I can't quit!

It flew off a thick outside edge. But thankfully went very low to the slip and the fielder at slip could not catch it. It instead hit him on the ankle. He winced in pain. I could hear the shriek!

Oh, wait! Did I tell you I went to play cricket? Real, tough cricket!  In a beautiful green ground, we can only dream of in India. The pitch was real as well. Forty overs a side. We even had an electronic scoreboard.

So I opened the innings. The last I did was in school. Quite some time ago. I mean, a long time ago. We were chasing 189 in 40 overs and had a difficult start losing 3 wickets early. I was there at one end with another friend who was settling down. The required rate had just gone above 6.00 runs per over and so I had to accelerate. I had started off slowly, rather trepidatiously. I was also feeling my legs about that time. Fielding 40 overs and batting for almost 20 till then had taken its toll on me. The body was cramping as well. Then that happened.

I nicked a ball to the slip. That man in the slip cordon was himself in the middle of an excellent spell from the other end and had settled down at the slip. One ball went off my edge hit his ankle and he was visibly hurt. I could see him wincing in pain. Are you alright sir? I asked him concerned. Oh yes, I'm fine! I will be alright; came the reply. I could see the swollen ankle. His white feet looked bloody red. He started to limp badly.

"I think you should rest sir", I said cautiously; "You are afraid of getting out to me? ain't you?" He replied, tongue in cheek! I laughed it off.

"My grandson is watching I can't quit"! He said again. "Grandson? Who is that?" I asked him. That kid who bowled fast, he is my grandson, he shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly. He is 16. I'm 60! He finished before walking back to his fielding position. He went on to bowl two more really tight overs in that spell before walking off to take some pain killers.

Sixty! That is his age. SIXTY!

It hit me really hard. Here is a man double my age playing with wincing pain and I am almost quitting coz' of cramps.

I'm not quitting, I told myself. Not before winning this. And went on to bat till the end, though it ended in a lost cause.

Well, it was one of the best days of my short cricketing career. Coz, I did not quit. Coz, that man, that old man, taught me, quitting is never an option. Not in cricket. Never in life!


Some photos from the cricket match

                                                               Cricket in whites

Getting ready to open - on the left

Lush green outfield

The courage I inherited from my timid mother!

As the world celebrated their mothers, I was running away from the timeline. With really tight deadlines and loneliness of this place, with the wifey also not around, I did not want to start missing my mom all over again. I'm a coward. 

Well, my mother was one as well. Coward would not be the right word I should say. Timidity would be a better word. She was afraid of everything. Every damn thing. Like crossing the road, her children's future, a difficult patient, talking in English. She was afraid of it all. 

At least that is what I thought of her; Till that dreaded disease gripped her and like a boa constrictor broke her piece by piece.

A timid person and cancer should not go along well together. When the doctors initially gave her four weeks to live, she should have just withered away. She was timid after all. 

Yet she did not. She smiled through most of it. Oh ya, she went back to work. And took the stairs for all the four floors of our house like she used to do before she started medication, with that unbearable pain. The steel in her suddenly grew bigger. Maybe it was always there and I had missed seeing it.  Where did that come from, I had often wondered. Every day when she got up she vomited. Of course, she cried. Then braced herself for another day's work. And worked her way through, till the last bone was broken. 

Was she really timid? Maybe I mistook the innocent smile for timidity. Yes, maybe she feared for everything in the world. But faced them all with the smile intact. Fear never came in between her and the most difficult patient. Neither did fear come in between speaking in impeccable English to her foreign son as she often said of the boy 'J' from the US, who stayed with us for more than a year. And bigger than it all, it never came in between letting her children live the lives they wanted in the remotest of villages of tribal Assam, considered to be terrorist hit by the world around her, even if that meant quitting high profile corporate jobs. 

And then I realized, courage is not an absence of fear but facing your fears with a smile. And then I realized, my mother was the most courageous woman of all. For she had the biggest fear and yet the best smile through it all. 

I smiled my way through the mother's day. For my mother's gift of courage to me is woven subtly into the fabric of my psyche that I can hardly distinguish where she stops and I begin. 

Life lessons from the black border colie

So every day at around 7.45 AM one of my regular routine is to look for the dog! Oh, that beautiful, black Border Colie.

The routine for this guy goes like this. There is this huge piece of lawn where the dog is brought to by the owner. And the man will throw down a ball into the distant territory and this dog will run to the ball and pick it up. Simple! Throw it up there, and he will go pick it up.

And after giving the ball back, the guy starts to run immediately for the next run even before the ball is thrown back again. Once the ball is thrown, once the ball just crosses the dog, the excitement just doubles up and the speed picks up. Sometimes if the man delays and he could not sense the ball crossing him, he turns back to see. But only if the ball had not come yet.

And the routine is done again! And again! and again. Till the owner is bored. Our guy just keeps running the ball down. Every time. Every single time.

And then the routine is repeated the next day. And the next. And the next week and the next year. Till I presume the dog decides to call it a day. But the excitement withers not! It just keeps ebbing away in that tiny heart of his.

Ah, if only I have the excitement of the routine! If only I can run my race at the speed of that lovely creature. If only I have the energy to pick my pace up once I see the target. And then get back, buckle down only to start running again with the same energy and excitement. If only!

I promised myself that one day I will own a dog. And run with it and learn to be as excited as it gets every day. Every single day! Till I learn to get excited at the routine.

Cambridge!

Life is never the same again! As I got back into the car and left Cambridge behind, I left a part of me, into that distant historic past of the Village of Cambridge. It is the story of a young boy growing up in a distant little town in South India. The story of dreams. He grew up dreaming of Cambridge. The Cambridge which taught his childhood hero, a brilliant mathematician who quit a glittering Cambridge career to serve humanity in the dusty lanes of his town.   

"What did it mean to be in Cambridge?" was the rhetoric often spoken about in that part of the land! "What did it mean to be in Cambridge?" was almost a talisman growing up. Cambridge meant history! The history, the boy in me so loved. History of so many years that both the hands with all its fingers each counting a century is not enough. And so, began my journey to this historic place, first in my dreams, much later in reality. This village has contributed to 118 Nobel prize winners, my tour guide said! I caught hold of every word of his, like life’s treasures. 118? Oh ya, he shrugged it off! There was an air of nonchalance in that body gyration. He went on! I stopped there. 118! I replayed that number in my mind again. The whole of my country have five, and we celebrate that number. A three-digit stat was beyond belief. I was just about recovering when he said Rutherford discovered electrons in the lab next door. And do you know ‘Watson and Crick’? they celebrated the discovery of DNA in the bar there right across the street. That man continued on his monologue. Not realizing the profundity of his own statements. After talking about Sir. Isaac Newton, Dr Stephen Hawking, Dr Charles Darwin, Bertrand Russel, and Charles Babbage he took a break! Maybe he realized I was still recovering from the number 118! Suddenly it hit me hard. The names do not matter in Cambridge! But it is the ideas; the convictions, that matter. Of course, Sir. Isaac Newton lives on. Yet the Idea of gravity that came out of the hollow blocks is the better optics for the village of Cambridge. Convictions are things certain! The certainty of the ideas which germinated in the minds of the people who lived in this remarkable village. Just to reinstate this, the street corner opposite to the most famous kings’ college is the corpus clock which shows the exact time only once in fifteen minutes. So that clock slows down and fastens up on time every fifteenth minute. And it is completely made of mechanical parts. How is that even possible? Well, In Cambridge it is possible! I took the quiet boat ride across the colleges soaking into the glory of Cambridge’s historicity. The stunning landscape. The refreshing greenery. The huge cathedrals. The old hollow blocks. Yet, when I closed my eyes, Cambridge meant something else. It meant dreams. For it is the place where dreams become reality and in reality, people dream. Dream about big ideas; until they become convictions; till those convictions conquer the world.