Jailbirds catch the cricket spirit

HYDERABAD: The 20-foot-high gates might separate these jailbirds from the world outside, yet nothing stops those at Cherlapally Central Prison from being part of the excitement brought on by an Indo-Pak cricket series.
Thanks to arrangements made by the prison authorities, on Friday they weren’t cut off from the Sourav-Inzy run-in at Peshawar.
The inmates were glued to TV sets.“India will win this series,’’ Vidyanand, a prisoner, predicted. “Doesn’t matter we lost the second one. The series will be ours.’’
An eternal optimist, this was when India was going down to a determined Pakistani onslaught.
A graduate serving a lifer, Vidyanand claimed he had been trapped in a murder case. Even as he made his assertion, the others sitting with him cried out in unison. “We’ll win.’’
“Cricket,’’ jailer Srirama Rajarao said, “is a strange sport. Some of these people actually brood over their fate, insisting they haven’t committed the crimes they’ve been incarcerated for. They starve themselves of food. But when it’s cricket, they never miss it.’’
“Emi ishtam untadhi, choostunnanu cricket ante, evaro chesini thappuki nenu ikkada unnanu,’’ (I’m here for someone else’s crime. Now, I’m watching cricket), an inmate at one of the barracks sulks.
“We get to see only Doordarshan and don’t have a cable connection. If DD fails to air the cricket series live, we’ll miss out on the action,’’ Prabhudas joins in.
Occasionally, power becomes a problem. There are outages in the mornings and telecast gets disrupted. Howls of protests go up, but there’s little one can do about it.
Every barrack has a black and white TV set and there are 16 barracks in each block. There are 70 blocks in the jail with about 25 prisoners in each block, superintendent M Chandrasekhar says.