Every time I see the college and the adjacent wedding hall bang opposite my home, I feel nostalgic about the old times. There used to be a reasonably large open ground there before ‘progress’ took over and the municipal authorities deemed it fit for the land to be sold to build a college and a wedding hall. That particular ground held so many memories for me that it is going to be very difficult for me to summarize them all in this one post. In any case, am sure going to make an attempt at least to put down the most memorable ones.
I still don’t clearly remember my first meeting either with G or P (albeit I have known G a little longer than I have known P). The 3 of us were part of this bigger gang of kids who used to hog almost half the large ground for almost the entire day playing cricket, soccer and other assorted games that only teenage kids can come up with using their inventive minds. Despite the fact that we had a big gang of similarly aged guys, for whatever reason the 3 of us hit it off pretty well right from the start. I guess we used to like the same cricketers, the same WWE (they were called WWF back then) wrestlers and the same computer games.
One of the things that we used to enjoy as teenagers, especially during our summer/winter vacations from school was to play cricket or soccer in the mornings (depending on which event was held during the year, the Cricket World Cup or the Soccer World Cup). What was interesting though was the fact that we used to start playing at around 5.30 AM in the morning and used to go on till around 8.00 AM. The early morning starts had multiple advantages, one, in the summer we would avoid the brunt of the morning heat, in the winter the activity would keep us warm. And the biggest advantage was that once this was done, we pretty much had the entire day to do other things before we got back to the ground at 4 PM again.
With the morning session out of the way, the rest of the day was spent either playing board games like Scotland Yard, Business (Indian version of Monopoly), watching rented VHS tapes (remember watching more than just a few Hollywood classics and blockbusters this way) or play computer games like Codemasters Brian Lara cricket, EA Sports Cricket ’97, FIFA 98, and other random games. Although it must be said that the computer made its appearance in our lives only around the time that we were 16-17 yrs old and before that it was all board games and outdoor games only, with the occasional rented VHS tape thrown into the mix.
And the conversations we used to have those days pretty much used to revolve around either the cricketer or tennis player or soccer star who was making news those days. Tendulkar (yes, he was around in those days as well), Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg, Ronaldo, Hulk Hogan, The Undertaker (yes, he was also around in those days), Bret “The Hitman” Hart, and their latest exploits. Each one of us had our favorites and we used to defend all their actions irrespective of whether it made any sense to us or not. We had a favorite and we needed to defend him at all costs, that was the only credo all 3 of used to follow.
Those really were the best days of my life. Days when we used to treat each day as a celebration of life, when we used to have loads of fun without necessarily worrying about the future, when we were full of energy, enthusiasm and optimism for life. Those were the best days of my life, the teenage vacation days.
The videos below are a tribute to G and P, two of the best friends that one could ever have. Love you guys, and you know that…
Image courtesy: Google image search for ‘baby buttocks’
