Indo Pak match at VCA Nagpur

May 19, 2011

With World cup and IPL , definitely it has been too much of cricket these days.

I fail to forget a India - Pak match at VCA Nagpur long back when we were at

MGIMS. We all were so excited. But the problem was that we had a class test on

that particular day. After all , all batches had mass bunks to their glory and

we certainly did not want to break the tradition, so we bunked the class test

and went to see the India-Pak test match at Nagpur and that too without tickets.

I can still recall that when we got down at Nagpur station , the exit gate was

manned by a TC. We waited for him to take a break. Meanwhile our great Dalal

sahib went on a stroll and when he passed by the TC, actually asked him " Bhau

ksa aahe ?- Mazza me ? " He answered - Mazza me and asked for his tickets too.

We could hear Ashish Dalal shouting- " Aye Sudha, ye aadmi ticket mangta hai "

" Abhi dikhate hai " Sudha Shankar Ray replied. Hurriedly Dinesh Maji , who

carried a railway

pass was dispatched and few platform tickets were smuggled in. After this

incidence , had it not been for Sudha, all of us wanted to imprint our boot

marks on Ashish's gluteal region. Any way the test match was very exciting and

we cheered a lot for our team. For the lunch , we had a tokri of bananas and we

even kept aside the chhilkas to throw at the rival group of spectators. In the

late evening , after our dinner, we gathered at the railway station and looked

at each other. So again, No tickets was the unanimous decision. We occupied the

upper berths of the last passenger train to Sewagram and went to sleep. It was

somewhere near Buti Bori that a TTE entered our coach. He woke up Parag Gaiki,

who was on the first upper berth and asked for the ticket. I could hear " Tikde

" and he sent him to me. I , too was clueless and forwarded him to the next

person, Rakesh Sethi . Rakesh told him that we all were part of a large group

and our tickets

were with our teacher who was in the next compartment. The TTE was convinced

and did not check the tickets further. Thank you Rakesh for saving the day. I

can imagine ,how, Dr Khadak Singh Sachdeva , our then Dean, would have been

happy and amused on seeing his bunch of students behind the bars for bunking a

class test !.

Gajendra Yadav, 81

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