Why ‘Overseas’

A quick one..

Within seconds of posting I was flooded with emails from my blog fans all over the world..one even came from Botswana, then rest ..ok were mainly from spammers trying to sell some weird stuff like ‘…enhancement pills’, ‘dating websites and all’. But I have to cave in to the popular demand asking me to explain the term ‘overseas’.

Apparently, the legend goes like this…Long long back when a battalion of RRCC was enroute to it’s first away game at Yishun, those in the NKK’s car happened to be driven all the way to Tuas, entering Malaysia, making a full circle all the way back to JB and then back to Singapore after crossing over the ocean via the straits. Though  NKK termed as a GPS malfunction, the passengers described it as truly an overseas trip..which is why the moment it’s out of  Rivervale Crescent it becomes an overseas game, courtesy NKK’s outstanding knack of direction which ensures a sea is crossed before getting anywhere.

Obviously if you are reading this without having read the previous post with care, you’ll be as lost as riding in NKK’s company. Go back and read the previous post first..please!!

For some its more than just a game..

“Please like my post, please comment” ..shrieked Sachien Mittal as he fell down the bed..in his sleep. Looking around he realised it was another RRCC+FB dream that was haunting his sleep yet again. It was 4 in the morning, too early to be up, but sleep was lost. Sachien quietly slipped out of his bed and headed to the study room. There placed right in front of his laptop was a book titled: “De-addict from Facebook in 10 days – by the anti-social media expert Dr.Nikhil Patel”. Sachien picked the book and logged into his laptop and headed straight to his facebook page to post:  “Reading a book on how to lose facebook addiction at ilibrary lounge, Rivervale crecent”. Swearing at the author he started flipping through the pages before quickly going back to his profile and commenting on his recent post (2 mins ago) “Come on guys, no comments on this?..please can you ‘like’ it at least”.  He went back to staring at the book for about 30 seconds and decided it was a bad idea to have purchased that book (apparently It was all in Gujrati, with only the cover in english..who would have thought that..well done Patel!!).  So ,by 4:15 am Sachien went back to doing what he is best at, posting rules of the game on RRCC and then rules on ‘rules of the game’ and more in a similar loop of things.

Anyways, the point here is not about my skills at spying Sachien Mittal (how good is that though?), but just illustrate how the visionary thinks and works for his passion. In a recent conversation he mentioned how small things that people fail to comply with irks the hell out of him..i remember those lines filled with anguish and anger very vividly:

“Woh sala motu Mani, Lol..dhed shaana bantha hai. Samajtha kya hai woh..sab se nazdeek rehta hai aur phir bhi late aatha hai..jaise harmony square pe aake meherbaani kar raha hai hum pe. Uska bas chale to woh us jageh ko ‘HarMANI’ square bana de. Aur ek Venkat hai jo Commonwealth me rehte hue bhi humare Sengkang cricket ke liye itna kuch karta hai..bhagwaan kare uski shaadi itni jaldi naa ho..nahin tho phir ek enthu wala bandha kho baithenge. Sometimes I am so worried ki mere baad RRCC ka kya hoga..i have already started teaching Neev some stuff about organising, but he too seems disinterested and starts saying ‘baabaa black sheep…’ ; I hope one day he will start valuing the legacy I am about to leave…..oh damn these jobless people are back to creating controversial threads on Facebook….” and then he had to take leave to clear  some urgent posts on FB which included deleting a nonsensical poetry-jugalbandhi between usual troublemakers Kukreja uncle and Mani. 

From being a quite couple of weekend games played internally RRCC now goes on overseas (more in the next post on why exactly it is called overseas) tours playing teams like Bedok IXORA? And Yishun’s YPL etc. Very recently RRCC registered their first victory too and that certainly has brightened the path ahead for RRCC enthusiasts. Apart from competitive games externally, even on the RRCC internal front things have spiced up with Sachien’s latest brainchild THE RRPL (Rivervale premier league) which is a an in house league competition where players are all competing against one another for cricketing points to get on top of the HOF (Hall-of-Fame) and captains are competing for pride and title as well.

It’s not difficult to see why the man is so emotional and expressive about RRCC. Afterall it’s a vision that he has for cricket lovers across Singapore and not just Sengkang. .afterall for some its more than just a game!

“Please like & comment on this post”

Score that went sore

Conspicuous by his absence on the first day of July, Saurabh Ghulati, when contacted gave us more than what we asked for, as a piece of gossip-tidbit for this space. Not pleased with the frequent mishaps in Sachien’s scoring, Ghulati chose one way of keeping his stats preserved, by not showing up. When he was probed for the exact reasons, he went to the extent of claiming that those scoring mishaps were intentional, deliberate and conniving acts of miscounting and essentially “aakhde khaa jaana” a phenomenon typically associated with the accounting practices enforced by Suresh Kalmadi. Ghulati even went on to frame his own limerick…as an account of all that went wrong with the scoring. Though he claims it to be his original piece of work, we somehow thought it was inspired from the 2010 Bollywood film UDAAN (who cares… like anything here is original)..So it goes like this:

“Har ek over ka yeh ek-ek ball khaa jaye,

Iske haath pad jaye tho wide pe yeh no-ball bhi de jaye,

Yuvi ka fastest fifty chodo, yeh Tendulkar ka 100^th 100 bhi khaa jaye,

Aur parosa jaa sake to Debasis Mohanty ka bhi double hundred khaa jaye”

Wah wah mr. Ghulati wah wah. Irshaad..so much for resentment about the “jhol” in our scoring system.

That was a sharp lyrical attack, but not exactly a clever move form Saurabh Ghulati and let’s face it, with Sachien reading this piece we might have seen the last of Saurabh Ghulati lest he should come forth with an apology as unconditionally as Chris Gayle did to strike truce with the WICB…. Unless you have a muscular tattooed arm similar to Gayle which should work as well and then, in fact Sachien could be the one apologising to you.

The lingo mumbo jumbo

Mind your language:

What happens when a married guy and a bachelor are conversing is that they are almost certainly not on the same page. Don’t get the point? Sample this:

Rivervale Rockets: The beginings and the rise of Rockets

One lazy Sunday afternoon, Sachien Mittal was lazing around watching some cricket match on an impeccably dodgy streaming website when his missus, fed up with his nonchalant ignoring of household duties, yelled at him saying.. “Cricket cricketcricket…who the hell do you think you are? You are Sachien Mittal, not Sachin Tendulkar..get off your damn couch and do something worthwhile, like making tea for for a starter, before getting on to doing my pedicure”. At this stage a bolt of lightning struck Sachien and he thought to himself.. “True, I am Sachien (likealmost Sachin) but importantly I am a Mittal and Mittals do something which Tendulkars don’t….Eureka..I will create my own team, my own league and my own everything” What happened after is not exactly known, but suffice to say it is all history.

From humble beginnings of online cricket among an enthusiastic couch cricket group consisting of Sachien, Mohit, Khairha, Sumit Rastogi, Nishant Bansal  and some random virtual players, what we see today is Rivervale Rockets beaming out with a couple of dozens of regular cricket enthusiasts and many more random virtual players who appear in the list but just never turn up. Some of them I feel are Sachien’s imaginary friends that he must have added to bloat the team list well enough before an IPO isissued sometime soon in the near future. In Sachien’s words they started cricket at the backyard for Blk157C Rivervale crescent more than a year back,  before gathering enough numbers to move over to the ground, though I find that dubious in that I never spotted any of them ever despite my habit of a regular walk around that side. OR perhaps they were just playing an awesome game of invisible cricket OR going back to my original hypothesis they just played stick cricket online. Who knows, but fact is also that in the long walk from the backyard to the ground Sumit and Nishant became so tired that they never reached the ground it seems like. Wonder who apart from Sachien has seen them?

Betweenthe differing narrations and stories what remains true is that Rivervale Rockets is now a reality, very much in existence, growing rapidly and here tostay. If rumors are to be believed Rajasthan Royals want us to collaborate with them for the next IPL but obviously we turned them down saying that we don't play for shietty teams!

Whenwe asked some of the co-founders for their quick take on their contribution tothe rise of rivervale rockets:

Sachien:"I came, I saw, I conquered and I roped in Khairha, Bansal, Aroraetc"

Khairha was as swift as Munaf Patel when coming up with his counter story:" I came I saw kicked Sachien off and conquered, I am the original starter”

Bansaland Rastogi were unavailable for any comments while Mohit Arora was simply not interested much. After a lot of coaxing all he said was “Credit koi bhi le, khelna hai mujhe bas sirf khelna hai. Par yeh Sachien ...sala duplicate Sachin hota kaun hai discipline ke liye -5 dene wala? School hai kya yeh?”

True, when they say Failure is an orphan and Success is a b#$%^&d

Housekeeping 101: Rules and Regulations, T&Cs, Terms of the service etc etc …you know what!

Better to lay the rules of engagement on this space clearly..lest you say “I wasn’t told so”

1.       No slandering

2.       No racism. Only race superior to everyone else is Formula one, all other races are the same.

3.       No use of expletives. Ok can use a few but not very often. Ok can use however manytimes but reasonable ones. Ok just use them but please mask it..like using #$%%$##...it’s really that F#$%^&g simple.

4.       Criticisms /Compliments are welcome as long as it pleases the authors enough

5.       Complaints are totally welcome but you can’t pass it on the blog or facebook. It has to be handwritten, with signature and complete details of the complainant (name, address, photo, mobile number, bank account 7 pin, etc etc) in a sheet of white A4 size paper and kept behind the tree near the Chong Ghee temple. We’ll collect it every Friday at 12 midnight, Unless it’sblown away by wind, washed away by rain or cleaned away by Town council. If it does make through all that we might read it and take appropriate action.

6.       Every once in a while a team member will be randomly assigned to contribute match report with a right to refusal. The right to refusal comes with a heavy penalty of having to carry water for the team in the next game and of course some mentions to discredit that person in the next blog post. We are a very democratic admin team and want to award everyone the right to choose/not choose albeit with some perils.

7.       Fun is the name of the game and please bear in mind we will make sure to paint a wrong picture about everyone very consistently. If you feel someone has been left out and not enough fake stuff is coming through you have a right to pass that feedback and we’ll do our best to not ignore it.

8.       Criticisms /Compliments are welcome as long as it pleases the authors enough..Ok that has been mentioned already but isn’t it worth a reminder?

9.       No discussion about Singapore politics here and especially no comments about government and all.  There is STOMP and other forums for that if you are into it.

10.    Except #4 & #8 all other rules are subject to changes and will perhaps keep changing all the times

Author's foreword and Welcome to the official blog for Rivervale Rockets

As an esteemed assigned co-contributor to this blog I must make it clear upfront that a lot of what you read and hear from this blog is going to be as fake as it gets. Not because I love faking it (yes that I do though) but merely because I don’t have time to check facts and make a story out of facts, plus factual stories are always boring,right? Not to mention, most of us don’t give a potty^*about facts  How else do you explain our love for Bollywood movies. A lot of reports you see will see here are based on a “make it or fake it” modus operandi. If you don’t like it, no worries we are even going to put in a lot of rave comments from “fake fans”. Lastly please don't bother about the typos or grammatical errors, none of the contributors are professionals at this. It's all that can be made up in snooze time at work, home and sometimes during early morning chores in the bathroom, if you know what i mean..but hey..we all take our iphones along, don't we? ..ok some weird ones do..and not me. Anyways the bigger point is weclome to our very own official blog and hopefully we provide you some interesting updates and stories to read about the develeopments within the Rivervale Rockets circle. Innermost team gossips that exist or don't will be brought to you here and also give you a chance to post your appreciations for this brilliant blog or a chance for us to delete posts that aren't exactly keeping in line with "appreciation" of the authors.

Read on my dear friends and keep looking at this space for more updates (hopefully regular basis) as we go along.

Cheers,

Rocket Singh - blogger of the year lah!

potty^* :A euphemism for S#$t that I have had to develop as a result of my efforts intrying to keep the conversational lingo clean while with my little toddler around as we fear at this stage where he is just about picking up words, he shouldn’t necessarily be exposed to the unparliamentary vocabulary just as yet.