“I am a cricket fan.” That is how Mumbaikar Vijay Jairam Gaundalkar introduces himself. An avid fan he certainly is, having statistics of even domestic matches at the tip of his tongue. “April 24, 1973. February 18, 1972. It is difficult for me to forget these dates,” he said, reeling off the birthdays of Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli. Tendulkar is the reigning deity of his religion that is cricket. Fair enough, the 63-year-old Gaundalkar, who used to be an umpire, has seen the maestro grow from the humble teenager at the Azad Maidan into the global superstar that he is today.
“What a player! Sachin is also a well-behaved person,” he says, reminding that the cricketer helped him financially on several occasions. He recounted that even when other boys mocked at him for his troubles with pronunciation, Tendulkar never did so during his visits to Ramakant Achrekar’s camps.
Sanjay Manjrekar is another name that he rattles off with pride. “I was the umpire when Manjrekar played his first two matches as a schoolboy.” The maverick fan, claiming to be a batchmate of Sunil Gavaskar at St Xavier’s College, has travelled to most of India’s Test centres, except the Eden Gardens in Kolkata, over the last 40 years.
“I have so much interest in cricket that I never felt like doing any other job. I was into umpiring for some time. Then, I simply started watching all cricket matches possible. I am so happy to see, meet and talk to cricketers,” he says. So much so, he was once taken into custody for jumping the barricades to hug centurion Virender Sehwag at Mohali in 2001.
The mathematics graduate sustains himself on donations from players and organisers, with Tendulkar, Manjrekar, Salil Ankola, Paras Mhambrey, Amol Muzumdar, Harbhajan Singh and Robin Uthappa among his benefactors.
“The players give me money, T-shirts, trousers, shoes and caps. This one was given to me by Ashish Nehra,” he says, pointing to his Pune Warriors India T-shirt. For a man so shabbily dressed, the unmarried Gaundalkar speaks decent English. And proving that he wasn’t just about stars, he enquired of the stylish left-hander from Kerala who scored a couple of hundreds in the south zone oneday competition last season at Bangalore.
“ Rohan Prem, how is he?” He followed that u p wi t h , “Wh o i s Kerala’s most promising cricketer?” When told about Sanju Samson, he shot back: “Sad that he couldn’t perform in the Junior Asia Cup.” In the city, with the help of Bangalore-based badminton coach T R Balachandran, to support youngsters at the all-India junior badminton tournament at the Rajiv Gandhi Indoor Stadium, he is keen to return to the city for the India-England Oneday International slated for January 15 next year.
“I hope I will be able to make it,” he signed off .