Nostalgia 1 - The Pen Cricket Game

I have been going into flashbacks too often lately. Many childhood incidents which seemed to be very serious at that time are now remembered with a tinge of smile. Nostalgia....... a word as beautiful as it's meaning. There have been many moments in my life which i love rewinding again and again. Most of them have been situations where I have failed in one way or other. I can say with confidence that all of them have taught me some lessons. These lessons are the ones which have crafted me into what I am now. Every experience, failure or success teaches us something, only we have to keep the windows of our mind open. We will observe mostly that we learn more from failures than from success. As I told you already, there have been a lot of such experiences in my life. So, I will just randomly pick some experiences and share it with you all (ofcourse, for my own pleasure, obviously).
Lets go 10-11 years back when I was just around 10/11 years old. During those days I was an ardent cricket and WWE (wrestling) fan. However, what I loved more was playing the cricket and WWE trump card games. Other than the usual trade game, I had a unique way of using those cricket cards. I used to place them according to standard cricket fielding positions on my bed which was my cricket field. The cap of a pen used to be my stumps while the pen itself was my bat. For the balls I had paper rounds. My left hand was the bowler while the right hand was the batsman. One of the main rule is that after the ball is hit if it falls on any of those cards and stays within it the batsman will be declared caught out. Also, if the ball hits the thumb, its a LBW. Other common rules being bowled, fours, sixes, etc. also apply. The last pages of almost all my notebooks at that time were full of scoreboards of those matches. Crazy, right? but let me tell you that all these matches were played very seriously indeed.
There were some of my friends who shared this interest. My mother used to get puzzled watching me so engrossed in this strange thing. At first, she may have thought that I was doing some research on a new kind of horoscope or tarot card reading. However, she wasn't much amused when she found me playing this stupid game during my exams. My father also found it too childish. Even my brother who was too small then seemed to be more grown up than me while I used to play that stuff. No doubt, its an idiotic thing but I enjoyed it. It was a great stress buster or something which cooled me off. It also managed to console me whenever I felt down. Plus, there is no expenditure on this game. My imagination could create my own world and I could control the players I admire according to my wish. Also, I credit my ability to calculate quickly to this game, where my mind is always on numbers, counting the runs and overs.
However, with the advent of video games and computer games, it lost its popularity in my mind giving space to EA cricket and other games. Then came the era in my life where like all boys of that age, playing games on computer was the most interesting thing in life. However, powercuts or loadsheddings, whatever you call them, managed to keep that unique pen cricket game alive in me. It was the inverter, which killed it completely in me. With the arrival of inverters, I had to spend the powercut period too in studies, which was initailly treated as spare time. Moreover, with time I was getting more serious about my studies and spending time with friends and family. Computers, television and even radio occupied my spare time. Gradually, I almost forgot about that pen cricket game.
Years passed, I was then doing F.Y.J.C. (not literally - I was a serial bunker) at CHM college, Ulhasnagar. It was actually a depressing period in my life. I had stopped meeting people except a chosen few and it had been months since I had smilled from my heart. One day, we (me & my family) visited a relative's house. I had accompanied them against my own wish to avoid emotional blackmail from those relatives. My parents were busy talking to the elders of the house. I prefered to visit the garden nearby where I saw some youngsters playing some serious cricket. I kept observing them and calculating their scores without their or perhaps my own knowledge. Suddenly, my eyes caught a sight which attracted me there. I saw some small boys playing some kind of a game nearby with some small stones placed here and there within a small circle. I thought it was the 'Gotti' game. However, when I went near to them, I found myself smiling. What I saw was as follows - one boy was holding a minute bat made of rubber between his fingers and another one was bowling to him a very small ball. They also had a stump set - very small - equal in length to the bat. Those little stones were the fielders. I suddenly remembered my old pen cricket game. I couldn't stop smiling. Suddenly, I saw the ball hitting the stump and I exclaimed 'Out'. The boys looked at me surprised. They smiled and I smiled back too. I asked them, "Can I join you?". One of them replied, "Yeah, But after this match, till then you can be an umpire for this game." I agreed gladly. It was the first time in many months that I had smiled or rather laughed openly.