World Cup Cricket and Appa
I have grown up watching cricket with Appa. From the days when cricket wasn't quite so glamorous, when the cricketers all wore white and didn't have their names printed on their jerseys. We had to really know our players back then to be able to identify them on the pitch. Matches stretched over for 5 days and you really had to be dedicated to follow these. One-dayers were considered the quick short version of the game and we hardly moved during the 8.5 hours when the match was on. We didn't have much to choose from in terms of content on TV and it was probably therefore a lot more natural for all of us to be huddled in front of the TV when a cricket match was on. My kids unfortunately have way too much choice of content and do not have the attention span for a "full 20:20 match" let alone a 50 over match, even if it is, as I constantly remind them "the world cup kids, which happens only once in 4 years!"
For cricket viewing in our house, Appa was always at the centre with the best chair in the house and then there were my brothers and a bunch of cousins of varying ages and sometimes an uncle or two. Beds and chairs from other rooms were dragged into the tiny little space that was our TV room on important match days to accommodate everyone that wanted to be a part of all the cricket hungama. Some of us also sat on the floors. Even those of us in the house who resisted (I was never one of them, but I am talking about Amma, Veena etc) would somehow or the other in the end be drawn to the TV, cos the shouts from Appa (and the rest of us cos Appa has this infectious spirit when it comes to viewing of sports of any sort) would be too deafening and sound too exciting to completely ignore. And boy did Appa shout! Not just at the sixes and fours, but for every yorker, full toss, cutter, googly, off-spin, leg-spin which resulted in a dot ball !
We practically worshipped our cricketers. From the days of Kapil Dev and Sunny Gavaskar in the first world cup that India ever won, through Azhraddin and Ajay Jadeja to Tendulkar, Dravid and then to MSD, Rohit Sharma, Bhumra et al. I have cried watching our star batsmen getting out or when our bowlers bowled the full toss that gave the opponents the chance to hit the winning six!
There was always a lot of peanuts to go around, which made sense given that Appa was often sipping a beer while watching the game. There may have been a glass of Limca or Goldspot to accompany the peanuts for us kids on a special match day, but one by one, we all graduated to beers at some point of time. And amidst the graduation from sodas to beers and from the floor to the chair, we also graduated from school and left the house one by one and it was just Appa sitting alone in his chair watching the matches (although one or the other of our younger cousins always eventually ended up on the chair next to him for many a match).
World Cup Cricket though was another thing. I just HAD to be home to watch these with Appa. Whether I was a college girl in Delhi, a law student in Mumbai, a lawyer working in Bangalore or a mum in Chennai, I was on the train or a flight back home come the WC finals, cos I simply could not watch a world cup final without sitting next to Appa, sipping beers and eating peanuts. We have cried and hugged each other through decades of India's losses and victories and there's no one else in the world who I would rather a cricket match with than Appa.
Today as I patiently wait for the 2019 World Cup Finals between Australia and New Zealand to start, I cant help but feel the painful realisation that this is the first world cup in my 42 years of existence, which I will not be watching with Appa. Hopefully he will watch the game with Ro in Chicago and not by himself. We will text each other a number of times during the match ofcourse, but the match just wont be the same for me. It's just as well India didn't make it to the finals, cos I cannot imagine not having hugged Appa at the end of the match irrespective of whether India had triumphed or not!
For cricket viewing in our house, Appa was always at the centre with the best chair in the house and then there were my brothers and a bunch of cousins of varying ages and sometimes an uncle or two. Beds and chairs from other rooms were dragged into the tiny little space that was our TV room on important match days to accommodate everyone that wanted to be a part of all the cricket hungama. Some of us also sat on the floors. Even those of us in the house who resisted (I was never one of them, but I am talking about Amma, Veena etc) would somehow or the other in the end be drawn to the TV, cos the shouts from Appa (and the rest of us cos Appa has this infectious spirit when it comes to viewing of sports of any sort) would be too deafening and sound too exciting to completely ignore. And boy did Appa shout! Not just at the sixes and fours, but for every yorker, full toss, cutter, googly, off-spin, leg-spin which resulted in a dot ball !
We practically worshipped our cricketers. From the days of Kapil Dev and Sunny Gavaskar in the first world cup that India ever won, through Azhraddin and Ajay Jadeja to Tendulkar, Dravid and then to MSD, Rohit Sharma, Bhumra et al. I have cried watching our star batsmen getting out or when our bowlers bowled the full toss that gave the opponents the chance to hit the winning six!
There was always a lot of peanuts to go around, which made sense given that Appa was often sipping a beer while watching the game. There may have been a glass of Limca or Goldspot to accompany the peanuts for us kids on a special match day, but one by one, we all graduated to beers at some point of time. And amidst the graduation from sodas to beers and from the floor to the chair, we also graduated from school and left the house one by one and it was just Appa sitting alone in his chair watching the matches (although one or the other of our younger cousins always eventually ended up on the chair next to him for many a match).
World Cup Cricket though was another thing. I just HAD to be home to watch these with Appa. Whether I was a college girl in Delhi, a law student in Mumbai, a lawyer working in Bangalore or a mum in Chennai, I was on the train or a flight back home come the WC finals, cos I simply could not watch a world cup final without sitting next to Appa, sipping beers and eating peanuts. We have cried and hugged each other through decades of India's losses and victories and there's no one else in the world who I would rather a cricket match with than Appa.
Today as I patiently wait for the 2019 World Cup Finals between Australia and New Zealand to start, I cant help but feel the painful realisation that this is the first world cup in my 42 years of existence, which I will not be watching with Appa. Hopefully he will watch the game with Ro in Chicago and not by himself. We will text each other a number of times during the match ofcourse, but the match just wont be the same for me. It's just as well India didn't make it to the finals, cos I cannot imagine not having hugged Appa at the end of the match irrespective of whether India had triumphed or not!
posted by lawyeramma at 1:33 AM
1 Comments:
He is watching it alone as it pretty early in the morning here. I call down to the basement occasionally to know what's going on.
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