storm, an era when most of this sample space would quake in their chuddies at the sight of Purvarth starting his run up to lethal deliveries!

Extraordinary cricketing tales

A series of blog posts will follow soon, outlining the life of one Purvarth Maddhyanyakumar, mostly his cricketing life in his 12 years at school. Almost all of these tales will be inspired from real life incidents. Names of course, will be changed to maintain anonymity and dignity of people around him :) haha.

Watch the space.

The simple complexity of them old times

Simple complexity ask you? Think of urban life in general today. I go where I want to, I speak with whoever I want to, wherever he or she is, I spend a pittance to send a short note to someone in some corner of the world within seconds, I watch what I want to.. the usual cliched reminiscing.

But things are so simple now. Can I sit at home in my undies and find out whether I will get a back row ticket for the latest blockbuster in town showing at a cinema 15 km away? Sure! Could I have done this in 1999? Are you mad?! It wasn't so simple then. I had to walk to the bus stop, wait for a rickety old KSRTC, squeeze out at East Fort 45 minutes later, run into Sree Padmanabha, stand in the midst of a sea of people smelling of coconut oil and Lux soap combined and if I was lucky, I could buy a 32 rupee balcony ticket for the latest Aamir Khan starrer. Call it nostalgia, but somehow all that was much more fun than booking a ticket online, getting ready at my own pace, and leaving home 15 minutes before showtime and shoot off through the 6 lane highway leading from here to the multiplex, run into the theater just as the show starts. Just-In-Time efficiency. Wow.

TV. How the experience has changed! When my elder brother was a kid, he never saw TV at home until he was 6, a year after I was born! Until then it was 'each other' and of course good old 'Aakashvaani' which entertained the household. The 1983 cricket world cup experience for many those who experienced would include a city bus ride to a friend's house to watch the match on live telecast (neat!) from England. The match would get over at 11pm IST, after which they would somehow return home (imagine what public transport must've been like back then) to an eager family dying to hear how India fared. India had won that one. How it must have been. Boggles the mind.
Then came the big black and white box. Keltron's path-breaking device! Bass heavy sound, green screen when off, black and white images when on! One knob each for Power and Volume, Tone - bass or treble(latest!), brightness and contrast! It would be a while before the image distortions because of voltage fluctuation generated more interest in us young viewers than some crappy serial about the tragedies of some unfortunate family!

Things would be different if a classic Bengali movie was scheduled to come on. Or a cricket match. Or a Byomkesh Bakshi serial. If the picture was scratchy or unclear, someone would be on the roof in a trice, heaving around the TV antenna in all possible directions, sometimes innovating with the elevation to get the 'right signal'.

"Is it clear?!!"

"NOOO! Keep turning!!!"

"NOW?"

"NOO! Keep turning!! NO WAIT WAIT!! Ugggh! TURN IT BACK TO WHERE IT WAS!"

"NOW??"

"TURN IT BACK TO WHERE IT WAS!!"

"I ALREADY DID!! WE NEED A LONGER POLE FOR THIS ANTENNA!"

If you smiled at this little exchange, then we are from the same era. De taali.


Letters. No form of written communication will ever be as personal as this. Sure it took 5 days to get the message across, but the same joy I felt as a kid receiving letters from my cousin from Delhi, from my brother who went to college in Allahabad, or from the girl I had a crush on, which would send me prancing silently from the letter box to my room in no time, letters my parents would receive from their brothers, sisters and relatives, yellow postcards which seemed completely inked out in (to me) unreadable Bengali which I would immediately take to dad or mom; I will never feel from an email. I've experienced this feeling for two decades before I truly caught up with the internet world. From the handwritten word, email took over, and it looks like gtalk will take it from there. Sure, it's more convenient and quick and awesome and all that. But the simple joy of writing a letter, sealing it up, searching the house for a postage stamp, walking half a mile to post it, and waiting for a fortnight for a reply, written personally by your loved one, will probably not be experienced from that new mail in your inbox. A letter on the other hand would feel like he or she was right there, talking to you.

The telephone. Oh boy. If you can remember a time when only one house in your neighbourhood had a telephone, and that would be used by every house in the neighbourhood to receive important calls? Then again, we are from the same era. De taali! STD though, still hasn't changed for some old timers. There will be those who will still yell into the phone while on an STD/ISD call. The trunk-call experience still lives in some form! If you saw someone doing that, you'd know they were from THAT era :)

Money transfers. I can't really comment on how things have changed here, never having received a money order in my life, but I could only imagine the emotions. An old couple in a village sees the postman approaching with a money order from their son in the city. Cliched? Sure. But no comparisons of personal natures from me here, having been on many an occasion bailed out of tight situation by a swift transfer of the dough from the watchful brother at the other end of the country!

But then, hasn't every other thing I've mentioned here changed for the better in some way or the other? I guess it's what you've experienced as a child that sticks on as the innocent and feel-good way of life. My folks will probably always prefer writing letters more than trying to send emails. I will probably always prefer emailing, or whatever other form of communication my work requires me to do.

Who knows, my children may some day write about how email used to be so cool and awesome, even though less quick than sending a thought from one mind to another. Who knows what they'll invent?