Long, long ago, I’d written a post comparing gully cricket with baseball. This was based on my experience playing cricket in school, on roads next to friends’ houses, in the gap between my house and the next, and even the gap between rows of desks in my school classroom.
I hadn’t imagined all this gully cricket experience to come in useful in any manner. Until a few weeks back when Siddhartha Vaidyanathan asked me to join him in this episode of “81 all out” podcast. The “main guest” on this show was Test cricketer Vijay Bharadwaj, whose Test debut, you might remember, ended in “83 all out“.
It was a fascinating conversation, and I loved being part of it. I realised that the sort of gully cricket I played was nothing like the sort that Vijay played. As I mention in the podcast, I “never graduated from the road to the field”.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to put my fundaes on baseball, and other theories I’ve concocted about Gully Cricket. Nevertheless, I had fun recording this, and I think you’ll have fun listening to it as well. You can listen to it here, or on any of your usual podcast tools (search for “81 all out”).
This was a delightful conversation amid all the covid gloom. Totally loved it. Vijay Bharadwaj is such an awesome guy. Complete Bangalore guy. Loved the nostalgia: tuss manja, thoothu, 1-dec-2-dec, cricketing technicalities, the übermenschen from the neighborhood who failed to make it big, etc. Bharadwaj talks with such joy and enthusiasm. I have no interest in cricket, but I followed enough Ranji and international cricket during my school days to be a fan of Bharadwaj and understand everything in the conversation.