Sleepy and not even a wee-bit excited, I left my house at 6 o'clock in the morning for the airport. We met Lavi at the airport at 7.15. The weird thing is that, sparrows have disappeared from every nook and corner of Bengaluru, but there are plenty of them at the Bengaluru International Airport, one of the most developed parts of Bengaluru. We arrived at Delhi airport at 12 and stopped for lunch at a typical desi-restaurant and I enjoyed a plate of aloo-paranthas. Our train to Ludhiana was at 4.30, we had to be at the station by 4, so my dad took us site seeing. We saw Rashtrapathi Bhavan, India gate, and such and such. Man, there are a lot of pigeons in Delhi every-effing-where. We went to the railway station and met up with our teammates who had been waiting in the clock room. This made me feel kind of guilty because, while they were travelling in train for 2 straight days, Lavi and I had completed our journey in a matter of 2 hours. The train journey was pretty comfortable, although the Shathabdhi-waalas kept trying to stuff us with food. Juice, snacks, tea, dinner, one after the other, for free(!) and uncalled for! The train took us to Ludhiana by 8.30 and we had to get off of it within 2 minutes unless we wanted to travel all the way to Lahore! We reached the school at 10, and accommodation had to be arranged by us, as in- we had to carry our own mattresses, pillows, blankets and buckets to the room. A brief insight to the hostel life I'd have to face next year...Yay!
The next day, inauguration was at 10 in morning, so we were made to wake up at 8, when it was freezing cold. I was in desperate need of a ahem space-heater ahem out there. How the hell could they expect us to play in that kinda weather?! I just wanted to crawl under blanket and go back to sleep. The inaugurations involved, the teams marching around the ground, taking the pledge and a couple of performances. After a few hours, our match began. We played against Springdale, Amritsar. They were a pretty good team. They had an advantage of height. There was this one girl who kept shrieking, in the hope that she would get a foul. And most of the time, she did. That was pretty unfair because we barely even touched her. I'll bet she learned her lay-ups something like this: Right-Left-Jump-Aaargh! We lost the match 47-17. Smirk all you want, but we got thumped even harder by the Chandigarh girls. We lost against them, 57-19. In our defense, the Chandigarh team was too fast, too tall and far too experienced. There were always two girls who were on our tallest player(Mandy) and kept "hitting her head, as though it were a tabla". The only match in which we had a chance of winning was against the Daly College. They seemed to be the girly-type and they too had lost both the matches in the league. The game was ours, we were in the lead till the last 2 minutes of the fourth quarter, but just one last minute basket made all the difference. We lost, 22-23. Everyone in the team was very depressed. But thanks to the bonfire that night, we all came around. It was fun to just let go of everything, act kiddish, act drunk, and act tapori-ish! And for the very first time, with my own free will, I danced. Period. Since, the girls and boys tournaments were held at separate schools, some of the girls took to having crushes on girls who looked and played like guys!
We spent the next two days, watching the other matches(or that's what we were asked to tell people.) But what actually happened? Team secret! In the end, the final match was between, Delhi and Chennai. Delhi emerged as the winners for the freaking 4th time in row! The highlight(s) of the week was that we got to watch India's best u-19 teams in action, our rival team Chirec, actually became our friends as we supported each other during our matches, we had cartloads of fun playing pranks on people, I realised how good south-Indian food is, and permanent damage was done to my confidence and self-esteem, courtesy- all the teams that participated in the CBSE National Basketball tournament.
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