School Stories

(This page will contain Uday's school experiences in Gudivada. If you were associated with him at other places, please Gmail me at raghuveerm or post a comment with those details. I will create similar pages for other locations and contexts. Pictures and other media files will be really appreciated).

Montessori English Medium High School, Gudivada

1. Fielding wins the tournament
2. Morning escape to stadium
3. Bags and belt buckle
4. Book cricket

1. Fielding wins the tournament

Our school, Montessori, had a very good cricket team back in the day. Uday was a wonderful fielder and made the team based on his athletic ability alone. He would cover the leg-side region from mid-wicket to long-on quite easily.

Our main rival was Bethavolu High School which had a superstar Babu Rao (the Sachin Tendulkar of his team who would have easily played first class cricket had he grown up in a city) but the rest of the team was so-so. In a prestigious local tournament which had two divisions, we easily topped our group and made the finals and faced Bethavolu who won their division. The school tournaments were 20-overs a side affair; we won the toss, batted first, and scored 88 runs which was above-par for the ground and usually more than adequate to defend for our strong bowling attack.

SPS High School, Tournament Venue

Our opening bowlers started their spells well and destroyed Bethavolu's top order reducing them to 16/5 in no time. Then Babu Rao got going - he laid into our attack and it did not seem to matter how well the bowlers bowled or where the fielders were - hitting boundaries at will, he got Bethavolu to 75/5. He then tapped the ball to mid-wicket to Uday's left which should have resulted in just one run. But he got greedy and set-off for a second. Uday swooped on the ball, and in one action collected it and threw the ball to the wicket-keeper right on the stumps. Babu Rao's dive did not save him and he was run-out! Score - 76/6. Our bowlers then took over and easily plucked out three more wickets without conceding any runs.

Cricket Ground (was much clearer and certainly felt bigger when we were young!)

Score - 76/9 after 19 overs.

Bethavolu had to score 13 runs to win in the last over with just one wicket in hand. We thought we were home. On the first ball of the last over, the tailender closed his eyes and swung his bat. I still do not know how he connected, but the ball was hit smack from the sweet spot of the bat and was still traveling when it hit the top part of the tall boundary wall enclosure. The umpire signaled a six!

Where the ball hit the wall (red circle)

7 to win. 5 balls to go.

The batsman swung again and missed. However, this time our wicket-keeper Jagadish who was usually good failed to collect the ball and the batsmen ran a bye. All of us yelled at Jagadish and the drama queen that he was, he threw down the keeping gloves and went out of the field shouting "to hell with you guys". Uday, being the best fielder, was asked to keep wickets.

6 to win. 4 balls to go.

The batsman swung again. The ball took an edge and went straight up in the air. Uday settled under it and the captain Satya Srinivas screamed, "Uday, everything is in your hands now."

Did Uday catch it?

Of course he did. We won the tournament with Uday playing a key role. He was mobbed by the entire team and was carried from the ground.

2. Morning escape to stadium

Uday LOVED playing cricket and this mania was well-known to his father who was naturally concerned that Uday would neglect his studies if he stayed in Gudivada after 10th class. This was the conversation at Uday's house one evening (retold by Uday many times to me).

Father: "We are going to go to Guntur tomorrow morning to enroll in a residential college. The earliest train is at 730 am and we will take that. Wake up at 5 am and get ready."

Uday: "Ok, but can we go the day after tomorrow? We have a tournament going on and the finals is tomorrow."

Father: "Nothing doing. We are taking the train tomorrow and that is that."

The next day, Uday promptly woke up at 4 am (anticipating that his father would wake up only at 5 am) and ran to the stadium in the dark! He waited till 8 am just by himself before the team started trickling in.

NTR Stadium

He sustained himself with just water and maybe a couple of bajjis (fritters) the entire day and went home at 11 pm thinking everyone would be asleep but his parents were waiting for him even then (yes, he spent the entire day and evening in the stadium). Nobody at home spoke with him for a week following the incident.

Did I mention that Uday loved cricket?

3. Bags and belt buckle

In our class, Uday used to sit in the last-but-one bench just in front of  us.

When the natural science class was going on, Kireety and I gathered all the school bags of the last benchers, made them into one collective pile by tying all their straps, and used a strap of one of the bags and tied it to Uday's belt buckle.

When the lesson was done and Uday attempted to stand (customary when the teacher is leaving the class), the collective weight of all the bags did not allow him to do so and he collapsed back into the bench.

Kamala teacher, who taught natural science, flogged me and Kireety with a thick cane.

Sorry Uday!

4. Book cricket

Our favorite past-time in class was playing book cricket. You open a page of the text book at random and the last digit of the page number was the score (if you opened the page who image is shown, you would get 4 runs. 0 would be out).

I still cannot believe Uday used to create elaborate scoreboards and organized tournaments with countries and professional player names with this simple technique.