A short story on love

Disclaimer: Once upon a time the author wanted to be be a writer for cricinfo.com, the leading cricket website in the world. And fuelled by optimism, he sent them across his credentials. Below is the text of that orginal cover letter. Yes, just after this neat line made of a lot of neat dashes.

                                      

                                        --------------- beginning of cover letter ---------------

‘You can know more about a person in an hour’s play than a year of conversation’

Right from that handsome age of nine when he first watched Sachin and Co crumble at the World Cup ’92, Neeraj Narayanan knew that he was destined to pursue a career in cricket. His conviction received further strength when he won every single match in his home ground, rather the house car park, against his sister. Since his neighbourhood only had bullies who refused to let him bat or bowl, he would run home after school, and grumble as his mother insisted he eat lunch before donning the whites. 

 In his tiny white shorts he stood, bum jutting out like Roger Binny’s, bat in left hand. With his right hand, he would throw the ball onto the wall and before it could ricochet and reach him, he would grasp his bat swiftly with both hands, and drive the ball gracefully through covers, or two broken pots.

The intense and grueling work ethic saw him become captain of his colony and school, and when they appointed him leader of the set that represented the college team, he knew that there was a little spot in the Indian dressing room that was crying for his presence.

Our story of his heroics with bat, ball and ground fielding ends here.

Late 2005, he became a part of the Cognizant family, a clan that insisted on pleasing American clients by delivering software codes on time. But much as he tried, he never ran around the floor or screeched like a madman or pumped his fist on solving a difficult piece of code, the way he had when he was in his whites. Ecstasy no longer was part of his character. Expressiveness still held on belligerently though, and whenever India lost or Tendulkar touched a new realm of success, he wrote and sent it to all to his colleagues.
Exasperated by him, they directed him to the company blog and it was here he found respite. In 2007, they recognized his blogging efforts and transferred him to the ‘Branding and Corporate Communications’ team, just so that he stop writing eulogies on self, and do something similar for the organization.

Mica and MBA happened, and he wrote more. As member of the Sports Committee, he spent a lot of time thinking about the annual cricket tournament, campaigns for promotion, and writing articles on matches he lost, so much that when the yearbook came out, they only spoke of his deluded die hard love for sports , and a few tidbits on his writing. This, when he had expected long testimonials on his charm, dimple, brilliance and what not.

And when it all ended, he was staring at an office cabin that read ‘Communication Expert - the Government of Gujarat’. Gandhinagar, it has been rumoured is the capital of Gujarat but we don’t believe everything we hear, do we? It is in fact a country of old men and older women, a civilization that is set back in time, which has ancient written all over it. If Gandhinagar was Jambavan, the wise hundred and something year old monkey in the Mahabharat, Mohenjodaro and Harappa would be frisky two year old puppies, sprightly and full of beans.

 Since most sentences here began with ‘Under the dynamic leadership of CM Modi’, he observed that the only way that he would not forget the language was to write on other mediums. So he began writing his own book. Then when Sachin scored his fiftieth century, he mailed a piece to a friend. The clever fellow asked him to send it to Cricinfo, just so that he could avoid reading it himself. The article was then published by the website. Being of mediocre quality, he insisted on sending another article, this time on Rahul Dravid, and it was published too. Like someone said,

‘It is hard to write, but harder not to do so’.

Hi, my name is Neeraj Narayanan and I love writing almost as much as I love the wonderful sport. It would be my happy and fervent desire to be part of the Cricinfo team. I love the work that the team does, and believe that I have the potential to offer something both similar as well as distinct.  Do let me know if I could fit in somewhere.

Neeraj Narayanan

http://garam-samose.blogspot.com/

p.s Here are the links to my published articles on Cricinfo and two videos we made for the annual cricket tournament at Mica. Do remember when you are astounded by the absolute shoddiness of the video, that the vision was excellent, just that the actors (read: friends) and technology was pathetic. 

http://blogs.espncricinfo.com/inbox/archives/2010/12/what_tendulkar_denied_to_the_w.php

http://blogs.espncricinfo.com/inbox/archives/2011/01/an_unassuming_man_called_rahul.php 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9GXj8wRgek

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHgKUQ-e7Go

History will be kind to me …. because I intend to write it.

------------------------- end of cover letter ---------------------------------

Conclusion: Well, in reply they did call him for an internship, during the course of which he met Rahul Dravid, even shook a trembling hand with him. But, as things go, not all organizations accept siblings in the same setup, a sensible thought as Nishi Narayanan and I  do love lifting up computers and throwing it at each other. (I do wonder what Mark Waugh would have ended up doing if the Australian Cricket Board had thought the same way.)
Anyway, Cricinfo continues to be the wonderful website it is, with its tremendous dedication to the game. And I, well I have moved onto the travel world, a worthy second fiddle. Writing about travel is nice, reading about it even more so.

Sachin and Rahul, however, will always hold a special place.

To be or not to be!

Sometimes when you have just turned seven and are roaming about your home in little shorts that at best can be described as hideously tight or plain hideous, the visitors at your place pull you close by your waist and ask you “Dude, what do you want to be in life?” The question travels into your being and then follows you everywhere just like Mary’s little lamb.

They couldn’t just let you roam about in your shorts, could they?

The first time I was asked this question, I stroked my chin thoughtfully and replied ‘elephant’. To my seven year old mind, picking up water in one’s trunk and then spraying it on everyone around seemed to be the coolest thing possible. Also, I wanted to be real tall.

As luck would have it, neither happened.

By the time I had turned nine, I had devoured almost all the Enid Blyton books and was now of the firm belief that I was born to be a detective. I would look at the milkman and paper guy with suspicious nine year old eyes, but sadly, they never stole anything for me to report, and become famous. In ’92, a curly haired marathi boy swung his bat on a large Australian field and I fell in love with him and the game. They called him Sachin. In my dreams everyday, I was on a pitch with him hitting boundaries and winning matches for India. It is the greatest testament of devotion for Sachin, that even in those dreams, I let him always score more runs than me. Maybe just two or three more, but I did. Of course, I refuse to tell you that I still have those dreams.

Like most other boys, at some stage I wanted to be a pilot. At the tender age of twelve, I sat in an airplane for the first time, was airsick and vomited so much that the adjacent passenger sarcastically asked the airhostess to pass me a bucket since a packet did not seem enough. In retaliation, I promptly vomited some more, and all ambitions of flying a plane were hastily rejected.

As the teenage years floated in the kaleidoscope called life, each twist showed a new shape, a new dream. One day I wanted to be like Maneka Gandhi ,err not biologically, I mean I wanted to join the SPCA. Another day inspired by Nana Patekar’s ‘Prahaar’, I wanted to join the army and that evening I did a full four pushups. Don’t laugh, now I can complete sixty in one go without breaking a sweat. The fact, that after the sixtieth, I would be wheezing like an old cow and lying flat on my back for the remainder of the day with a glucose drip in my mouth, is to be ignored or to be treated as delightful honesty on the part of the adorable author.

Over the years I became a software engineer, wrote some code that shocked the bejesus out of most teammates and clients, and moved on to pursue knowledge, as in, MBA. I set my focus towards MICA, the premier Media and Communications Institute in the country, sure that it would provide me the chance to flirt with creativity and maybe even marry it. What Mica did, eventually, was make me aware of a new love – conceptualizing videos and ads, although laziness seldom allowed me to execute the same. Mica was like this big river, where we were all hippopotamuses. We lay in it, lazing, doing nothing but still overly satisfied. In that cauldron, I discovered that my existence was governed largely by sports, and a love for writing. College finished too soon and I felt the familiar disappointment of returning to a desk job that served no purpose other than letting American clients improve their business.

Now, as joining date approaches, the urge to follow either of two callings, a travel writer or a career in sports management, intensifies. Happiness, I am sure, would enclose its chubby fingers around the rough callused hands of a man known as ‘Travel Writer Jobs’ or ‘Team Manager Jobs’ (No relation of Steve Jobs).

In enthusiastic haste, I scampered all over the worldwide web in search of sports management jobs. Besides scores of other options, Google also let me know that I could apply for ‘High Performance Manager – Vanuatu Islands cricket team’ The vivid images of motivating, pushing and driving a weaker team to victory over a dozen mightier teams rushed me towards the ICC official website. Now, the Vanuatu islands are a group of islands in the South Pacific Ocean, famous for volcanic eruptions. Their cricket coach, Mr Pierre Chilia, though, is considerably less likely to erupt, he is actually a sweet tempered, sensible man. In his reply to my enthusiastic mail, he informed me that the selection process had already commenced, so I could go back to square one and draw doodles there. Lol, a managers job for a national sports team sounds way far fetched, but hey in the author’s defense, ask the women in his life and they’d tell you that romance, even with an impossible dream, had always been his forte. Amen.

A couple of weeks and I’ll be sitting in an office in Gurgaon analyzing data. Mails have been sent to a dozen sports marketing companies but they do not like recruiting humans anymore, it seems. And companies that employ travel writers do not have computers. Why else would they not reply to me? ;)

History will, still be kind to me, coz I, intend to write it.