E-Paper
Murder convicts butcher ACL... for ketchup!
THEY FLASHED the ?V? sign on the V-Day soon after humbling their fancied, English speaking opponents from the American Centre for Languages (ACL) on Tuesday evening. For their victory-effort at the Sampoornanand Jail Training Institute campus on the jail road they had two ketchup bottles and a shield to show, a cake to have and milk included in their diet for the next 15 days. The man of the match (MoM), Bhulawan, got a place in the Ganga Bhawan for his outstanding show?17 runs, 4 catches and two wickets.
THEY FLASHED the ‘V’ sign on the V-Day soon after humbling their fancied, English speaking opponents from the American Centre for Languages (ACL) on Tuesday evening.
For their victory-effort at the Sampoornanand Jail Training Institute campus on the jail road they had two ketchup bottles and a shield to show, a cake to have and milk included in their diet for the next 15 days. The man of the match (MoM), Bhulawan, got a place in the Ganga Bhawan for his outstanding show—17 runs, 4 catches and two wickets.
The uninitiated may be surprised with a couple of things in the opening paragraphs—tomato ketchup bottles as prize, milk in the diet of the winning team and Ganga Bhawan accommodation for the MoM. But then if you thought that these were oddities in a post- match presentation, how would you react after knowing that all the eleven members of the winning team were murder convicts? These convicts—by design or default—after being convicted, were playing in the open, for the first time under the watchful eyes of the jail guards of the Model Jail.
It was not difficult to spot where the boundary was. There were jail guards all along the ropes posted with the idea of keeping an eye on the convicts. The guards were alert but they too were unable to control their emotions as the Model Jail team marched triumphantly towards an emphatic 26 run victory.
“I had forecast that our boys would win. They had prepared hard,” remarked a beaming Ram Dal Pandey, jail guard. So when team captain Mohd Sagir—15 runs, 3 wickets, one catch and a runout—lifted the shield, Pandey was visibly delighted. But it was not Pandey alone. Ganga Sagar Awasthi, jail guard, who played the scorer and Shabbir Ahmad and Amitabh Singh, jail staffers, who were the umpires, too were ecstatic.
And so was Gayatri Tyagi who runs the NGO, Taru Chayya, and was responsible not just for arranging the match but for the shield, the ketchups and the thoughtfully brought cake for the winning team as well. Senior superintendent, Model Jail Suresh Chandra, jailor LM Pandey and deputy jailor Anil Tyagi too were present right through at the ground to cheer the boys. Tyagi had coached the team members, Pandey was enthusiastically cheering the team right through Suresh Chandra had given his consent to the convicts to wear ‘whites’ instead of the usual off-white khadi kurta pajama. Chandra later announced milk diet for the winners for 15 days and Ganga Bhawan accommodation for MoM. After the Ganga Bhawan allotment, a convict gradually is given more freedom as restrictions decrease. So, Bhulawan was happy. So was the team. But the losers too were not really complaining.
Gayatri Tyagi who had got the American Center for Languages team here conceded that the “boys really played well.” Seeing their enthusiastic show on field, one forgot for a while that they were prisoners-in-whites. Later as they boarded their prison truck back to the prison, the reality dawned. But for a couple of hours it didn’t seem to matter.
