KOLKATA // Cricket tours are awful for personal disciplines. They bring with them their own routines, from which it is almost impossible to escape. On match days those routines are self-explanatory.
On non-match days, there is either travel or media interactions ahead of a match. Or if you are lucky, one-on-one interviews extracted from unyielding media officials of the teams.
A World Twenty20 compresses everything even further. The matches are shorter, they come quicker and the days, as well as not containing enough hours for all the work that needs doing, melt into one another. What time is it? Who knows. What day is it? Anyone’s guess. You rarely end up seeing any of the cities you travel to, beyond the hotel and the stadium.
These routines clash directly and forcefully with the painstakingly built routines I have in life outside of a cricket tour. In other words, life in general.
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Primarily, as well as the sleeping routines, they clash with my dietary habits. For various reasons, I have mostly eradicated bread, rice and pasta from my diet. Sugar is a weakness but I would like to think I have managed to control that.
On tour, that usually goes out the window and on this particular tour, it has gone out the building completely. The strange hours of work, the pressures of a deadline, mean generally whatever is thrust into our hands is ingested immediately.
But this time, it has not been such a bad thing and especially in Kolkata, a city known for its culinary temptations (in truth, most cities in India can claim to be known for their culinary wares).
Bengali desserts, in particular, are the worst nightmares of those concerned with controlling such things. Yesterday — and what day it was I am not sure — I quaffed down two gulab jaamuns and a couple of rasgullas unthinkingly. If you do not eat rasgullas in Kolkata, I am told, you risk arrest. All this after a Bengali lunch in which biryani made an appearance.
So it has been throughout my travels, from the rich, creamy food in Chandigarh, to some Goan chicken in Delhi, via some coconut chocolate laddoos.
The regret begins on Monday.
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