It happened once in MICA - Neeraj Narayanan

On the 30th of October 1974, Nolan Ryan pitched the fastest baseball pitch ever, at a speed of 100.9 miles per hour. Exactly thirty five years later, Udhav Kumar pitched it at half that speed and history was made at Mica.

For almost twelve months now, Abhishek Parmeswaran has been going to sleep at 9 am, waking up after seven in the evening, and spending the remainder of the night dreaming about Arsenal, playing computer games, dreaming a bit more about Arsenal, and going to Micafe . Besides sending terminations from Dikshita Shukla’s id, informing the entire Mica community how happy she is to see Ashish Rao in a towel, he graces the gym with his presence once a month, struggles with weights which never add any substance to his overall mass, and pats his hair an awful lot.

For almost twelve months now, he has been reminded from all and sundry about how woeful his batting is. So when he swung his bat wildly a month back and the ball, strangely, went over the Silveroak boundary instead of his stumps, the signs were ominous.

That day Abhishek scored nine, and even the cement mixer shone more brightly as he stood in front of it guarding the entire midwicket boundary. A month later, on the 30th of October, the bat swung now once, not twice, but eleven times, as he smote everything that came his way either straight, over the hostel that his Palash roommate has always loved; or over the trees deep at midwicket. As the ball flew to more areas of the boundary than it had earlier known, his team mates changed expressions from initially appreciative nods to happiness to raucous applause to finally, amazement. The fraud Iyer had erased every batting record set by any of his batch mates and became the lone ‘current’ student in the college to score a century.

The most classic response came from the man himself, as moments after he had struck Udhav for a towering six to reach his century and his ecstatic team mates hugged him, he looked around bewildered and eloquently mouthed, “Abey! Maine century maar di?” Trust me, he stressed far more on that “maine” than you can imagine.

Several hours after the match, as we sat at Chhota, I sipped my tea, shook my head for the umpteenth time and remarked to Abhay Mehta how cricket had lived up to its name and was the game of glorious uncertainties.

A day later, eleven boys, none of whom had represented their batch even in a single match so far, stood united and bowled the strongest batting line-up (X-Men) in the competition for a paltry 79 runs.

Cricket is, and will always remain the game of glorious uncertainties.

p.s 1) May God let Abhishek score many more runs coz it was a delight to watch him play that day. More so, coz he’s NOW in my superselector team.

p.s 2) Bidding you all a pleasant evening, and leaving you with a picture of how, we will always remember "dear Shakey". From one teammate to another, we are proud of you buddy!