Wickets, Overs, and Mammoth Moths

A hugely successful New Year's party at Fusion 9 left us all feeling in quite good spirits the next day. After class Rishi, Vikrant and I joined some of the trainees who are staying at the India School of Business campus near the office for a game of cricket. For those of you who have never spent the requisite 1-2 hours to learn the rules of the game, cricket may seem like a big load of tosh. That was me yesterday morning. As of last night, I'm a new fan! I had the honor and pleasure of playing among cricketers such as Anurag (IIT Chennai's captain last year) and Vikran who played professionaly for a year in a county-level league team. Needless to say I sucked in comparison, but I was generously cheered by my compatrots when I was batting, and I did my share of fielding as well.

Apparently, when you lack a proper cricket arena it is customary to turn any other reasonable open space into your playing field. In our case, the tennis grounds had to do. The grounds had two courts side-by-side with the nets taken down. The middle between the two courts was used for the pitch. A chair was used for a wicket. We batted only from one end of the pitch because of field size limitations. The boundaries were the tennis grounds fences. The ball we used was a tennis ball, 'natch. In order to discourage ball-losing hits, the batsman would be called out if the ball flew out of the grounds (usually a good thing).

We played three games of either 6 or 8 overs, with roughly 5 batsmen a side. I did pretty well in the last game. I was picked to bat first and I managed to survive about 10-12 runs in about as many balls (roughly two overs), some of them scored by me. Arul scored the other runs during those overs - he was the second batsman on the pitch with me. Coincidentally I was on the losing side in every game...

It was another great night, except for the incredible variety and number of insects of all sizes that were buzzing, crawling, sucking, and biting every which way you turned. There were a few moths (attracted by the bright lights of the grounds, no doubt) that were literally the size of my fist!