Alternate Career option

This was the story I sent to the company magazine "TOGGLE", only the photo was published :-(



"If I were not a systems engineer in Polaris, I would be playing the cricket world cup by now.

Yes,this is praveen nellikeri,a once-upon-a-time budding cricketing genius now becoming a blooming idiot in the software industry.A person who wanted to become a run making machine but now struggling to make machines run :-(

Born in 1983 ,I proved to be lucky for Indian cricket as they won their only world cup so far ,that year.I held the bat(plastic one) for the first time when I was 3 and celebrated by debut by hitting 3 consecutive fours of my mothers bowling.(well I did not know where was the boundary but my mom used to shout four whenever I hit the ball).And from then there was no looking back.From my home ground(literally) to outside pitches with my friends ,I was the top batsmen at all times.I had played on various pitches ,on various surfaces (tiles,cement,tar,sand and of course on cricket ground).not to mention the number of matches I singlehandedly won in book cricket or in video games(EA sports and Lara's cricket game) .

I also own an impeccable record of being the man of the match everytime I played with my sister and her friends :-)

Unfortunately there is no written record about the number of sixers I have hit,number of centuries I have scored or the number of times I have sent the batsmen to the pavilion much due to the fact there were no 24 hrs news channels by then who could make anyone a hero .The only thing I can show off is the photos which I cherish so dearly.One taken when I had broken Lara's world record by scoring 833 N.O against ...(well.. I cant say as the at team has blackmailed me that I will lose my fingers with which I used to spin the ball,but now do coding,If I reveal their name).The match had to be stopped as 7 of their guys were to be admitted to hospital due to extreme fatigue .It was then that one our cricketing giants flew to karnataka to congratulate me on this wonderful feat.He even said that seeing me bat he felt like he was batting...Oh those wonderful days..


Then one day a tragedy struck which blocked my way to my cricketing career and thus diminished India's dream of winning a second world cup when my friend told me that there was a cricketing club called POLARIS who would select people from colleges and train them.I went there ,got thru the interview and got selected to the team and signed the contract(now called the much feared bond).It was then I knew that I was fooled and was not selected in a cricket club but to a software industry and since then have been an unsung hero... Now I have got used to my new life of coding,enhancing,supporting and mail-forwarding when all my would-be colleagues are onsite playing the world cup in West Indies. "