My brother's blog and his quips parted ways over a year ago! But, here's something he wrote on his flight to India, which I hope will bring his blog back from the limbo!

My struggle with the bat has reached historic proportions. It has been more than a year since I scored a meaningful run.
 
The last time I scored a few runs, three to be precise, was in an early season game last year when I frantically waved the bat at the bowler like an impotent wand before I was put out of my misery by an apparently innocuous delivery that homed in on middle stump. I walked out to greet the ball, flailing wildly like a marooned sailor would at a distant ship and heard the deadly sound of timber behind me. Suddenly I find that regaining hand-eye coordination is a challenge that is as compelling as finishing the Boston marathon.
 
I shall first state two facts. The first fact is that I have not played much cricket in the past three years. I managed to squeeze in four games during this period for my local club in Nashua , and have nothing to show besides those aforementioned three fortunate runs. I was out for a golden duck each other time, which truly reflects the state of my batting form. The second fact, perhaps the more relevant one, is that I am not the second coming of Sir Ranjitsinhji. As lovely as I have managed to look in front of a mirror or even on the shadowed wall, my game has always been what one would call highly limited. So my recent batting struggle is not particularly shocking, but it is worrisome only because I make such a big deal of it. After all, the air I breathe has three elements to it, family, cricket and tennis, not necessarily in that order.
 
Let me submit to you a little bit of my cricketing history, since I find that it is so important in the larger scheme of things. As a young teenager, notably the puniest of my age group, I spent many months fielding in corners of the field where devils wouldn’t venture. My comrades wisely knew that I wasn’t capable of doing much more good than avoid the cricket ball. So it came to be – I was an afterthought in the batting order and never bowled a ball in anger at any living soul. I did, however, diligently practice my trade at home bowling to a yellow battered wall that morphed into the entire Pakistani batting line-up while I kept score in a way that would make Narottam Puri proud. In my spare time, I would commit every living statistic to memory, including Neil Foster’s 11 for 163 at Chepauk in 1984-85 in the test where Fowler and Gatting both scored double centuries. I think I secretly aspired to be a Richie Benaud on Channel Nine, and would have reasonably settled for being an Anupam Gulati on Doordarshan.
 
Two things changed my life. First, my father caught hold of my frivolous notions firmly put my career on the infinitely more grueling engineering track. Second, I had a growth spurt that matched Laxman’s career path. I grew a foot in about a year as a fifteen year old. In my friends’ circle this amounted to conferring some long-deserved respect. Suddenly I found myself batting at number nine (a big promotion) in a key “bet match”, and our pocket money depended on the outcome. In the 110 degree heat of the Gymkhana grounds at Hyderabad , I announced myself to the world as young Sachin did in Karachi , scoring my first two runs ever against real humans, off the last ball, to win the match. At 2 not out, I was a hero and carried off the field. My batting prospered that season because my captain, one Karimullah, took fancy to my match-winning talent. I was the scrawny kid who couldn’t buy a boundary but would never get out. By the end of the season, I was opening for my team, like Ravi Shastri, my other hero.
 
I humbly state that my cricketing graph grew non-linearly afterwards. I nearly topped my college batting averages in my first year, even scoring the first six ever on one of the large grounds. Mainly I had acquired the knack of staying unbeaten. Through sixteen matches in my junior year, I was dismissed only once and I grew confident enough to start imitating my new batting idol, VVS Laxman. Cricketing statistics took a backseat for real exploits and I could not have been a happier kid. Sadly I realized that I had probably reached the peak of my skills at age 19. In a year, I was about to embark on a journey to America, where a baseball bat would be more apt and I would be consigned to memorizing those damn scorecards yet again as I pursued my graduate studies.
 
After coming to the US , playing cricket became a distant pipedream that rivaled dating a certain Ms. Salma Hayek. All changed in 2003, when I ran into a group of enthusiastic cricket aficionados who had recently formed a cricket team, Nashua Spearheads. My enthusiasm knew no bounds when I met them – while they did not play with a real cricket ball, they played with a hard tennis ball and that was good enough. My cricket starved senses didn’t mind it one bit, I showed up for practice at the neighboring baseball fields that summer and was thrilled to see many others that shared my interest. Like an old flame that shows up at your doorstep begging for forgiveness, I went back to cricket despite knowing things would never be the same.
 
Maybe it was the ball, maybe it was my waning focus, maybe I did not play enough or maybe those four years in college were just an illusion, I never regained my batting mojo. I was an average batsman for my new team in America , but luckily I hadn’t regressed to my middle school days when I was a water boy. Hitting the hard tennis ball required strength that I never possessed and I never really played with the free mind that guided me through my youth. Like a pianist that loses his spontaneity with age, I lost my ability to place the ball through narrow gaps. Still I was a little kid in his playground every time I joined my merry band on weekends.
 
Three years ago, I stopped playing cricket because worldly ambitions and general drudgery took over. I missed the game once more as I grappled with everything else in my life, including the birth of my new breathing apparatus, two lovely children. Cricket does not hold the place in my life it once did, yet I long for the occasional taste of nostalgia.
 
So I rejoined my group and showed up for play last weekend. My turn to bat came pretty soon, and it was not against one of the better bowlers on my team, and here I am being generous. I took my guard pointing to my left leg. The handle of the bat felt cold and strange. I patted the bat hard on the ground to proclaim that I was the master even if I hadn’t ridden this horse in a while. The bowler ran in, and I heard every step. The ball was wide off off-stump and so friendly I might have been tempted to ask it out for a drink later that evening. Instead I swung hard at the ball aiming somewhere between long off and outer space.  The ball took the edge of my bat and went spiraling upwards towards the one fielder who wouldn’t drop catches in his sleep. I felt a sense of doom even as the ball descended.
 
Another duck, a golden duck, and my horror run continues.