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.