Pages

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Blogathon 3: Cricket fever

The event you have all been waiting for: The next edition of the Tulika blogathon is officially here! 

*crowd cheers* *cheerleaders do a jiggly jig* *camera swoops around a crowded stadium* *etc*

Here's what you have to do: Post pictures with little captions about cricket on your blog. You're welcome to add your thoughts on the pictures as well. Your kids playing cricket, you playing stick cricket in school (did you play French cricket in school? anyone?), children of the neighbourhood frying in the noonday sun and playing with chalk-drawn-on-wall stumps, you at an IPL match, your bedroom wall plastered with cricketing heroes' posters - all things cricket-related are acceptable entries.

Your deadline is Monday, April 19. Leave a comment below with a link to your post or mail it in

Selected entries will be formatted into an online-only book. The virtual book will be up online as a slideshow and as a pdf document - so you can download it and show if off if you want to:-)
You get your name on a virtual Tulika publication. We get all your deep dark cricketing secrets. Sweet, huh?

Here's Sandhya Rao's take on her book Cricket! to get you started....

When I was a little girl, way way back in the early 1960s, growing up in a small town called Durgapur in West Bengal, we were always back home from school by lunch and after that we were free to play – play in the afternoon, play all evening and, left to our merry selves, ready to play all night. Some of my friends then went home and like good kids did their homework. I grabbed a scrappy bite and flopped into bed. Homework, hah! Well, that hah! got me into big trouble sometimes, but, hah! who cared. There were so many more interesting things to do.
Like, catch tadpoles in the rainy season. Help my mum cover books for the little ones in her class, all for the price of a bar of chocolate (very difficult to come by those days), listen to cricket (and tennis) commentary on the radio for my dad and report to him the live action of the day… That’s what really set if off, the love for all forms of sport: to watch, to play and to play around

Alan McGilvray, Brian Johnston, Bobby Talyarkhan… these are some of the names I remember and I would assiduously assimilate all of the action and replay it for my father when he got back from work. In the process, I acquired a special fondness for cricket and tennis although what we friends played was badminton and seven stones and dark room and through all of these games we gave ourselves our favourite players’ names. So what if cricket was played differently!
I think that’s what inspired the little book of photographs called Cricket! A game anyone can play, anytime, anywhere, anyhow.
That’s why, when I see some IPL stars put on their best aggressive acts, it makes me angry. Because children are watching. Because children worship their heroes. Because children want to be like their heroes.
Because really, it isn’t about winning at all. It is about playing the game. Cricket! is about playing the game. Any game. For fun. To enjoy and generate happy feelings. So you can have a good night’s sleep.

 - Sandhya Rao

P.S. You can find more pictures from the book on the Tulika site