Saving Private Ryan and the Ashes! What better way to spend summers than lying sprawled on your bed on a chilly Saturday night, your pet cats (Simba, Milo, and Smokey) ogling at you in the background and you slurping that cappuccino while imagining yourself striding out there in the world with the likes of Shane Warne, Kevin Pietersen, Tom Hanks, and Matt Damon. Hanks telling Damon to earn it while on his deathbed and then Warney shelling KP at first slip with the Barmy Army chanting "Warney's dropped the Ashes".
These surreal moments stay with you. They fuel your battle symphony and give you a real purpose to convert your dream into an actuality. Looking back, it’s not just a moment, but something that goes on for infinity, making us redefine our existence and hope beyond hope that one day, we may be old enough to be young again.
Life has a funny way of balancing itself out. We are always told by our mentors that history repeats itself because we don’t learn anything from history. I always remember the golden words of my great chemistry professor back in high school, Mr. Nicholas Jayanathan, that the physical distance between the student and the teacher in class is inversely proportional to the student-teacher relationship. Mickey Mantle once said, "It's so amazing that we know nothing about the game that we have been playing our whole life". Cricket is renowned for being a gentleman’s game. All great sports carry that mantra and cricket surely fits in that riveting category.
I was fortunate enough to be a part of the Literary and Debating Society back in GIKI during my undergrad era. If there is one perspective that I successfully emulated from my dear seniors in that division, (especially former GIKI/LDS alumnus Mr. Waqar Nayyar) it is that an unexamined life is a life not worth living. For a guy who struggled to put pen to paper in the early stages of his life, my affinity for cricket was mesmerizing, to say the least.
Unfortunately, the political status quo in Karachi back in the early 2010s did not really equip me with the ideal cricket trajectory that I would have loved to embrace. Being an only child, my parents were very apprehensive about my growth radar and like many other self-respecting families back then in the day, they were concerned about my enormous craze for the game.
Hailing from a middle-class family, I always cherished the life advice meted out by my favorite WWE Superstar John Cena “Respect is demanded, not earned”. Not having an elite background meant that I had to commit myself to a lifetime of incessant hard work to find my own purpose in life. My late grandfather always taught me the divine and worldly significance of staying connected with my roots. I often thought of myself as a tourist, frequenting the back streets of the world, not going where the path led, but where there was no path, and trying to forge a trail instead.
We are always told, “Bus abhi mehnat kar lain. Aik do saal ki Baat hai. Life automatically set hojaye gi”. I spent the better part of 2 decades believing that I could only be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer to truly succeed in life. My O’ Level institution was often contemplated to be a safe haven for nerds (I didn’t choose to be a nerd, I was born as one just like that old saying “I didn’t choose the mug life, the mug life chose me”).
Our institutions played a Herculean role in helping us make impressive inroads into the arenas of physics, further mathematics, english literature, sociology, and supply chain management to name a few. Unfortunately, I found them to be substantially lacking on the sports side of things, a department that I feel needs to be embraced with as much fervor and steadfast rigor as one does religion.
Pakistani cricketers have never really ventured into the limelight for their fielding prowess. From Abdul Razzaq dropping Sachin Tendulkar in 2003 to Rahat Ali shelling Watson at deep third man off the bowling of a pumped-up Wahab Riaz, one can only imagine the trauma our cricket-loving nation has been subjected to at the highest stage of the sport. Rationally speaking, I guess it makes sense.
Gully cricket and the lack of sound cricket infrastructure often make it difficult for our fellas to embrace the acrobatic fielding stunts of sensational icons like Jonty Rhodes, Martin Guptill, Ravindra Jadeja, and Glenn Maxwell. After all, no one wants to dive for a catch in front of an incoming Honda CIVIC only to be zapped into next week. At this point, the reader would probably be losing some of his or her inquisitiveness when it comes to going on reading this generic script. Can’t blame them! However, as that saying goes, just when you think you have life completely figured out, you are deflected by a bombastic margin of 180 degrees.
My love affair with cricket can be visualized as a roller coaster ride, full of ebbs and flows. My interest in the sport, primarily as a fan, was rejuvenated by the 2011 World Cup Cricket Semi-Final between India and Pakistan. It went on to hit the next level in 2012 when one of my all-time favorite cricketing heroes Michael Clarke had an unbelievable calendar year (racking a triple century along with 3 double centuries with his personal battle against Proteas Paceman Morne Morkel cementing its spot in the annals of history as one of the all-time great cricket duels).
I oozed with bravado when the great Kumar Sangakkara made a fighting half-century in the 2014 T20 World Cup Cricket Final against India. However, like Liam Neeson once said in “Batman Begins”, when a forest grows too large, a purging fire becomes natural and inevitable. The 2015 World Cup semi-final literally ripped me apart when Dale Steyn was hammered by Grant Elliot for a maximum on the penultimate delivery of the contest, not to mention bringing back the memories of the cataclysmic Lance Klusener-Allan Donald run-out saga in my mind.
In the middle of all this, I was trying to find my groove in life. Completing my undergrad chapter in 2018 and then being cast out into the world, drifting like a tramp from one platform to the next to discover my purpose in life, only to end up having agonizing outbursts as I struggled to counter alienation and existentialism, like a plastic bag swirling around in the air on a windy Thursday evening.
It was the decision to shift permanently from Karachi to Lahore that probably redefined my novel cricketing career. I remember frequenting Qaddafi Stadium with my former coursemates from my alma mater days, hoping beyond hope that one day, my path would intersect with professional cricket. Pakistani fans are ebullient supporters of the game. Be it in Tech Society or Ex-Air Avenue DHA Phase 8, I would rush to the general store on a warm Sunday afternoon, getting myself white tape and a tennis ball in conjunction with a bottle of Rooh Afza.
From there onwards, it was a case of going berserk, launching ball after ball for six, going in Andrew Symonds mode with the willow while trying to create a lovely seam presentation like Tim Southee and, panting like a dog after delivering two or three bouncers in an over.
Life was carefree and those amateur cricket pitches often transcended in rank, appearing to me as sanctuaries where I could put my overthinking to bed by emulating Michael Slater’s style of commentary or slogging the ball like one of my favorite idols Ross Taylor and, slandering myself every time the ball trickled between my legs to the boundary cushion. Analyzing cricket matches with my cousin for hours in a day non-stop and contemplating the origin of the Lochness Monster while draining hot chocolate at a supersonic rate that would make Elvis Presley turn over in his grave.
Despite my knowledge of the game, I couldn’t really live up to my aspirations on the playing field, which was probably attributable to my sedentary lifestyle, with matters exacerbated by my raging desire to consume chocolates and chicken fajita pizzas any chance I got. My cousins (Daniyal and Abu Bakr) kept me going the whole time. My batting masterplan would always revolve around old-school defense (impeccably demonstrated by the likes of Rahul Dravid, AB De Villiers, and Cheteshwar Pujara on the international spectrum) that implied soaking up the opposition ballers’ efforts and playing the role of an anchor to hold up one end and facilitate power hitters on the other end.
It was the other departments where I struggled for consistency with my inadequate muscle mass hindering me from developing a legitimate, medium-pace balling action. Stalling the gardeners and sneaking into the nets with my cousins at Bohranwali Ground in Faisalabad was probably my favorite pastime. I had become comfortably accustomed to people telling me I didn’t have what it takes to become a full-fledged cricketer at the domestic or country level, forget the international peg or franchise games. I guess it's always impossible until you show yourself that it is possible.
I remember this one net session where I was balling to Daniyal (a dexterous and wristy left-handed batsman who excelled when it came to playing both spin and pace on the front foot, especially square of the wicket) while coming over the wicket. It was a futile effort as I bowled either full tosses or half trackers that were massacred by him. An hour later, it came down to the last ball of the day, with my cousin still standing tall, positioned deep in the crease to potentially ramp an expected waist-high full toss over extra covers while I slumped back to my mark, disillusioned and psychologically shattered.
It was at that moment that something happened. I took a deep breath, said a prayer, and braced myself for a shorter run-up that prioritized precision and accuracy over pace. I went around the wicket and in the 25th year of my life, I bowled arguably the defining ball of my nascent cricketing profile.
It was a good-length ball, pitched on the second off-stump line. My cousin’s eyes lit up as he strived to go out on the front foot for a bristling cover drive but a fraction of a second’s worth of indecision led to him exhibiting a concentration lapse for the first time in his life while facing me. He exposed the tiniest of gaps between his bat and pad which normally wouldn’t have mattered much but was a catastrophic mistake in this case as the ball dramatically swung in after pitching and cannoned into the top of the middle stump. The silence was deafening and that’s when the moment dawned on us. A masterful case of David beating Goliath.
It was then that the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky echoed through my mind “Your greatest sin is that you have betrayed and destroyed yourself for nothing”. It was then that I realized that with discipline, motivation, longevity, and consistency, I could forge a decent outing for myself in this format. Since that day, I have bowled hundreds of deliveries and while I was never able to recreate that dream delivery again, it was enough to get me up and running.
At the same time, my stars were rapidly spinning out of proportion on the corporate scale as I experienced alienation, existentialism, and burnout, transitioning from one job to another, with serious doubts over Robert K Merton’s model of bureaucracy. To quote Fight Club, I had heavily succumbed to the IKEA Slave nesting instinct as I bought things, I didn’t need with money I didn’t have to impress people I abhorred.
It was survival time. It was then that I developed the vision to go abroad to pursue my higher studies in Chemical Engineering in the UK while refining my cricketing ambitions and striving to figure out my purpose in the greater scheme of things in the universe. Enter GHK! But I guess that story is destined for another blog. Brace yourself, peeps! To be continued!
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