Basically, my team won the championship. At the end of the match, we had our unit's senior representatives at Chennai, hand over all the cups to us. For the first time in my life, I got a cup in a sporting event.
You see, in the international preparatory school that I studied in, I used to win a lot of prizes in the annual sports day. Never a first prize. Always used to be second or third. Moreover, the events were the ones that the International Olympic Council is planning to include as showcase events in 2012 - Lime and Spoon race, Sack race, Three leg race, Sweet and Flour race, etc. One must also remember that, like the kid in the Gulab Jamun ad says, the number of participants in these events was quite low. That school had some budgetary constraints and so I don't remember cups being distributed. Even if they had, it must have been restricted to the first prize winner only. My consolation was the certificates in different colors that used to be issued.
After I moved to a bigger and better school in my 6th standard, I found out very clearly that my participation in the School events would be just that - participation. Of course, I broadened my scope to include jeering of other "houses" by shouting "Nanga Parbhat - zing sharbat" or "Neelkant, nool kand, vaayila poatta kal kand" and "Kanchenjunga , eli-mi-changa". In High school, the chant of "Kailash, cooling glass" was introduced in lieu of one of the houses, since I was sent to some other house. (For the benefit of those of you who didn't study in Vidya Mandir, our houses were named after the famous mountain peaks in the Himalayas viz Neelkant, Kailash, Nangaparbhat and Kanchenjunga).
There was also an interesting period in that school, when I played for the Under 15 team in 1988/89. I was in the "D" team of my school. In the TNCA league that year, the other 3 teams in my school were all eliminated in the first round itself. But my team reached the pre-quarter-finals. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with our cricketing ability. What happened was, that year, we had heavy unseasonal rains in the August month. And invariably, the day of our match was either raining or the previous day would have experienced a major downpour. But we would always go to the ground no matter what. And the opponent team didn't show up and the umpires would award the match to us. This happened in round # 1 to 4.
Then we had the pre-quarter where it was a showdown with one of the top cricket schools - Santhome. The match was in Chepauk "B" and we were trashed royally. Remember the India-Bermuda match? It was practically the same story here. The only good thing that came out of it was that, one guy in my team was Richie Rich and his dad was a member of TNCA. So we were all taken inside the Chepauk stadium. We walked close to the pitch also and went to the dressing room, gym and ate (duh!) at the club's restaurant there. Quite an exhilarating experience.
In my college, I never indulged in anything that resembled physical activity. So the cups I got were only in the semester exams. Not too many there, too. Just one each in the 5th and 6th. :)
So, I was basically very thrilled to win this match which ensured that I would be in the winner's list.....
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