Adventures in India...
The men on my team at work are cricket fanatics. If it's an important match, they'll take off an hour to go to the home of someone nearby to watch. (An hour off is not a big deal when you work 12 to 18 hours on the average day.) I've gone along once or twice to try to learn the game, but had little success until the evening of February 26, when a dozen of us gathered at a team memberís apartment to view a crucial World Cup match between India and England. Before the night was over, I understood 4s and 6s, what a "century" was, and how to curse a bad player.
The evening of the game, there was a general exodus from work about 6 pm. At Rahul's apartment, alcohol flowed as freely as cricket conversation. Everyone devoured snacks and pub food while we watched Tendulkar and team captain Ganguly score run after run before becoming out. Then Mangia batted sluggishly and when he was finally out, there was general relief. "Do you know how to curse a bad cricket player, Lorre?", someone asked. Nimesh fed me my line: "Mangia hei hei." Everyone laughed and applauded.
A week earlier, after India lost an important match, Jagadish emailed everyone the quintessential Indian cricket joke:
I was in my car during a traffic jam, and I could see a man walking between the cars, apparently asking something to everyone as he passed. The man walked up to my car and knocked on the windshield. I opened the window and he asked, "Hey, did you hear the news? The Indian cricket team is being held hostage and they asked rs.100 crore* for their release. If they don't pay it, they threaten to put petrol on the players and light them!""That's why I'm walking from car to car, to collect," said the man.
While I was getting my wallet out of my pocket I asked the man how much most people usually gave, and the man said, "Well, about 5 litres!"
[* A crore is rs. 10 million, or approximately $200,000 US, but with 4 to 4 1/2 times the buying power of that amount in India. So rs. 100 crore is approximately $20 million US, with the buying power in India of about $80 to $90 million.
The winner of the cricket pool, by the way, was Sirisha, my fellow technical writer. She spent the money on a bowling party for all of the participants.
