The Games We Played - Conventional

Inspired by Red's lovely post on the importance of games for the all round growth of children, I tried to recall the games which we used to play, and as it always happens, it was a good trip down the memory lane.

There were lots of them. Evenings usually filled with Cricket. Initially it was lanes, then we graduated to parks. Roof tops were also frequent alternatives. Duly pooled one-rupee plastic ball would last three days, but later there was revolution of sorts as far as plastic balls are concerned, when we could also have harder two-rupee and five-rupee plastic balls.

Sundays and summers holidays had a different itinerary. We would get up as early as 5.30 AM to reach the grounds with leather or cork balls. One difference between the two would be obvious when you would be hit by them. With the cork ball, pain would be immediate, which would lessen at night. With the leather one, all the fun would begin at night.

In the evenings we played Football, with of course very convenient off side rule. The Hockey federations removed the off side rule much later than us. Since there were no yellow or red cards, there were no send offs either, which enabled every non- goalkeeper to use hands in a desperate situation(while saving a goal).

Most part of my life, my class friends were also my play friends as we all lived in the radius of 3-4 km. There were some very good parks around. We would play within ourselves, but more fun was when we would have a bet match with a different class. Class IX vs Class X or Class X A vs Class X B kind of stuff.

There was this period in our life when we were badly hit by Badminton bug. We were absolutely mad over it. We even created our own point tables and based on that we would decide daily rankings and seedings.

We also tried our hands on Hockey. We had only one Hockey stick, and that too reached up to my upper corners of arm. So we decided to play with cricket stumps, and ball would be of rubber, jean or sponge. Again there was no offside or infringement rule. The ground was the lawn in front of Hemant's house. We would create so much ruckus till we would be kicked out.

Most of the time, these games would continue as late as 9 PM, till some emissaries would be sent from our respective homes with the message to better report back soon or face the ignominy of, Heavens forbid, getting scolded in full public view.

We are also smitten by the sporting stuff on TV. World Of Sport on Sunday evenings was a regular, but we went mad at Asiad 84, Football World Cups in in 1986(Oh Maradonna!!), & Italia 1990( poor Maradonna!), and Reliance, World Series and Sharjah Cricket cups.

These were the conventional sports which we played. In next post I will talk about non-conventional stuff. Be ready to get bored again!