This blog wants to just add on to this amazing blog by Ashok.As he says the IPL reminds the generation that was in shcool before the period when ‘what’ became ‘wat’ and ‘colour’ became ‘color’ , about the Book Cricket.
I think Ashok is not the first person to see the similarities….Probably he is the first to write a blog on it. I remember Sherry (Navjot) telling to Sonali of NDTV about the similarities of Book Cricket with the twenty Twenty format of the game during the T20 world cup.
The similarities, I see is that the way the runs are scored are never cared for….the shot selection is never a thing to be technically discussed by the Cricket Experts sitting in the TV room.
And the most important similarity of them all ; In both forms of cricket i.e. the OMI ( One Minute International) and the Twenty Twenty ….the number of runs scored by the batsman is always greater than the number of balls faced , even if it is the most boring batsmen like Dravid,Laxman. Really nice to see Dravid scoring 38 off 31 balls.
Well, I will come to the point.I just want to show some other forms of book cricket that were prevalent in my school days …atleast in my school.
TYPE 1
The First one was almost the same as the one mentioned by Ashok, but in that form …when the last digit of the page number is ‘0’ , the batsman was considered Out.Nobody cared , how he got out …run out , bowled, lbw …nothing.
But some of the cricket enthusiasts also listened to the expert talks by Sunil Gavaskar ,Ravi Shastri, Tony Greig and Geoffrey Boycott after the match,wanted to raise the level of Book cricket equal to the standards of the real ones,so that the book cricket can also be analysed by the (hidden) cricket expert in them.Hence, they designed a new way of playing Book Cricket.
The last digit of the page number was taken as the number of steps to go forward in the runs and wicket maze as shown below.Whenever we got ‘0’ as the last digit,we considered it as a ‘DOT BALL’. Hence, the DOT BALL in book cricket was introduced.
It’s quite evident from the picture that the various way the batsmen got out was also introduced to Book Cricket.Experts now had loads of things to talk about the batsmen’s poor run of form.
TYPE 2
The other form of Book cricket was perhaps born out of influence from the metro channel’s superhit game show “Metro Dhamaka”.The picture below shows why
This game demanded a Safety Pin to be used as Willow.Boys didn’t have the Safety Pin.
So , the boys got some reason to talk to the girls in the first bench and ask them a safety pin for playing this form of book cricket.
Somehow , this form of book cricket never took off as it was mostly being distracted my the curious girls (owner of the Safety Pin) who come to the last bench and see what these guys are playing with the Safety Pin.Hence, the games mostly resulted in NO RESULT due to Kadalai ( putting groundnuts) sessions that lasted as long as the CCA periods ( Co-Currivular Activity periods on Thursdays).
Anyway, none of these forms of book-cricket nor the most basic form of book-Cricket now exists.Thanks to Video Games and various other factors…
Pinastro 