कथाकार

A cold and rainy day in a hill town is scary and at the same time it is lovely. A December night, rainy and chilly, the unseasonal rain had worsen the weather. I was waiting for my college bus during a weekend, which usually departs at 8 PM from the city center to my college campus, situated in jungles outside the outskirts of the city. There were hardly six or seven of us waiting for the bus. All of them were unknown faces and mostly were workers from the neighboring village of our college campus. It was a cold day, even the known faces would have been difficult to recognize, given everyone was under the cover, masked by mufflers or monkey caps or both.  The era of smart phone zombies was yet to arrive. Forget about smart phones, even normal mobile phones were rare those days, and hence time pass at the bus stop was a little harder. So chit chat was the best time pass. While looking for the know faces, I recognized one familiar face. It took a while to realize, that a shy & cu...

Deja vu My life took me to a city called Noida, which is rain deprived. Howbeit, today the nature was generous on the desert city, it was raining like there is no tomorrow. It was Friday and I had some weekend commitments in New Delhi, so I decided to leave early. It was raining since morning, the otherwise bright and hot Noida was looking gloomy, wet and cooler. At 4:30 evening, it was as dark or as bright as 4:30 AM. The issue with almost all the metro cities or for that matter all the cities in India is, that they are not able to or prepared to handle rains. It happens in the city of Mumbai, where rainfall is generous and a day or two dry days during the monsoon months are Golden or in NCR, where a day or two of rain in the monsoon season are little two much. Traffics have another connection to rains. Come the rains, you will have immediate traffic jams. God knows why. I kept on moving towards Delhi, avoiding all the big jams until I reached just near the coveted DND flyover. The tr...

The episode of Dropped catch was overpowered by the strong teamship by the team, which stood in solidarity behind me. The negative soul was shown the door for his arrogance. The individuals can win you few matches, but team support, when the need rises, saves from embarrassments.  This was my final year in competitive cricket. Thou, I can say it now. At that point of time, I didn't knew it was my last year. We succeeded in several matches, tournaments and uplifted our games to a very high level. The cricket season ended. The summers started. The eastern part of North India get summers early. The district boards get the district league tournaments before the heavens start pouring. This is a tough period to be on the ground throughout the day. The sun literally suck your fluids, without using a straw. It is a time, when people get sick due to heat. April 2003, the district league has started. Luckily, it was held in the stadium we used to practice, on the pitches made for Ranji Troph...

This is the story of early 2000s.  I was selected as a field captain for my team. To all who are not aware of the role of field captain, the person has literally no power, except managing the practice sessions, calls out bowlers to bowl, batsmen to pad up, shout out last round or plead people to take a round of the ground and stretch. It's a pathetic job. I have played for larger and bigger clubs earlier. But due to time constraints and cut short the travel time, I was looking for a club nearby. There were three clubs, the MP YCC, promoted and sponsored by then Member of Parliament of my region. And one was a low profile looking Azad Club, bunch of spirited but not so promising. Third one was youngest and naive. Since, I had to cut short my number of outside matches, so that I can have spare time for my college cricket practice, studies and college classes, I chose the third one. It was once a most prominent clubs, but after retirements of its stalwart, the club was under inexperie...