Deep Cover: Cricket and Indian Identity
I’ve realized over time that this blog, while implicitly autobiographical, has a small set of essays that are explicitly so. I’ve decided to make this a thing, and have collected these essays in one place on the “Diary” page.
While there is always an element of narcissism in such writing, my main motivation is different: it is the idea of memorializing a time and a place. For most of us, if we don’t write about a time and place that we have experienced, nobody else will.
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Many years ago, as the final capstone project for a learning journey at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, I wrote something best described as “creative non-fiction”. It combined elements of autobiography with some ruminations on cricket and Indian identity.
That project is presented below, unchanged. It is a PDF file —- I could have reconstructed it to be a blog post, but I felt that would erase some of the context.
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Some of these essays have other elements. For example, my essay on the blues scene in New York contains music that I have sung. But the main motivation was in fact to write about my early years in New York. Who else would write about that time and place? And this way these memories are not all lost, like tears in rain.