1 / 2Cricket, Injuries and Bad Habits
From a very early age, I was a very outdoorsy kid. I lived in a telecommunication quarter where there were a lot of children. We played Cricket, Badminton, and ocassionally Football, but Cricket was the predominant sport. I grew up during the Golden Age of Indian Cricket and naturally I wanted to be a player too. This desire probably came from Dad who himself played District Cricket in his prime and watched all matches on TV. If there was one thing that I loved more than the Web, it was Cricket. Watching 5 days of Test Cricket was a thing of joy. I cried when India lost to Zimbabwe in the 1999 World Cup. It was exactly 12:43AM when Sachin did the Desert Storm. I loved waking up early in the morning hours to watch the India-Australia bilateral series. But because my school didn't have a good sporting set up, I never really pursued it as a career. But still, that hunger and fire within me to be a player was always there. It was met only with discouragement from pursuing it for reasons such as money, competition etc.
Kochi had a great sporting culture. Unlike in Trivandrum, the people there gave equal importance to both Cricket and Football. And I played both although I took Cricket more seriously. Every year, we had a Corporate Cricket and a Football Tournament and I was part of them all. Having lost badly to the Champions in 2012, I wanted to put up a good show in 2013. Cricket was a stage I had control over, something I could prove my mettle. As the captain, I made sure my team played as many practice matches at 6 am in the morning at the ground nearby against the locals before tournament. I was not particularly good in Football as I was in Cricket. In Football, my team won the finals and I just happened to be in that team. In Cricket however, we lost in the quarter finals thanks to 2 dropped catches from my main fielder of all people against the defending champions of all teams, something that still haunts me. If only one of those catches had been taken, maybe we would have been champions. There started the peak of my playing years which went on for many years.
It was also in these years I started neglecting my body. I picked up smoking and drinking habits, my diet got worse, and I left my sporting injuries untreated. I had a generally atheltic build and was in peak fitness. I suppose that was exactly why I took my fitness lightly. The smoking and drinking didn't kill me, the injuries healed after a while and I was back in the field playing as usual. So I just lived like that.
It took me until 2014 to finally see a doctor to fix a recurring ankle injury playing Football in the Wipro campus. Football was a sport I never should have picked up. But the popularity of it in Kochi swooped me into it. It was the first time an injury never healed fully and the doctor I reluctantly saw brushed it off saying hairline cracks tend to heal on their own because my leg looked fine on the x-ray, except I knew I wasn't. This particular injury would later come into my life to wreak havoc.