Circa 1971, I was about 11 years old and my father commented to me - "Look Vishwanath has scored a century". I replied - "So what, who cares". I got belted for that comment since my father felt that being abreast of current affairs was crucial for success in life and my arrogance did not exactly meet his approval.
Soon I was made to join Ramakrishna Ashram in Mysore where we were exposed to all games like Football, Hockey, Cricket, Basketball, Shuttle and we had to play all the games. Now cricket had advantages that the others did not have. In every other game I had to run, play, be on the move all the time but in cricket unless I was batting or bowling I could safely stand in deep third man or deep fine leg and could watch the game unless some idiot actually hit the ball towards me. Thus was born the love for cricket.
By the time the Indian team returned from its victorious tour of England and West Indies in 1971, I was a semi expert and ready to follow every game irrespective of where it was being played. The 1972-73 series in India was my first full fledged tour which assiduously followed. I was soon in the pro Pataudi - anti Wadekar, Pro Prasanna - anti Venkataraghavan camps debating furiously about my choice of Pataudi and Prasanna.
I started collecting cricket pictures and wanted to collect autographs but for the life of me did not know how to get them. Even today I have a briefcase full of cricket pictures cut out from various newspapers, magazines. Parents and Family were often contemplating murder as I cut off some good pictures the moment the newspaper came home in the morning so that it can be fresh. That is also the time like all addicts that I fell into criminal tendencies. I would surreptiously tear out pages from magazines and such in public libraries or when visiting some guests in their homes. I would spend hours pasting the pictures into note books.
By 1974 I was in a hostel in Bangalore and National College those days was the hub of cricket and other cultural events. We played tennis ball cricket and incidentally I dont think kids in any other state played as much with tennis balls as we did. It was considered "weak" to not play with a cork ball or a sponge ball that stung and bounced. But in Bangalore it was very popular and there were times when even Ranji/Test cricketers like Vishwanath, Binny, Brijesh Patel, Sudhakar Rao actually played tennis ball cricket on the college grounds.
This was the period when I started going to every match that was played in the Chinnaswamy stadium whether it was a Ranji, Duleep or even a friendly match. For Rs. 5 we could sit in the gallery under the hot sun with a even hotter concrete floor beneath but we never lost our interest. And mind you these were 3 day or 5 day matches where players plodded and plodded endlessly when compared to todays ODI/T20's.
I remember some memorable matches, incidents from those times.
There was this match between Karnataka as Ranji champions and Sri Lanka who were then not yet a recognised cricketing country. A brilliant player called David Heyn was batting and mistiming a pull the ball went straight up soaring vertically into the sky. A catch any child could have taken easily. The wicket keeper Syed Kirmani was all ready below the ball when Sanjay Desai another excellent batsman shooed away everybody and stood gloriously alone below the ball as it started descending lazily from its vertical climb. David Heyn watched with interest as did the crowd, and guess what ??? The ball continued to travel down and passed between the cupped hands and body of Desai and dropped to the crowd without so much as coming anywhere near his body. The entire field including Heyn were doubled up in laughter and for long Desai was the butt of jokes among us.
This was also the time when I managed to get my first autograph. I was listening to a radio commentary one day of a test between India and New Zealand when the commentator said that people had written to the NZ team asking for autographs and since no reply paid envelope was enclosed the team could not respond to its fans. I dropped everything and immediately sent a letter with a reply paid envelope to "New Zealand cricket team, C/o Green Park cricket stadium, Kanpur." Would you believe it I actually got the entire teams autographs in ORIGINAL on a single sheet of letterhead which even today I possess proudly.
Since then I have written to every team that came to India, including the Indian team and have done so till as late as 2012 but the results are surprising.
In 38 years the Indian team has never once replied.
New Zealand and Pakistan were the only teams that sent the autographs in original.
All other teams sent photcopies of the page.
Once the commercialisation of cricket took root no team responded including someone like Kenya or Holland who you would think might respond.
I got into the habit of searching and scavenging road side book stalls to find books, magazines on cricket and on one such occasion I picked up a few copies of Sports & Pastime a magazine that was no longer published. Leafing through it at home I came across my proudest possession. The stationary of the Pakistan cricket team of 1960 with all the original autographs including greats like Fazal Mohammed, Hanif Mohammed, Javed Burki etc.
The next set of precious autographs I got was again by luck. My classmate and friend Ravishankar Deekshit (now the Principal of a engineering college) a budding leg spinner and nephew of the great BS Chandrasekhar preferred to spend time on the cricket field rather than in the practical labs as my partner since we had similar names. It was upto me to do the work, write the reports etc and he simply put his name down with me. I was getting irritated and finally told him that I needed to be compensated. He asked me my price. I told him that he must make Chandrasekhar get as many autographs as possible from Australia when the Indian team toured there in 1977-78. He did and I got many autographs, many I do not even recognise but it had the prized autograph of Sir Donald Bradman.
End of part 1........................More in next...... Crcketing Memories Part 2
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