Bokango, Baabulog, Jee Em & Cricket

2006, trip to Karnala and the Industrial Visit to Aurangabad. These three places or events are where I got to know a lot of my classmates and also some of the seniors. Within a span of 4 to 6 months, I managed to catch hold of few classmates who later became good friends and also few seniors became good friends. When it comes to mingling with the seniors, we normally hangout at restraunts or stay in college and have a gala time mocking some fellow students or laughing about something that happened in the past. But there is only one thing that brings us all together in seriousness i.e. the game of cricket - playing cricket.
We form teams of 6 to 8 and go to other colleges to have fun and obviously make an effort to win. Let me take you through a small journey in which we friends together participated in various cricket tournaments and various things we achieved.

The first ever tournament we played was at Azad Maidan which was held by Hinduja Collage. Hours of practice and hard work took us into high spirits. Our team was called ‘Bokango’ (I don’t know why). According to us the rules were stupid and all the boys in the team were upset. Here is one of the tweaked rules: the bowler’s arm shouldn’t go beyond his body or below his knee. And the match was played under-arm. Well, we lost the match and didn’t make it to the second round. Hey! But we were not sad at all. We completely forgot about that match and came back to our original senses i.e. pure fun and mischief.

The second tournament was Adorea ’07 in Jan, held by the BMS Department of our very own college. One thing all of us were happy was that the match was over-arm but not without some tweaked rules. This time there were two teams representing BMM. One was captained by Vijay Christdoss of FY BMM and the other was captained by Dhruv Deshmukh of SY BMM. Our team was named 'Babulog' because one of our team members called all of us by this name so we named it Babulog. Once again we lost in the first round to a team called Young Generation. Another first round exit. Here is an interesting fact: the seniors who were playing in our team were the runners up of the last version of Adorea in 2005.

After a gap of 10 long months we made an entry back to serious cricket. This time it was within our college premises. The tournament was organized by the hostelites of Mackichan Hall. The rules were absolutely absurd (to us). A small box and a 5 over match where one could easily score 80 to 90. We managed to pile up 70 odd runs for our opponents who were the 3rd team representing BMM. They were called M-5 and we were called Jee Em (for specific reasons). We were outdone by our colleagues and another 1st round exit. I still remember we practiced for about 4 days and each day we practiced for 3 hours.




After we got ousted from this tournament we had decided we would never ever play cricket together again. There was almost a rift within the team. A friendly rift though. One good thing is we never played blame games at all. Few weeks later we heard about another tournament held by Sydenham Collage at Oval Maidan. This time it was proper cricket rules which brought a wide smile on our faces. One thing that was bothering us was that we reached on match day without a single minute of practice.
One rule exited us was that, the amount of runs scored in the first over would be doubled. Cool huh? One of our team mates couldn’t play the first match as he had some other business to attend. We called in a fellow student, Nilesh, who stayed nearby to fill in the empty slot and it was a well made decision to call him. This was the first match where Karan Pradhan took over as captain taking the mantle from Vijay Christdoss who was the captain for all the previous tournaments. Vijay this time was deputy to Karan.

The first match was against Jai Hind College and we won the toss and elected to field. We were set a target of 44 runs in 5 overs. A good start was provided by the openers and later the captain and vice captain saw their team through to the second round. This was the happiest moment of all our team mates as this was the first ever victory as a team in the past year and a half. All of us went ahead with a great amount of confidence to the second round as we faced the hosts, Sydenham Collage. We again won the toss and elected to field again. We had to chase 57 runs in 5 overs which eventually was done by Varad Naik and Darius Mistry. Varad opened the innings and remained unbeaten by hitting the winning stroke by a six. This win took us to the finals, a goal that all of us couldn’t achieve in the past year and a half. We had a 2 hour break which was refreshing for all or us. It was the first ever final for us except for the seniors who achieved this feat 2 years ago at Adorea 2005.

Here we are at our very first final after joining Wilson Collage, BMM. We won the toss again and elected to field. One of our team mates, Benny Gladston made way for the returning Josline Harris who bowled well in the match. A small team huddle and a pep talk by the captain. We bowled our hearts out and bowled out the opponents, Elphinstone Collage, for 78 runs. This time our batting didn’t click and we didn’t fire on all cylinders as we were bowled out for a mere 29 runs. We were disappointed but when we looked back at the past 18 months we were satisfied and happy about our recent achievement.

It indeed was a great tournament for all of us as we went home without any regrets. We only hope to carry this form ahead and look to repeat the same performance in 2008 with all the confidence and success. Although we would miss the services of Darius and Karan as they would be completing their final year in mass media. But we as a team would still continue to take part in as many events as possible and be victorious and bring smiles on peoples faces.