Week 6 - Let the Rain Fall Down
I have started to notice some of my New York friends complain on social media about the weather they are getting. “OMG it’s going to be 90 tomorrow! It might even get to 100 later this week. Ugh it’ soooo hot.” Welcome to my world.
Fortunately, I either brought the monsoons from Bombay back with me, or I magically transferred the heat to the other side of the world. You’re welcome!
With the rains came a brief respite from the scorch of the last month. Delhi rains are a bit different from the Bombay monsoons: in Bombay, the rain is constant but varies in magnitude, but in Delhi, we get intermittent torrential downpours. The storm is playing peekaboo – thirty minutes of rain, every ten hours. With that temperament comes a slightly cooler forecast – from 105 to 90 degrees – but I will take any small victory here. This week at work was another slow one, with the courts still on vacation. My biggest project was trying to escape all the mosquitoes that had descended with the monsoon…I was not successful.
Comment from my readers (I have more than one!!) suggested that I dive deeper into some of the topics I discuss on this blog. So, since the World Cup is fully underway and capturing everyone’s attention, I thought I would dive into a sport that is underappreciated in America: Cricket!
Cricket is the first sport I ever watched, and my first true fandom. Growing up, cricket was the best way to connect with my grandparents, and bridge the cultural divide. It was one of the few things on TV that I could understand – the rest were in Hindi, even the cartoons. For Indians, cricket is a religion, a fanaticism unlike anything I have ever seen. From a young age, it was easy to get swept up in the passion and dedication to the sport. Once you see your grandparents yell at a screen for hours, you become a little curious as to what is going on. I don’t think I have seen them get worked up over anything else that way – Indians are a pretty mild-mannered bunch otherwise. While England may take credit for forming the sport, cricket’s heart lies in India. Other countries have multiple sports to take in, other athletes to idolize, but an Indian cricket match freezes the entire country.
My favorite athlete of all time is a cricket player: Sachin Tendulkar. A wunderkind, he joined the national team at sixteen, and ended his career as arguably the greatest player of all time. A boy from Bombay, he is India’s most idolized figure next to Gandhi, and even that is arguable. He used to have batting practice at a park in Bombay, and my grandfather took me once to see him in the cages. Standing at 5’5”, he still looked like a giant at the time. We went out and got my first cricket bat right after.
In 2003, there was finally a pay-per-view service in the US to watch the Cricket World Cup – Dish Network gained a lot of subscribers that year. The only problem was that the tournament was hosted in South Africa, making the timings of the games not that ideal. But every other day, there would be a knock on the door at four, five in the morning, and people would slink into the house to watch. If I wasn't’t already awake, I would come down before the second innings started – around nine – and find around ten to fifteen people downstairs. My mother would be making chai for everyone. My uncle would chide me for not waking up early enough to watch the whole thing, questioning my commitment with a smirk. That year, India made it to the final to face the Australian juggernaut, the bane of our existence. For some reason, India could play against any other team except them; against Australia, the players crumbled.
Australia batted first. India had won the coin toss and elected to field, hoping to take advantage of the field conditions. That plan backfired spectacularly, and Australia scored 359 runs in their innings – one of the highest scores I had ever seen. Once India came up to bat, the players were dropping like flies, and a rain delay mercifully stopped the beatdown just for a moment. Most of us stopped watching – we went outside and played cricket in the cul-de-sac instead, using the same bat my grandfather got me. India ended up losing by 125 runs – the biggest loss in a World Cup Final. It would be eight years until India won the cup, its first in my lifetime and second since 1983.
The rules! It is a bit like baseball, in that there is a bat and a ball, and the field is a non-rectangular shape (baseball diamond, cricket oval). There are three formats: A Test match, which lasts five days; a one-day international (ODI), which is about 8-9 hours and the most common format; and a twenty-over match (T20), which is a breezy 3-4 hour game. Let’s just focus on the one-day, otherwise this could get long.
Each team has 11 players. One team fields, while the other bats. There are always two batsmen on the field, and their job is to accrue as many runs as possible without getting out. The fielding team has one bowler (‘pitcher’) and one wicket-keeper (‘catcher’), with the other nine spread out across the oval. There are certain restrictions to where the fielders can be placed, but let’s not get into that. Their job is to try to get the entire batting team out, or to limit the amount of runs they score in the time given.
For a one-day game, each team bats for 50 overs. An over is six balls, or deliveries, by the bowler. A batsman can score a run by hitting the ball and running across the pitch or by hitting the ball well enough that it crosses the boundary of the field. The pitch is a hard, rectangular surface in the middle of the field, where most of the action happens. The bowler bowls from one side to a batsman on the other side – this batsman is the striker. The other batsman is the non-striker; each time they run, they switch sides and switch the person who is up to bat. There are different types of bowlers too: fast-bowlers, who throw fast (obviously), and spin bowlers, who throw the equivalent of curveballs. The bowler can get the batsman out by bowling past him and hitting the wickets (striking him out), inducing a catch (fly-out), or hitting the wickets while the batsmen are running and not in their crease (safe-zone/home base). There are other ways too, and I am now realizing that this is getting a bit too complicated.
To keep it short, one team bats in pairs until ten out of the eleven are out and try to score as many runs as possible. The fielding team tries to get them out as quickly as possible. Then, they switch! Whoever scores the most wins. There is a lot of nuance and strategy in the game, with regards to fielding placement, batting order, bowling order, reacting to the conditions, etc. I could go on forever. Trust me. It would be a bit like that scene from The Big Sick where Kumail Nanjiani has a very cringy one-man show dedicated to the history of cricket. I don’t want to be like that. But if you want to learn more about the rules, I am linking a very thorough and user-friendly guide to the rules of cricket below.
I just want this post to show people how much this sport means to me, how much it connects me to my family and culture, and how much it represents the identity of the majority of Indians. If you ever want to sit down and watch a match with me, I would be more than happy to oblige.
Until next week!