Corporate Cricket Caucus

This is officially cricket season...The Indo-Aussie series has probably revived some of the dormant interest in cricket or maybe this was coming for a while now...

Not only is cricket in the air down under, it has also "infected" the mail boxes of us lazy software engineers...No sooner did the Intra company cricket mail adorn our inboxes, than did the junta (mostly one guy who either still regularly plays cricket or is very enthu about it) start sending mails about forming team"s" and registering for the tournament...And lest there be a battle of the sexes, an all women's cricket tournament was also advertised!!

So we get down to the yet-to-be-completed basket ball court (hah! YES one day, basketball shall be played there!) and start exercising our cricket rusty bones n muscles. And you have to understand one thing about tennis balls used to play cricket on the local scene; they come in various elasticities and weights! You have these rather hard and small ones, which go lighter than fast (or faster than light) and you have this feather light, furry tennis ball variant. The main advantage of the former is that when it makes contact with the willow, it gathers quite some speed; however, the fatal drawback of the same is that when it makes contact with your corporeal self, it'll leave you begging for mercy...

And so we were stuck with the hard 'un and while we were just getting warmed up (by the ball hitting us also), along came another set of id wearing, formally dressed, casually confident group of guys. And no time was wasted to come to an agreement that there shall be a 'match' between the 'teams'. This match was to be held with a big, plastic water tank on one side and a stone on the other side serving as wickets! Throw in some powerful lights, a blabbering bombay buffoon and some controversy and we've got a world cup final here!

I decided to, meanwhile, study the human aspect here which incidentally is the highlight of this post...You see all kinds of guys when you're in a place where there are a lot of ppl playing cricket. There's the silent, brooding type who more often than not let their actions do the talking (and how!); There's the loud type, also called the showboater, in total contrast to the above mentioned type in all aspects!; There's the enthu type who genuinely wanna play but somehow aren't up to standards etc etc

And what I've realized is you sometimes get to know the person a little bit better, when you play with them...Either their high competitive streak or their never say die attitude or their selfishness or their big aortic pump, is revealed when they do certain things. Well, lets just say its really hard not to form an impression about a guy who's around 25 years old and adamantly refuses to give up his turn to bat even after he's gotten out blatantly :)

All's well that ends well...We head back to our respective desks, nursing our bruises, patting each other's backs and discussing the day; little knowing that sore backs and aching shoulders are waiting to greet us along with the next morning's sun.....