Serious hobbies 

I don’t know if other people relate to this. I have a problem - I can only do serious hobbies. The hobbies themselves are not serious, it is just I become serious about them. For example, cricket - something which I resumed for 2-3 months this year and then finally stopped. 

It started with Satyajeet, creator of this wonderful website asking if I would like to join a game of cricket. I said sure. Most of the cricket playing I did was until 10th grade - which was almost everyday. This cricket playing was in various forms - full pitch, box cricket, shadow batting in front of the mirror, playing with a stick (visualise a 2nd grader spinning the ball near himself and then hitting the ball with a stick which would rebound off a wall and come back - for hours). I was always the best among my friends which doesn’t say anything really. After that, it became sporadic, few times a year and sometimes many years without playing. 

Coming back to the game, we were fielding. I got a catch on the second ball of the game which I luckily caught. Our opponents made a decent score of 140 something in 20 overs. I didn’t bowl as I was playing after a long time and told my team mates that batting is my stronger suit. We lost our first wicket quickly and I went in at one down. Surprisingly, I middled the first three balls I played, including a good lofted cover drive which should have been a two. On the fourth ball I faced, I hit a decent shot to mid off and ran for a quick single which my partner refused late and I got run out. Perfect start to my new cricket playing days. We quickly lost 7 wickets for 30 something. Almost everyone had resigned to defeat especially Satya! But miraculously, we won from this position. I was so overjoyed with emotion. This is a kind of joy which is unique to team sports and can only be understood if experienced. Then, I played a few more games - 8 to be precise. In most of the games, I gave good starts for the team but never made a big score. 

You can ask me what is serious about this? Well, for starters I analysed all of my innings. My dot ball percentage, boundary percentage, how I did in power-play etc.?

Next, I finished Bradman’s “Art of Cricket” which is a very good read about all aspects of the game, especially batting. Though, it is probably more useful for test cricket than the tennis ball cricket we played on the farmlands of Sarjapur. My dreams at night started to have me hitting glorious cover drives and pull shots, taking hat tricks and scoring hundreds. I think this is the point when your hobby becomes “serious.”

While playing cricket was lot of fun, it was taking a lot of time (half the time would go in just traveling to the grounds), so I decided to stop playing it altogether. My only regret is to not have scored at least a fifty. 

PS: On a side note, I came across this interesting quote by an English journalist about Bradman -

...he will always be in the category of the brilliant, if unsound, ones. Promise there is in Bradman in plenty, though watching him does not inspire one with any confidence that he desires to take the only course which will lead him to a fulfilment of that promise. He makes a mistake, then makes it again and again; he does not correct it, or look as if he were trying to do so. He seems to live for the exuberance of the moment…