The first cricket moment I can recall was in early 1978, a few months after we came back to India. Watching a few games of backyard cricket had given me some rudimentary knowledge of the game. You needed to hit the ball as far as you could, and run back and forth as many times as possible, is as far as I had got.

Armed with this deep insight, I sat in front of a television to watch what I later realised was the first-ever series telecast live on Indian TV( India vs Pakistan in Pakistan). Indian TV, in those days, and for about 15 years thereafter meant those who were affluent enough to afford a television could watch a few hours of sanitised fare offered by the state broadcaster, Doordarshan.

The match was apparently headed for a tight finish. Pakistan needed about 150 runs in an hour and a half, and one of my cousins bet a sum of 10 paisa (the equivalent of a one quarter of one US cent), that India would lose the match. Doing some shrewd calculation, I figured that it would be impossible to run back and forth a 150 times in an hour and a half, and therefore challenged him. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been told about the existence of fours and sixes (and of some distinctly unchallenging India bowling), and India promptly went on to lose. I don’t actually recall paying up though.

The loss was followed by the inevitable soul searching and recrimination, a process which was to create a lifelong impression on me. The conversation went like this:

Me: Who is our captain?
Cousin: A chap called Bedi.
Me: How many runs did he score?
Cousin: Zero.
Me: Our captain himself scored zero. Are we such a bad team?
Cousin: No. We have one great player called Gavaskar.
Me: How much did Gavaskar score?
Cousin: He scored 97, and would have scored more if the umpire didn’t give him out wrongly.

At the end of that conversation, I was a Gavaskar fan, a Bedi detractor and a lifelong believer in the injustice of Pakistani umpiring. Rarely can impressions formed on such rickety foundations prove so long lasting. Gavaskar is still the greatest opening batsman of all time, and the greatest Indian batsman I have seen.In the late 70s being a Gavaskar fan, obviously meant being anti-Viswanath, the cricketing equivalent of George W Bush’s “If you ain’t with us, you are against us” philosophy. So I must admit that I found Vishy’s double-hundred against England at Madras excruciating, and silently revelled in his misery in Pakistan. Now I scour YouTube in vain for the occasional clip of that famed square cut!

Nor did I enjoy Gavaskar’s batting too much. Most of the time I spent biting my nails, and indulging in various superstitions, of sitting in particular positions while watching him, petrified that he’d make a mistake and I would have to face the taunts of the Viswanath camp.

The late 70s was a good time in India to become a cricket fan. Even by today’s breakneck pace of international scheduling, it was a busy time for Indian cricket. In the space of a couple of years, India had home series against West Indies, Australia and Pakistan and sandwiched between that was a tour of England and the World Cup (Maybe I can now expect a stern letter from the ICC for not calling it the 1979 ICC Cricket World Cup, or an equally ridiculous name that they have retroactively come up with).

Looking back at this period, I am amazed at how I progressed from a very sketchy knowledge of the game at the start of that West Indies series in 1978, to a frenzied spectator at Madras’ Chepauk stadium towards the end of the India-Pakistan series in Jan 1980.