Watch out or cricket will get you, child

My dear Butternut Squash,

The time is now 3.23am and your father is lying in bed reading a news article on ESPNcricinfo that starts as follows: "Joe Denly will return to his home county of Kent next season having been released from the final year of his contract at Middlesex following three difficult seasons."

I do not know who Joe Denly is. I heard of Joe Denly for the very first time in my life at 3.22am. I will probably never hear or read about Joe Denly ever again. Tomorrow if you ask me, "Daddy did you read that thing about Joe Denly?", I will be like, "What nonsense is this Joe Denly? Any updates on teething? Ashwath's son already has seven."

In fact I don't really know what a "home county" is. But I am thinking that Kent is some kind of British "Vidarbha". As for Middlesex, your guess is as good as mine. (Actually your guess -- "Is Middlesex a piece of boiled carrot? Is it a remote control? Is it a bottle of moisturiser? Is it, is it, is it, is it tell me, okay don't tell me, I will just eat it just in case" - is probably better than mine - "An atmospheric crime series?")

And yet here I am wasting precious sleep reading this stupid article. Why? Because, as Edmund Hillary once said, it is there on the ESPNcricinfo website.

My child, run away from cricket! Run away! Never come near it! Never be drawn into its evil gravity! For it will only lead to wasted time, unslept sleep, broken dreams, crushed hopes, large mobile roaming bills, international humiliation and spent energy.

I remember a time, in my early youth, when I did not care for cricket at all. In fact, I did not care for any sport. I would watch football during the football World Cup, and cricket during the cricket World Cup. And that was all. I didn't care two crested wild hoots if Argentina beat Brazil or West Indies drew with Pakistan. I was mildly interested in India's performances only because I desperately wanted the first name Roger and the surname Binny, instead of "Sidin Vadukut", which sounds like some kind of accident in a furniture shop.

But then suddenly, perhaps when I was ten or 11, I became a cricket fan. Perhaps it had to do with the arrival of Sachin Tendulkar on the international cricketing scene. I am not entirely sure.

Lo and behold, I was now waking up early in the morning to watch some random tournament - The Cable and Wireless Series or The House of Kedia Challenger Cup - held in places called Dunedin, Harare or Ankola. How many hours of sleep have I wasted like this? Many thousands and thousands.

My devotion to this vile sport also came with grave detriment to my academic performance. Right from school through to college and a highly ranked business school, cricket tournaments have always had an irritating habit of coinciding with examinations. So even as 30% of my brain is memorising the Frasch process for extracting sulphur from underground deposits using superheated water, a full 70% is secretly watching Tendulkar make coleslaw out of Ken Rutherford's New Zealand, with the television set on mute. Is it any wonder that to this day your father is incapable of extracting sulphur from underground deposits and has to order it from Amazon instead?

My dear child, you too will be tempted to waste your youth on this sport. Perhaps when you are ten or 12 years old in school, other girls will approach you to talk about Virat Kohli's good looks or Arjun Tendulkar's numerous meritocratic achievements. Leave the classroom premises immediately and depart to the library or some tuition centre. This is the slippery slope upon which numerous innocent children have slipped and slithered their way into cricket fandom.

As you get older the temptations will mount. Perhaps India will reach the final of a world tournament. You will think to yourself: "Surely no harm can come out of going to Rahul's house to watch the World Cup final? Even if I don't like cricket, I can just hang out with the gang…"

Who is Rahul?? What is this gang?? Please never ever even think of attending such events because it is just not good. Don't go, don't make me upset, please.

Okay, I will also come along with you.

But this is just the beginning. This pressure to follow cricket will reach tremendous levels at your workplace at the Johns Hopkins Hospital or the MIT Media Lab. Some Indian/Pakistani fellow will gallivant over and ask "Did you see that IPL 2041 match between Dubai Skyscrapers and Beijing Watercannons?"

Obviously, you will try to be polite and join him in conversation. And before you know it you are following several IPL handles on Twitter, wearing IPL t-shirts on the weekend, and paying exorbitant sums of money to watch IPL online streams in the United States or on the International Space Station or wherever else it is that you are residing.

Soon, as things spiral out of control, you will begin to maintain a cricket shrine in your house with posters and autographed objects, you will order that Wisden book every year, you will buy books printed with the actual blood of cricketers, you will start a blog to defend your favourite players, and you will even start buying tickets on the black market and travel across the world just to watch a single match.

Boom. Your life is in a shambles, you no longer have time for your Mensa friends, and your chances for a Fields Medal slowly slip away.

As you can see, nothing good can come out of following this insidious, life-consuming, time-vaporising, energy-sapping, sleep-diminishing sport. Avoid it at all costs, my child, if you wish to live your life to the fullest and achieve all your dreams and aspirations and goals.

I hope you will take this advice with the utmost seriousness as soon as you are old enough to read.

Your father will now go to sleep just as soon as he has finished reading this latest ESPNcricinfo post on one Ben Dunk.

Yours sincerely,
Sidin "Dadukut" Vadukut.