The rules of the game

Cricket, the wonderful game with which I have a love hate relationship, is gaining popularity even in China, according to the news buzz!

In truth, I have always loved the game. It is the players, the umpires (referees), the coaches, the cricket control organizations, sports media, gamblers, bookies etc. that I really hate.

A nice game turned into a mockery, sometimes even a soap opera!

When my brother was here visiting, we were watching CSI. He commented that, there was less crime and more cleavage, and it was something else other than the scene that was being investgated and my response was :

prime time shows : soap opera in stage
Star trek : soap opera in space
CSI : soap opera in lab
24 : soap opera in counter terrorism office
Law and order : soap opera in DA office
20/20 : soap opera in cricket field

If you noticed the previous post, you would have noticed that both Jr. and the little one are now courting plastic cricket bats, thanks to their australian cousin's refusal to share his bat, while the men and kids were waiting in the verandah, after being kicked out of the house during a "ladies only" ceremony before the BIL's wedding!

All these kids are growing outside India, but the aussie dude has an unfair advantage in that he is growing up in a land where Cricket is played! He even knew who Sachin was, and Jr. ignored his critical knowledge and insulted his intelligence by holding the cricket bat with one hand, baseball style, and generally swooshing the bat in arbitrary directions and coming up with a higher success rate at connecting the ball with bat.

Sachin in pink and Dhoni in yellow set me back fifty rupees on Station road in West Mambalam and the weird game of cricket played by three kids with three bats and three balls along a single pitch, started. We even had great grandpa (from San's side) keep wickets, for fear that the ball might end up in the open toilet!

This game as usual, brought back a rush of memories. The rules of cricket are simple and can be explained to non cricket playing folk in California terms as follows:

1: Dude hurls ball at another dude who has a bat
2: Bat dude hits ball
3: fielders converge on ball
4: Bat dude runs across and trades places (bases) with another bat dude while fielders get ball
5: If the ball clears the outer boundary of field, with bounce they get more runs, without bounce is even more runs.
6: If ball is caught before bounce or if bat dude misses the ball and it hits the wicket (equivalent of plate), he is out and next dude comes in.

the official rules are here! and as you can see, are a lot more elaborate than the ones mentioned above. However for most practitioners of the game on a field, the rules cover 80% of what normally happens.

The keywords here are "on a field"!

We now venture on to practitioners of this wonderful game on the streets of Mandaiveli. Come on, you knew that was coming way before you even came to this paragraph, didn't you?

As a touring member of the Mandaiveli Therukkutheru Cricket Club, myself and my brother must have spent approximately 45.75% of our middle school years playing cricket. Of this ~ 82.37% was spent around Devanathan street. The most important lesson learnt from all that time?

The game is defined purely by the boundary! Guess this holds true even for the "real" game. If you play on a smaller field, every tom, dick and harry can hoist the ball across the boundary and give the bowlers more than a "run" for their money.

In street cricket though, the rules are very different. It is almost like living through the story "A table is a table", where a bored fellow decides to call a Table a chair, a chair a bed, etc. till he becomes so wrapped in his new world he is unable to communicate with others!

Let me explain. Let us say, you are using the electric box on Sambandam street as the wicket.... Oh wait, you don't necessarily know the local map. So I have taken the liberty of using google maps, which by the way does not do justice to the street layout! The U shaped road marked in that map is Sambandam street.

(thank you Google)

Going back to the electric box wicket, the rules were, if you hit the ball straight out to Devanathan Street you got runs, if you hit to your right into the middle Sambandam street, you got runs (with the exception of the house with Django the dog) and you were out if you hit it into any of the three houses with musudu maamaa's and or maami's who would keep your ball! Django was another story altogether, and did I forget to mention that if you hit the ball into the house with the glass windows owned by angry thatha, you had to sit out the next two games?

If you have not got the picture yet, the danger houses from those times are all marked with red, orange or yellow dots depending on the % chance that you would get your ball back. Needless to say, the rules when the electric box on Chandrasekaran street was used as the wicket would be completely different based purely on the danger houses!

When playing the boys in another local street, they would first explain the rules on their street for the first five minutes before the game proceeded! This reminds you of the National Geographic videos where people from one polynesian island sail to another island and the locals explain things like "if you enter any womans hut, you have married her, and if you come out immediately after entering the hut, you have married her sister as well!". Once the rules were clear, you would just throw caution to the wind and hit the ball, hoping that you were not out by the local street "rules" and would stay on to play the next ball!

Now, don't even get me started on Uppukkuchappas! (something you won't find in any cricket rule book).

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Bambara pai Sundaram..

A goody bag was brought home by the 4 year old. In it, among the many other useless plastic trinkets that find their way to the trash can, a small top! Clear transparent top piece, pink bottom piece, a small sticker in the middle which said "pull me".

Went ahead and pulled and a small blinking LED inside the top showed me that the little button cell inside still had some juice. You spin the top and the light comes on. The nerd in me promptly investigated it and found that there was a small spring inside which made electrical contact everytime the top hit critical angular velocity.

All those Balu class fundas from ages ago came back to me in a rush. Those diagrams with nicely labeled circles, tangential arrows, radial arrows, the greek symbols. Seems like yesterday, that the obsessive student in me was just practising drawing perfect arrowmarks before physics class started on top of the Oxford English school terrace in Madras.

There are no arrows to draw today, but I did do a thorough inspection of the top. There wasnt much to it and it stopped lighting up after a few spins. Recently heard a news piece on the deteriorating quality of products made in China. This top, and almost all the stuff you find in goody bags (purchased in bulk by parents from party stores) are unsafe for children! I do not think they are held to any standard! Sad thing is that almost all parents buy these in bulk and put two or three in a goody bag and distribute it to other kids in the daycare as gifts. Isn't there some regulatory body that looks into these plastic trinkets and pulls them off the market ? Probably not. The Chinese Association for Goody Bag Trinkets probably has a lobby in Washington that ensures their mass production and distribution.

This thought, was thoroughly depressing and to take my mind off it, I started reminescing about the good old days, of my own childhood. What did I do in all those summer vacations? What did I play with in the absence of remote controlled Hummers and toy dogs that eat pellets and poop them out? I played with kites, tops, marbles, etc..

Yes, I had tops too. A whole bunch of them. I used to haul them around in a yellow cloth bag which had a picture of Thirupathi Balaji on one side and the name of a Sari store on the other. Needless to say, there were a few top strings (Jaati's) in black and red, with one end tied in knots and the other end frayed to varying degrees to get a good grip on the nail!

In a nutshell,

Canon EOS : Tamron Lens :: Wooden nail top : Jaati

Tamrac was not around in those days to come up with a fancy bag for my tops and a separate accessory pouch for those strings, or they would have had their first paying customer!

The added bonus was that yours truly was a top expert. The game of tops, when played appropriately, (I always made the rules in my street) would earn the winner the tops of the losers. Needless to say, the bag was always increasing in weight, albeit slowly! I would lose an occasional top or two to some of my friends or my trusted lieutenant aka my brother. My brother started his own bag, but carrying his bag and mine was getting on his nerves and eventually we just pooled in our collection and the title of "Bambara pai Sundaram" was conferred on me by all the local uncles who between sipping their weekend morning coffee and their Hindu newspapers, watched our game with amusement.

"That boy sure knows how to hustle a top or two!" or "Ramanukku eththa Lakshmanan paaru!", they would exclaim after watching our game. Me and my brother were one perfect team and we were pros, all at the young age of 10 and 8! Tiger Woods Viger Woods, Bah! If only there was a world Bambara championship, two child proteges would have come to the limelight twenty something odd years ago! But lets not dwell on past injustices and focus on the future!

I went to India recently to buy a top, just to show my little darlings how Daddy and Chitappa used to while away their summer vacations and was surprised to find that these wooden tops with the nail driven from their head were nowhere to be found. Grandpa came to the rescue and we finally found some in the old Mandaveli market! I bought a few, wondering all the time if the Department of Homeland Security would confiscate them because they look like grenades on the X-ray scan! Luckily, the tops made it back to the US of A and are now used to amuse the little ones on an occasional basis! Granted, today's kid is probably watching "Hits of Sachin" re-runs on the sports channel or staring wide eyed at skimpily clad youth on MTV and the streets are not exactly condusive to playing tops either, what with the frequent interruptions of the Kinetic Honda's and TVS mopeds, but the question still begs to be asked!

Where have all the bambarams gone ?

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Flying with kids..

In a recent post on kids travelling under constraints, a couple of links were pointed out to me by s.b. These links were good, really good!

Here is how we manage the kids during our flights. We do not let them float in the aisle. We did have two other kids walking up and down on their own constantly, during our last flight. One of the kids actually stopped by for almost 20 minutes near our seat and I was holding his hand so that he wont fall down. Eventually his mom came and took him back to the seat! We do let the little one out of her seat, but she is confined to our row, and sometimes I carry her up and down the plane.

We do not let them open the door hatch! Jr. is entertained extremely well by San and her mom, by teaching all kinds of grandma games on the flight!

This one is Dosai amma Dosai! (Dosa is a south Indian Crepe and amma is mommy).

It goes

Dosai amma dosai
arisi maavum ulutha maavum kalandhu potta dosai
ammavukku 4
appavukku 3
baby-kku 2
Jr. ukku 1
suda suda suttu
neiyla thottu
vayaru romba saapidalam!

(translation)

Dosa mommy Dosa
crepe made by mixing rice flour and lentil flour
mommy gets 4
daddy gets 3
baby gets 2
I get 1
hot hot and fresh
clarified butter dipped
lets eat till our stomach is full!

This goes on for 15 minutes before they switch to ice-cream soda!! Or I play "find that word on this page" with the in-flight magazine.

Point is, our kids are equally cranky, but we deal with a lot less negativity.

I have been thinking of starting a kid friendly airlines!!

1. I will have wide aisles for kids to run around
2. the walls will be painted with Disney , Sesame street, Barney, Dora characters.
3. I will hire daycare teacher turned air-hostesses or air-hostesses turned daycare teachers only!
4. Will not have any carbonated or sugary drinks on the flight that would make the kids hyper.
5. There will be little tables in the middle of the plane and little kid chairs where they can draw, paint etc., once the seat belt sign is removed!
6. There will be music and videos for the kids to be distracted.
7. There will be little beds for them to sleep comfortably instead of trying to lie down horizontally between daddy and mommy with those annoying arm rests pulled up halfway!
8. All adults who board will be asked a few extra questions.
a. do you like kids ?
b. did you let your kids put things in your bag without your knowledge ?
c. do you think kids should be allowed to travel on planes ?
a "NO" answer for any question will promptly trigger a cavity search by airport security and they will not be allowed to board the plane.
9. Instead of the pathetic paper barf bags, there will be a button next to the seat marked "V" which automatically drops a bucket from the top compartment. That way you can save yourself an inflight shirt change!
10. there will be a diaper change area and some special diaper trash containers. Have you ever tried pushing a full diaper into the small rectangle which says "trash" on local flights?

I have a lot more ideas for this plan, but don't want to get carried away! Damn, I already thought way too much about this. Now all I need is some nice billionaire to loan me some money to start Babiaire / Littlewings or Kidsfly Airlines!

Hope this inspires some other parents to control their kids during flights!

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