My ten year old son, Prateek, fondly called as ‘Puchu’ by me and my wife, surprised his mother this morning by waking up before time for school. For nearly 2 minutes, I and my wife felt elated as like other days we won’t have to deal with his normal morning tantrums. But then I realized sooner than later. Puchu ran towards the TV, switched it on and tuned into DD sports. He heard Charu Sharma speak as if he understood what he really meant. May be he understood, I almost can’t guess how much this next generation understands and knows. But much to his annoyance, his mother picked him up in her arms like a toddler and took him to the wash basin. Puchu turned his head repeatedly towards the television while brushing his teeth, almost oblivious to the fact that a lot of rinsed toothpaste was falling on the floor rather than on the basin.
It was a one day international between India and Sri Lanka, at the Mohali cricket ground. Thank god it wasn’t at the Ferozshah kotla in Delhi, or else Puchu might well have ran to the stadium itself after waking up, with his toothbrush hanging in his mouth. I mean literally. I never quite understood how a kid can be so insanely obsessed with Sachin Tendulkar. Anyway, I moved on towards my cupboard, it was time for my getting ready too. All this while when I was dressing up, I could hear my wife shouting at puchu, supposedly because my son was delaying his normal process of getting ready for school since he was too consumed watching the match. In fact, the match hadn’t even started. He almost jumped with victorious joy when he learnt that Ganguly had won the toss, and selected to bat first. My son jumped in a way Javed Miandad had jumped to retaliate against his dismissal appeal in ’92 world cup against Azharuddin’s India.
It was almost time for us to leave, puchu’s school bus would be there at the stand any moment. I’m sure he knew it better than me. I could almost see what he was planning in his little head. He wasn’t surely in a mood to ‘sacrifice’ the match by ‘visiting’ his wretched school today. I’m sure he had started hating his friends too for time being, they weren’t intelligent enough were they? They won’t be interested in the match as he was, surely that’s how he felt. How could he be even with them? Chheee!
His mother grabbed him again in a fashion similar to the earlier one, made him wear his well polished school shoes, and did all that with a very stern face indeed. Puchu started crying suddenly, and I wasn’t surprised. My wife besides being beautiful, could look the most dreadful when she would raise her eyebrows and look at someone with anguish with “I’ll slap you” kind of eyes. We were almost going to lock the door when my son, suddenly broke free from his mother’s lap, slammed the door open and ran towards the television. I was amazed at this sudden show of power from my undernourished son! Somewhere I felt quite proud. But anyway, now it was my job to bring him back outside. So I got in too, trying to grab puchu and tell him it’s ok to miss a match but not school. What we witnessed next on television was what actually made puchu go to school without any more retaliation. The scorecard said-
S R Tendulkar bowled by C.Vaas - 0
S Ganguly batting 5
R Dravid batting 2
No comments:
Post a Comment