A Lady’s Account of a Gentleman’s Game

My formal initiation into the world of cricket was during the 1996 World Cup. Well, that is if you don’t consider ‘book cricket’ and the one-off summer afternoons of galli cricket where I was grudgingly included in the neighbourhood game and cautiously stationed where there was a one in a hundred chance of the ball passing by. While I did fairly alright in the book cricket version, the kids in my colony didn’t take very kindly to me scrambling for cover behind a bush when a stray ball actually beat the one in hundred odds and came hurtling towards me. That was when I opted for an early retirement from the game of cricket (much to their relief). And then, 1996 happened.

I was in the 8^th grade and had become a die-hard cricket fan overnight. I watched every match in the series. I scoured through the sports section of the Deccan Herald as religiously as my textbooks and devoured every bit of information on the teams and the players. I even made a scrap book to follow the tides of the World Cup. It had newspaper clippings, the World Cup Schedule, players’ pictures, trivia, statistics et al. I rooted for Sri Lanka in the finals because they were the underdogs and I had found Dilhara Fernando rather cute. But I also remember switching loyalties to Australia after the match because I felt sorry for them and their woebegone expressions; besides I had begun to find Adam Gilchrist cute as well!

Sadly, post the 1996 World Cup, the die-hard cricket fan in me eventually died and all that remained of the flash-in-the-pan obsession was a dusty scrapbook and a pack of well-worn Cricket Trump Cards. But in January 2008, my friend Simi and I sat at Worli Sea Face after watching the movie ‘Bucket List’ and drew up a wish list of our own. Sixth on that list was a re-manifestation of my flash-in-the-pan fondness for cricket under the note, “Watch a cricket match live at a stadium.” Well, it did take me a good 5 years to get down to it but I shall have you know that yours truly has put a big, fat tick mark against item #6 on the agenda. Here’s proof for the non- believers :-)

 

Well, this was from the India vs. England T20 match on 22^nd Dec 2012. Boy! Was I glad that the world hadn’t ended the previous day!  The evening started off on a bit of a back foot (though in Cricket, I am told that phrase is not cause for concern). My friend Krishna and I thought for some reason that the match was scheduled to start at 8 pm and not 7 pm. Even though we managed to reach the stadium by 6:50 pm we weren’t prepared for the serpentine line of fans outside. It meandered past the lane alongside the gate and continued until the end of the road and even snuck up the over-bridge and ended at the Marine Lines station a good 1.5 km away!

An excruciating half hour and 7 overs later when we managed to find our way into the stands, I felt like Alice down the rabbit hole. I walked into a whole different world - a green island bathed by a thousand splendid suns and surrounded by a euphoric sea of blue that ebbed and flowed and rippled in synchrony.  I was literally a drop in the ocean. I elbowed my way through the sea of blue and realized much to my delight that we actually had ring side seats to the game.  My delight was sadly short-lived. The moment I sat down, I found that my entire view of the game was blocked by a not-so-thin cameraman who single handedly eclipsed the entire pitch like a one rupee coin eclipsing the sun! 

I missed the next couple of overs trying to get his attention to convince him to lie down on the grass and shoot the game from a more unique angle. I’ve seen wild life photographers on National Geographic shoot game (albeit a different kind) from that angle. But his head phones effectively rendered all my attempts useless! What’s more, his strategic distance from the ring fence effectively prevented me from poking him in the ribs to draw his attention. With only 7 overs to go for the first half, I resigned myself to watching the game at a 45 degrees angle.  Of course, I missed 3 of them trying to catch the roving camera that would relay the audience’s faces on national television for I had asked half the world to watch out for me on TV.

The second half saw me missing the first 5 overs again – 4 of them in the quest for a cheese grilled sandwich and 1, trying to find my way back to my seat. Ironically, the not-so-thin cameraman served as a landmark, thereby saving me from missing another over (at a 45 degrees angle of course).  But suddenly, with a fielding change, my luck changed as well. The next 5 overs saw me gushing like a 16 year old; thanks to the little blue blob to my left (refer the proof-photo shared earlier), otherwise known as Virat Kohli. Well, the man is a crowd pleaser and he did seem to enjoy his share of the limelight, throwing smouldering ‘how-you-doing?’ looks to acknowledge the “Viraaaat, we love you!!!” screams from the ladies in the stands.  The last 10 overs went by in a flurry of Raina, Gambhir, empty space, Sir Ravindra Jadeja carrying a water bottle, empty space, Kohli, Sourav Ganguly with his fresh crop of hair and Siddhu with a yellow turban passing through and stealing Kohli’s thunder by waving to the crowd, empty space and a tottering Ravi Shastri headed towards the presentation arena. 

We lost the match that day, but I went home happy in the thought that:- the world had not ended, item # 6 had a big fat tick against it and Kohli threw 2 smouldering ‘how-you-doing?’ looks in my general direction (give or take a couple of feet) :-P

Shopoholics Anonymous

Violins played soulfully in the background. The air was sweet with the gentle fragrance of roses infused with bergamots. My eyes glazed over as I walked down the aisle with a smile towards that wonderful man who had everything I had been looking for. I could feel the envious glances from a bunch of women across the room and hastened to reach him, lest he be distracted by their presence.

If I had thought that this was one of those picture perfect moments of my life, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The violins were rudely interrupted by an in-store announcement. The perfume sales-person went away on a break, taking with her the last whiff of the Nina Ricci EDT that she had so generously been spraying at random shoppers. The sales guy at the Benetton aisle was attacked from the flank by a woman with a fake Louis Vuitton bag who relieved him of half my shortlisted clothes!

“Ah well, at least you’ve got your mug”, my friend patted me on the arm encouragingly when she saw my fuming ‘I-shall-murder-the-thieving-lady-with-the-fake-bag’ look. I nodded, slightly abashed. I was abashed because I had dragged my unsuspecting friend into the Shopper’s Stop store earlier that morning to buy a mug. And there I was 3 hours later with 2 pairs of shoes, a summer dress, a tulip skirt and yeah, one mug but still mourning over the loss of a couple of peplum dresses that I had shortlisted. And all she had to show for the 3 hours was, well, infinite patience and empathy! Uggh, shopping does bring out the ugly, ungracious side of me!

My friend Simi once told me that I turn in to some sort of a weird Zombie when I shop. Apparently, when I spot a dress or a pair of peep-toe shoes that takes my fancy, I zone out, my eyes glaze over and I eerily glide towards it with my arms outstretched; impervious to all external stimuli / internal logic.  I stopped for a moment to ponder over that hard-hitting truth (after I had tried out that new pair of peep-toe shoes, of course!) I realized then that I seem to have more of a physiological response to shopping. Retail Therapy which has been touted to be the ultimate mood enhancer for most of (wo)mankind seems to go one step ahead to act as a performance enhancer for me! In fact if you’d put me in a 100 m sprint alongside Usain Bolt with the finish line at the Zara store, I’m pretty sure I’d elbow him and surge ahead.

I am not kidding. There is nothing like a LBD or a pair of kitten heels to get the adrenaline pumping. After several years of dedicated research in the Retail space (read indiscriminate shopping) I have logged the following observations on the physiological effects of Retail Therapy:

1.      Blood rushes to the brain. (I believe this also happens when one runs into George Clooney)

2.      There is a heightened sense of sight and touch. (Yes, there *is* a difference between cyan coloured chiffon and cerulean tinted crepe.)

3.      And the reflexes are distinctly sharper. (Well, sharper than that on a Monday morning and sharp enough to elbow Usain Bolt out of the race to Zara!)

Add to that the forbidden four letter word – S*A*L*E and you’d have me on a leash! I was probably hypnotized as a kid as a part of some socio-economic experiment to boost the Retail industry in India. I presume ‘sale’ would have been chosen as the key word that would snap me in and out of a dream-like state (where I would charge about mindlessly emptying my wallet). Anyway, if any of those evil scientists are reading this… Congratulations! It works. I even rush into ‘Lungi’ exhibitions at Co-Optex thanks to the rainbow coloured sign-board that screams “SALE”!

So the way it usually works is - twice a year I wake up early on a Saturday morning to a phone call from my friend Vani with the joyous news of the end of season sales. We plan our strategy and our circuit which like a medieval hunting expedition mostly involves getting a head start. Until recently, our circuit mostly revolved around Phoenix Mills and Atria Mall. However last year, with due deference to our geographical status, we foraged the hunting grounds up north. I shall have you know that we wore down the escalators of Phoenix Market City, R-City mall and Oberoi mall all in one day! Well, the Oberoi sojourn was for a movie but I’m counting it anyway. Bite me! Oh dear, there’s my retail-induced mean streak again. If any of the shoppers from R-City mall are reading this… Sorry about the black eye, but that *was* the last yellow cardigan in the store after all and I saw it first.

And finally, if Arjun, Vaibhav or Kunal are reading this… “Girls Will Shop”!!!

Bitter Pill

I would not quite call myself a hypochondriac, but I do end up visiting the Doctor a tad more often than most other people do. Well in my defense, I have always ended up a victim in the eternal tussle between my desire to eat everything and the ability to do so. It also doesn’t help that where most normal human brains would conform to the “Fight or Flight” reaction in stressful times, mine deviously registers “Throw-up” as the only response. 

When I first moved to Bombay, my version of acclimatization involved throwing up every once in a while. Vani, my friend, flat-mate, and fashion pundit very succinctly summarized the situation and labeled my weekend vomiting bouts as the “Sunday Syndrome”. Being new to the city, I refrained from visiting the smaller neighbourhood clinics; not due to a misplaced sense of snobbishness but because of a generic assumption that the bigger the medical facility, the more credible it would be. 

The first center on my list, was what seemed to be a fairly huge medical college and hospital. A familiar landmark around where I lived then. It was a weekday and Simi, my friend, flat-mate, and philosopher very sweetly offered to take me to the nearest hospital before heading to work. I found myself in an elongated room with three doctors sitting at identical tables aligned in a row; two of the Doctors were already attending to the patients seated opposite them. A grim-looking nurse brusquely waved me towards the empty stool while the remaining patients at the doorway watched on impatiently for their turn. A scene from the CET counseling room during my pre-engineering days suddenly surfaced from the depths of my memory as I walked towards the Doctor.

The moment I seated myself on the rickety stool, I was assaulted with a barrage of questions in rapid Marathi by the Doctor. When I hastened to explain to him that I didn’t quite understand Marathi, the ward-boy (who in this case just happened to be a burly, middle-aged lady) clucked disapprovingly and nodded her head reproachfully with a ‘Don’t-know-where-they-keep-coming-from’ expression. The Doctor switched to a less rapid Hindi interrogation and I answered with equal parts relief and uncertainty (my barely functional knowledge of Hindi was no match for his medical terms in textbook Hindi). I must have managed fairly well though, for I did end up with a prescription (albeit in Marathi) from the Doctor; but the Consultation fee of a mere thirty rupees left me quite confounded. When I went to a Chemist to buy the drugs, my confusion was fuelled further, for they told me that they did not stock “that kind of medication”. It was when my confusion switched to alarm that they patronizingly explained that I had just been to the local Ayurvedic hospital!

If the thirty rupees fee raised my eyebrow, I soon ended up at a hospital where the consultation fee made my jaw drop. This time around it was a case of burning eyes and a nagging headache. Triggered by suggestions from colleagues at work and a spot of ‘Googling’, I went to a renowned (non-ayurvedic) hospital close to my locality. They had insisted upon creating a file for me so that “it would be easier when I would come for a treatment the next time around”. Their confidence in my falling ill again was mildly disconcerting. I was then ushered into an elaborate eye examination room where after much ado I was told that the discomfort was not due to some exotic eye infection but because my power had increased from -0.5 to -0.75; and yes, the fee was an astronomical eight hundred rupees! It only added insult to injury when Simi (who had in her unfailing show of solidarity accompanied me to the hospital) wanted to pick up a pair of glasses. When we reached the Optics Showroom, the optician offered to check her power; and yes, for FREE!

That did it.  The day I was attacked by a vicious bout of cough, I resolved to advance to the next segment – non-ayurvedic, non-highway-robbing medical centres. This time, I took my Landlord’s advice and visited his family physician whose clinic was a stone’s throw away. When I turned up at the hole-in-the-wall clinic however, I was a little miffed to find that he was a child specialist. I hung around nevertheless amidst wailing babies and curious mothers (probably wondering where my ailing child was, for clearly, why else would I have turned up!). I was the last one to see the Doctor who thankfully, unlike the mothers outside, wasn’t very curious. In a very matter-of-fact-way he asked me for my symptoms and before I could finish, he started penning down the prescription while simultaneously calling out to his assistant to bring the prescribed drugs.

And that was when I practically fell off the stool in shock. I don’t quite remember which caused the greater impact - the prescription that he handed to me on a yellow Post-It note or his instruction to his assistant “Sheela, woh naye sample waale tablets lekar aana”! I quickly spun around to scan the room for some sign of reassurance- a framed MBBS degree certificate or even a graduation photo with a stethoscope around his neck but the search was interrupted by the sight of Sheela walking in with a big yellow box with STD, ISD, PCO written on it. She went towards the small bed in the corner and emptied what was clearly a public telephone booth signage box. Out came a deluge of colourful pills in various shapes and sizes. She sorted through them and handed over a few of her favourites to the Doctor who promptly folded them in a used math notebook sheet and passed it over to me. I just managed to register a blur of blue capsules, yellow tablets and a dozen baby pink pills staring at me with a few algebraic equations in the background. No expiry date, no pharmaceutical composition, and definitely no logic. 

The Doctor mistook my incredulous expression for one of gratitude and launched into a friendly banter which was more of an interrogation of my personal life (definitely more detailed than the discussion of my symptoms). When he surmised that I was working in a bank, staying on rent and had done my Telecom Engineering before my MBA, he actually said, “Why don’t you send me your resume and I’ll try and get you a job with BSNL. Government jobs are more stable and you will even get a Government quarters. But no promises, huh?”

This time around I left with both, a raised eyebrow and a dropped jaw.

Be a Sport!

The massive gold rush at the Common wealth games made me nostalgic and brought back memories of my formative years in the sporting arena. Not that I had much of a gold rush or even an adrenaline rush for that matter. It was more of a mad rush to try not be the last person left on the tracks, and come to think of it my sporting arena was never more expansive than the school ground.

Nevertheless my earliest memories of sports is that of the school annual sports day in KG 2 where we had to roll a length of paper ribbon into a wad and make a dash to the finish line. Though I was the 1st one to finish rolling the ribbon; in all my socialistic benevolence, I waited for the others to finish rolling theirs as I had the misplaced notion that the actual race could begin only after everyone was done rolling. So I waited patiently with a beatific smile on my face, much to my parents’ consternation and the teachers’ perplexity. A couple of seconds later I saw one girl start running. And in a classic example of those tell-tale irritating kids in class, I turned to complain to the teacher who had flagged off the race with her whistle, except my vision was blocked by another girl who broke into a run; followed by another. It was then that by an early display of herd mentality which prevailed over common sense that I broke into a frenzied run for the finish line.

Now in the 1980s, annual sports days in school were quite flamboyant affairs. The dress code for this particular race in 1987 was blue and the format was a frock / gown. I had gone all out with an ankle length ball gown replica with ruffles which proved to be quite a hindrance while running because it wasn’t quite designed for heavy sprinting or even rapid shuffling of feet for that matter. However here again the concept of relativity made an early entry into my life though I didn’t recognize it then. The 3rd girl who had run past me seemed to have gone one step further than me in designing her dress and seemed to have added a blue veil trail to her ensemble which was well in line with the latest autumn –winter collection but didn’t quite go with her running shoes, because it kept getting under them!!

And that was how I managed to salvage the 3rd place (bronze) in the ribbon race with an amusing insight – Lesser clothes works better in Sports as well.

I then moved onto the annual sports day in 1988. This time I was a year older and much the wiser from my previous exploits. Turns out the school was as well. The school tailor in all his sensibility designed shorts for all contestants (to eliminate any added disadvantage that the attire may confer upon the contestants). My parents for their part had geared me up by giving me the added advantage of a healthy breakfast replete with a glass of glucose and all. When the instructions for the race were doled out, I got to know that the task was to drink a bottle of Thumbs Up and dash to the finish line. This time, my socialistic benevolence disappeared as fast as the Thumbs Up which I glugged down at a speed of 1000 cc/sec. The moment the last drop left the bottle I started running towards the finish line but I didn’t get very far. There is something about idlis, glucose and thumbs-up which apparently doesn’t go well together because my sprint was cut short within the 1st few metres by a stupendous, spontaneous arc of puke which effectively blurred the finish line.

And that left me with the 2nd invaluable insight - Wherever lesser clothes don’t help in particular, lesser food definitely does!

Over the next few years I had tried various forms of sports - the lemon and spoon race, needle and thread race etc. I can’t comment about the skipping race because ironically I had to ‘skip’ the race as I tripped over my rope and fell down even before the race started! As for the sack race and shot put throw, both me in my sack avatar and the shot put orb that I subsequently hurled, ended up travelling the same distance (2 and a half feet, I was told) after which both rolled over unbecomingly to the side of the track.

Anyway, years later I can safely say that I am still in touch with my sporty side-

a) I actively participate in the corporate rat race
b) Play ball with the mails that hit my inbox by proactively bouncing them off to other stakeholders with an ‘fyi&a’ note
c) Attend marathon meetings which begin at 9:00 in the morning and go on till the cows come home.

P.S: I try to steer clear of the sack race at work though, for that’s one race where the last one to finish actually gets the sack : )

‘Gym’micks

There are 13,456 ways to kill a person. By far the most excruciating yet seemingly innocuous method to do so is... gymming (‘working out’ for the uninitiated). Barring Fin-Acc quizzes and Sumo wrestling, there is no mortal activity on the face of the planet that could possibly match up to gymming in making you feel like you died twenty two times in one nanosecond.

I just happen to be one of those ‘obsessively health conscious’ (read suicidal) souls in the universal quest for the 'Utopian anatomical configuration’, which partly explains why I ventured through the hallowed portals of the gymnasium. The other not so altruistic motive which constitutes the rest of the explanation revolves around the preconceived notion that the gymnasium is the breeding ground for the ‘finer species of the opposite sex’. A connoisseur’s delight, if I may say so.

A little impromptu jog and I found myself at the gym, albeit high on aspiration and low on respiration. But all my hopes of a grand entrance were annihilated by the effects of my little jog taking its toll. I mean, dragging myself in looking like I had been to hell and back, while all the while sounding like a cycle pump in action wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. All said and done, I was ready to embark on a soul-searching, paunch-losing expedition and headed directly towards the treadmill with a vigour that would have made Don Quixote seem inadequate. My efforts to do the same however were nipped in the bud by the gym instructor who politely but very firmly insisted that I do a couple of warm ups first. I thus began my first task of bending forward and touching my toes with a ‘huh, child’s play’ look which froze midway because that was exactly how far the tips of my fingers went... midway, just below the knees. I was cognizant of a wide chasm (justifiably comparable to the Grand Canyon) which no amount of finger-wriggling or toe-lifting could bridge. After sustained efforts aided by surreptitious knee-bending (deemed illegal by the moguls of the gym), I managed to complete the ordeal with out actually dropping down dead. I was all set to pack up and evacuate the premises. I’d had enough exercise for the next thirty two years put together.

Being endowed with a rather convoluted cerebral process, I pride myself in being capable of despairing over more than one thing at a time. Added to my abysmal gymming abilities (or disabilities if you may) the absence of that certain ‘finer species of the opposite sex’ was rapidly contributing to my mounting despair. But my despair like my gymming ambitions was pretty short lived. For in all their resplendent glory, and completely conforming to my idea of a grand entrance, there arrived a contingent of the finer species in question. It is amazing what a bunch of strapping young men can do to ones morale. One minute I was charting out a route map to the EXIT sign and what do you know, the next minute I’m back to Don Quixote mode again, ready to pump iron.

That was how I found myself in phase two of the exercise regime. This time around I had to touch the opposite toes with the tips of my fingers. Under normal circumstances, by no stretch of the imagination or my arm muscles for that matter could I have accomplished the feat. But egged on by a curious audience and subtle execution of the art of knee-bending, I came out victorious. I had thus graduated to the awe inspiring exercise machines that seemed to be made up of pulleys, weights and more weights. The task when put in words seemed obscenely simple - grip the handle bar, raise and drop the weights in a vertical motion. But the simplicity stopped right there. For try as I might, I couldn’t pull the handle bar more than two inches downwards. I blamed it on the pulley and tried explaining the laws of friction and other interesting aspects of physics to the instructor but for some reason that I couldn’t fathom, he wasn’t all that convinced. As a matter of fact, neither was my esteemed audience who by then had graduated from a level of curiosity to one of extreme amusement.

Anyway, I found solace in a new drill- the dumbbells. At least that’s what I thought until the gravity of the situation (pun unintended) dawned upon me. All my endeavours of wielding the dumbbells in mid air were thwarted by the fact that the dumbbells seemed to be the ultimate manifestation of Newton’s law of gravity……the only direction they seemed to be headed towards was the core of the earth. But this time I refrained from alluding to the laws of gravity scavenged from the elementary school physics text. Something told me that assimilating the subtle nuances of physics from someone who couldn’t even lift dumbbells wasn’t exactly one of the primary hobbies of either my instructor or my audience. It was somewhere during the middle of these contemplations that the dumbbell slipped from my hand and with stupendous velocity, acceleration and a considerable amount of precision fell exactly on my left foot. The result was profound. There was a unanimous gasp which subsequently diversified into three different reactions - the instructor embarked onto reciting a long list of anti-inflammatory, analgesic sprays to hit the market; my audience was rolling on the floor laughing with unadulterated amusement of the hedonistic kind; and I headed towards the door with a brilliant display of histrionics, successfully conforming to my idea of a bad exit.

My stint at the gym didn’t help me lose weight though I did manage to lose quite a bit of self-image. But one thing I did gain there was some gyan. Here goes:

a) Working out would probably kill me faster than obesity.
b) The finer species of the opposite sex have a weird sense of humour.