Vasanth Vaidyanathan's Blog

My cricketing dream ended long back, but why a blog now? Because blogs did not exist then :-)

This happened one evening almost 20 years back in Chennai. I was playing with a bunch of friends...all kids then :-) Of course, we all played in our own street. This is professionally called "street-cricket" or "gully-cricket" these days. We had to bowl first and I clearly remember we were able to contain the opposing team's score. And then we had our chance to bat. I don't remember whether I opened our innings or not, but I knew I had the herculean task of taking my team to victory. And I did blast off. Not far into the game, I thought I really made 4 runs...(the ball should reach the end of the road for me to score a four). But alas, the ball went with such a force towards the boundary that it toppled a full can of milk. It was outside our neighbour's house and the milkman was milking the cow and apparently he had just completed milking the cow. Under 5 seconds, all of us disappeared from the road. Actually we went hiding. We did not come out for a full one hour. By then the milkman had gone, and so was the cow. Of course, I did hear our neighbours talking in hushed tones about who could have actually toppled the can of milk.

Our family moved out of the area, and until today I have not revealed this secret to anyone. There ended my dream of playing cricket. I remembered all this when a wave of nostalgia hit me as we played cricket last week as part of IEC sports day. Good old days, eh?