(This is a post written with the sole aim of tickling a person's funny bone. Not even an iota of offense is directed towards the language Tamil - I truly respect it - or the commentators mentioned below who do a commendable job of taking the sport to a larger audience.)
If you decide to do something other than these two options like deciding to stay in your room and watch a documentary based on the 21 years of filmmaking of Richard Linklater, you are very likely to get an expression from your hostel-mates (who step into your room to get an update on the score they had missed while having lunch) which is an equivalent to the one your mother would give when she catches you eating a handful of paruppu saadham that had been given to you to feed your 3 year old cousin. And of course, you would not have a choice but to give your hostel-mates the same sheepish smile that you would give your mother conveying indirectly that it was your first handful.
Being a guy in his early twenties and not being a very
enthusiastic lover of cricket can put you in an isolated spot in any major
city/town of India, let alone an engineering college. Especially when you have
the ICC Cricket World Cup in progress, almost every statement that comes out of a guy’s
mouth in an engineering college would revolve around cricketing
statistics/cricketing teams/cricketing advertisements/cricketing anchors and
when you want to not be a part of such a group, there are fair chances that you
might be considered an alien who had been made to land at Rajasthan.
****
A case in example:
One of my friends in a regular WhatsApp
conversation asked me last week if I was looking forward to February 22 and I replied that I had been waiting for this month's 22nd for a pretty
long time. He asked me who, in my opinion, would win and I replied that a victory for ‘Birdman’ would make me happier but ‘Boyhood’ had a pretty good chance of
winning after having been shot over a period of twelve years ('Birdman' actually did manage to win - Hurray!). It was only in
his next message that contained a few 2 syllabled and 3 syllabled Tamil curse
words that I understood that he had been talking about the ODI match between
India and South Africa whereas I had been talking about the Academy Awards. And
after I explained him the confusion, his next message read “Periya ulaga cinema*@$&* ivaru! Feb 22 na naan match pathi thaan pesraen nu unnaku therla?”. When having to deal with such situations, you need to be very
careful with your next reply. If you fail to be so and send a reply explaining
in detail that Academy Awards actually deal with American cinema and not world
cinema per sé, there is no use complaining later for a message that you
received from your friend which if typed here would amount to two entire lines
of special characters.
****
Being in a hostel when a cricket match between India and
Pakistan (or any opponent, for that matter) is played makes things much more
worse. You would be a happy person only if you did any of these two:
- Join the group in your hostel that is watching the live online streaming of the cricket match and keeps growing in size by a member every 10 minutes, shouting and hooting, for every ‘boundary’/’sixer’ an Indian batsman scores and every wicket the opponent team looses
- Sign your name in the ‘Out-Sign’ register of your hostel and board a bus to the nearby town to explore its streets (which would most likely be empty due to the match, making it more convenient)
If you decide to do something other than these two options like deciding to stay in your room and watch a documentary based on the 21 years of filmmaking of Richard Linklater, you are very likely to get an expression from your hostel-mates (who step into your room to get an update on the score they had missed while having lunch) which is an equivalent to the one your mother would give when she catches you eating a handful of paruppu saadham that had been given to you to feed your 3 year old cousin. And of course, you would not have a choice but to give your hostel-mates the same sheepish smile that you would give your mother conveying indirectly that it was your first handful.
Caution also needs to be taken while drinking water on such days at the hostel as you never know when a sudden cheer might erupt from the
match-watching-group that would make you spill the water on your face,
especially into your nose, which might lead to your making a ‘pig-face’ for the
next one hour.
Having been daunted by such threats, when you decide to sit
down and watch a cricket match between India and South Africa on the television
at your home and try to become a cricket lover (saying people that cricket does
not matter without Sachin does not seem to have the same impact it had in the
first half of 2014), the unexpected might actually happen, at least when the match is being watched on a
Tamil channel with the commentary in Tamil.
“Pitch’a nallaa
paarunga. Anganga evalo pacha pullu irukku nu paarunga!” – when this is the statement that you hear as
the game begins, would you be tempted to abandon watching the game?
You would
have gotten an unexpected incentive to watch it instead.
After all, where else do you get to hear Shikhar Dhawan called
‘Victoria maapilai’ and Imran Tahir
called ‘Ulagam suttrum vaaliban’?
And as the match progresses and Shikhar Dhawan hits a
‘sixer’ and a ‘boundary’ on consecutive balls, you make it a point to remember
the shots to mention it proudly to your friends at college as a validation to your
having watched the game which is only made more easier by the commentary that
follows – “Namma aalu ippa semma veri la
irukaaru paarunga. Avaru bat ku bathil aruvaa, kathi vechu vilayaaditu
irukaaru! Last ball’a aruvaa vechi velaasina maari velaasi thalinaaru. Intha
ball’a chinna kathi vechu theetra maari wicket-keeper thalaiku mela
theetitaaru! ”.
But if you believe that you have heard the best, you would
be absolutely wrong. Because, the best would come about 30 minutes later when a
commentator would say “Minaadi mega
mootama irunthuchu! Aana ippa veyil nallaave adikka aarambichuruchu! ” and
the other commentator would try to joke saying that “Neenga sariyaa sonninga! Aana minaadi mega mootama irunthathuku oru
kaaranam irukku nu nenaikaren. Indian innings paakanum nu megangaluku ku kuda
aasa vanthathu thaan athukku kaaranam. Athaan Indian innings mudinja odane
megangal marainju veyil adikuthu!”.
#Respect #AbsoluteRespect
#PinnitingaPonga #KiliiKiliiKilii
#Awestruck #Dumbfounded #Speechless #Flabbergasted
(If not for hash-tags, how else would you describe such
statements?!)
Anyways, after 3 more hours filled with memorable statements
like “80,000 Indian supporters minaadi
South African batsman’ku kannu maraika thaan seiyum, kaadhu adaikka thaan
seiyum! ” and “Soodu patta poonai
maari egiri gudhichu antha batsman defensive shot aadinaaru! ” leading to
stomach-aching-laughter and occasional face-palm moments, the match would end
and you would make note of the scorecard carefully in order to vomit it out
during the discussion amongst your friends at college.
But as you keep trying to get the scorecard into your head,
a painful thought might strike you – How nice would it have been if Tamil
commentary had been facilitated long back?
It would have given you a reason to love cricket in addition
to Sachin.
It would have, more importantly, saved you the pain of
having to suffer from water being accidentally poured into your nose.
*@* - Try holding such a face for an hour. You would
probably understand the feeling.
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