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23rd March, 2003





We didn't have cable TV at home. It had always been deemed a 'distraction' towards our academic performance. However, as luck would have it, my granddad, a devout cricket fan, had decided to visit us a couple of months earlier and my father had to, grudgingly, get Doordarshan Sports so that my granddad could track India's tour of New Zealand in 2002-03.





That was the first time I watched a game of cricket. I cannot remember the first time I played it, as it was much earlier. I had been playing cricket before I even knew what the game was, who played it and whether I was any good at it.





I had watched Sachin Tendulkar in advertisements, but not on the field.





But now, I was watching it. Something about Virender Sehwag and Zaheer Khan stood out to me in that series, even at that age, and I decided to worship them.





My granddad left soon after that tour, but DD Sports did not. I had at my disposal a newfound cricket watching interest, two deified heroes in Sehwag and Zaheer and a functional sports channel. Suddenly, I was in with the times - the advertisements with Sachin and Ganguly made sense, the news reports made sense and the adult chatter made sense.





The advent of DD Sports into my house had somehow altered the zeitgeist. I was sold.



So amidst this hullabaloo to a highly impressionable mind, it all began. It began with a Brian Lara and Lance Klusener special. This sport was throwing greatness at me, one match at a time. It began with India vs. Netherlands, and with it the first Sachin straight drive that will remain eternally indelible.





It began with running home from school to check the scores. It began with protracted, desperate arguments with my parents for the day-night games, as they went well past our bedtime.



Once, I went to bed (disgruntled naturally) hoping that the English batsmen would show mercy to my team.





I woke up to the ballads of a certain Ashish Nehra, and his miraculous 6 for 23 . We mimicked his airplane celebration for years when we played.





I woke up to a Sourav Ganguly heist against Kenya. Thankfully, (since it was a day game) I was wide awake for Mohammed Kaif's heroics against New Zealand.





Then, the hype. India and Australia were bound to meet in the finals - surely, no one expected Kenya and Sri Lanka to defeat these behemoths? The Times Of Oman, in a bid to stand out from the crowd, ran a headline along the lines of 'Forget Australia vs. India, what about Sri Lanka vs. Kenya?'





I guess it was destined to be. Against Kenya once again, Ganguly unleashed a barrage of sixes over midwicket, and there was a new threat to the Indian quest to the finals: rain. The clouds threatened to wash out Ganguly's efforts, and India would have to come back for a fresh start. India switched to spin options pretty quickly into the Kenyan innings, with Harbhajan, Sachin, Sehwag and Yuvraj all rushing through their overs at Ganguly's frenzied gestures. He had one eye on the clouds, one eye on the D/L (now DLS ) score, and two hands frantically urging his bowlers to get to their mark quicker.





I went to sleep after India had satisfied the D/L quota of overs.





Sehwag, meanwhile, was having a bad World Cup. His mother was being interviewed on national news. She was describing the meticulousness of her prayers, and her motherly instinct told her that Sehwag would score big in the final.





On 23rd March, during our morning school prayer I decided to include an additional plea for my Indian cricket team. I was too young to calculate the importance of my little hurried wish; too young to be aware of the deluge of prayers that would emanate from India that day. The obliviousness of youth made me believe that, somewhere out there in Oman, one little kid's prayer would change destiny.





I was restless in school. I was convulsing with excitement during the bus ride back home. I might have leapt out before the door was fully open and hared across to my building. I might have jammed the elevator buttons and paced around, urging it to go up faster. I might have rushed past my mother at the door, flung my schoolbag aside and switched on the TV, remote trembling in my hands.





I switched on to a disaster.





Ricky Ponting had grabbed my little dreams and crushed them with alarming brutality.



He was a tornado; Australia, a dynasty. Every shot was like a whip crack, every boundary gesture was like a slap and every fist-bump was a puncture to my bubble of optimism. I was just sinking deeper, and deeper, and deeper.





But, we had Sachin. So we waited, clinging to our battered strands of hope. I watched Sachin and Sehwag walk out, and I had goosebumps. It was time to right the wrongs. Pay back the misery and the trauma in style. It would be the ultimate underdog story.



Sachin hit a boundary and then skied a pull. The ball hung in the air longer than normal.





It came crashing down with our hopes.











So I did the only thing I knew. I switched off the TV and went down to play.

This was the only antidote that came to my mind, the only escape mechanism. At the age of 9, going down to play was a panacea. My mother came down for a walk at some point to inform us that Sehwag had finally come good, but India hadn't. I didn't want this bargain. It was raining, and we were hoping for the match to be called off. The same rain gods I was against a match before were the ones I looked up to that day.





But alas, when I finally trudged back home, Sehwag was trudging back as well, having just been run out. The match was back on, and so were my miseries. But a young mind is fairly optimistic, and even at 9 down when Ashish Nehra hit two consecutive boundaries I envisioned him scoring a brisk century to engender the upset of the millennium.



