Bengaluru: For anyone who grew up in Bengaluru before the turn of the millennium, ‘gully’ cricket was the norm. A single batter, electric poles for stumps and fielders spread around haphazardly were common sight. It wasn’t unusual for streets and playgrounds to be cheek-by-jowl with ‘gilly-danda’, ‘lagori’, and hopscotch players jostling for a slice of the tar or the green patch, as the case may have been. Preparing ‘manja’ from broken glass pieces to fly kites was also quite a ‘ritual’ on holidays.
However, most of that has been consigned to folklore, thanks to rapid urbanisation and the city’s ever-diminishing lung space over the years. Moreover, technology flowing into homes — and manifest in the form of mobile phone handsets and gaming console controllers — has turned out to be the bane of outdoor sports.
However, among those who recall those ‘good old days’ fondly is a now 52-year-old, who grew up on 12th Main Road in Indiranagar, playing cricket with wickets painted on his garage door and the bowler’s ‘run-up’ extending from his driveway to the road.
From ‘gully’ cricket to marshalling the Indian cricket team — first as captain and then head coach — Rahul Dravid, fondly referred to as ‘The Wall’ during his playing days for his almost impregnable defence as a batsman, has travelled the distance and played the sport at all the hallowed turfs across the world. Yet, his face lights up when he speaks about his Indiranagar days. “One of the things that people never forget is how they played as kids. Playing hide-and-seek or seven stones, as we used to as kids, tells us how important unstructured sport or interactions are,” said the former Indian skipper as he addressed a gathering of educational stakeholders from schools at an event hosted by Plaeto in Bengaluru Thursday.
“I grew up on 12th Main Road in Indiranagar, where now, unfortunately, you can’t even cross the road. But growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, there were a lot of empty plots all around. So, even on the road, we could play hockey, football and cricket. We used my garage door as a wicket, and we would come running on the road to bowl. As the odd vehicle rolled by, we would stop and continue once it was gone,” recalled Dravid, who excelled in both hockey and cricket at St Joseph’s Boys’ High School.
While present-day holiday activities are structured, Dravid held forth on what holidays back then meant to him. “During summer holidays, you basically came home only for lunch. My mum would say, ‘You’re treating your home like a hotel’. That was because we used to be outside playing until it got dark.”
Reflecting on the life lessons from those days, Dravid said: “A lot of that helped build camaraderie and friendships that stay with you for a long time. The abilities to communicate in person, interact with others, argue, and be able to hold your arguments were so important.” According to Dravid, all that helped make who a person was.
Sport as a career
Dravid revealed he didn’t think of cricket as a career until he earned the India cap.
“I never thought about sport as a profession until I played for India. Even when I was playing in the Ranji Trophy, I was still studying at St Joseph’s Commerce College and planning to do an MBA. That was also because back then, cricket was still an amateur sport, which only a lucky few were able to turn into a profession. Today, things have changed,” he said.
Zero hundreds at home
While speaking at the venue, which overlooked the M Chinnaswamy Stadium turf, Dravid, who termed the ground his “second home”, quipped: “I’ve never scored a Test 100 here. For all the runs I scored here in domestic cricket, and I scored quite a few of them, I could somehow never score a Test 100 here, which is sad.”