At the Mecca of World Cricket

They call it the ‘Mecca of World Cricket’ – it certainly is especially when you are chanting ‘Korbo, Lorbo, Jeetbo’ along with the capacity crowd (okay it should be the existing capacity crowd. Few blocks of the stadium are closed for renovation/ reconstruction work). I went to watch my first match at Eden (after living in Calcutta for more than 6 years) yesterday with lots of expectations and was not disappointed with what I saw.

When I ventured out of my PG at around 2pm, I confronted a raging Sun. As I left the auto 5 minutes later, I was in the advance stages of sweating. However, I must acknowledge I was not properly ‘geared’ to wage on a battle with the mighty sun. With a dark coloured full shirt and jeans, I was inappropriately dressed for the occasion – pointed one of my friends. As always I took it as another testimony of my ‘terrific’ dressing sense.

It took sometime before the entire group assembled at the destined place (Others who were not able to join us were directed to reach the Stadium directly). The entry was not smooth and has something to with the management of the flow of people. I wonder how they used to manage when the seating capacity was around 1 lakh. However, the passage through gate led us to an entirely different world – A world where the ‘Magic’ of cricket eclipse everything else. As we were moving towards the stands with fear of getting seats at the back, God was busy modifying the script of the day. He decided, it would be appropriate if we sit on the first row just behind the cheerleaders of KKR. The only thing which came to my mind was ‘God Tussi Great Ho’.

And it was not all. It was as if the Stadium had come to life, the atmosphere was electrifying and at least half the battle arena was ‘Purplified’ (I know no such term exits. But who cares. When one runs out of word, he needs to create a word). And then there were ‘Hoog Lee’ (The adorable Tiger Mascot of KKR which were booed by the crowd for interrupting the view). One of my friends was so excited seeing them in action that she actually went ahead and pulled the tail of the ‘tiger’ (Of course, she very innocently, had taken the permission of the police official standing there). However, the main source of our attraction was still the Cheerleaders. One of our friends, did us a favour by using his ‘5 mega pixel’ camera phone to capture those images. (As soon as he shares those pics with me, I will put them up in my Orkut profile).

With all these, the stage was set for the ‘Battle Royale’. KKR didn’t disappoint us with an assured performance. Watching ‘Dravid’, ‘Dada’ and ‘Kumble’ battling it out was humbling and enjoyable. And then there were some terrific display of shots by Kallis, Tiwary and Hodge (Even Dada entertained the crowd with a six). However, the fun was when the entire stadium went for the initial rounds of Mexican wave. Seeing it and being a part of it was one of those ‘magical moments’ which I will cherish for a long time. However, towards the end, it turned into a tiresome and boring exercise. Not that we did not have our share of jumping, shouting, singing, cheering, booing and of course dancing. And in this task, we were not alone – Our endearing & beautiful cheerleaders were always with us and so were the cute ‘Hoog Lee’. As the KKR dragged their way to victory, we decided to visit this experience once again in next few IPL matches.

P.S: Under the floodlights, a friend and I discussed about the immense potential of this format (it’s not exactly cricket but it sure is entertainment). Sports in our country will benefit a lot from this experiment.