When asked to start this blog, I was gripped with trepidation. I am a tech-palsy, if you get what I mean, and had not been particularly enamoured of new media. Moreover, this seemed like a leap into the unknown, with an undefined audience -- if indeed, there was going to be one. In any case, what does one say that is not already being said through my newspaper writings?

Plenty, one of my young colleagues in the newsroom prodded me. There is a thrill to freewheeling writing, with no designated subject, no word limit -- and no fixed readership profile. The last attribute I found fascinating because of its unknown factor.

``The web does not owe you a living. It doesn’t care that you have been doing this for years, you have to earn your eyeballs like everyone else,” says Andy Dickinson somewhere. In that challenge also perhaps is the opportunity to explore new worlds.

So here goes my first post — of this, that and myself.

I am sort of a cricketing person. I suspect that everybody in India can claim to be this, but not everybody can make a living out of it. When I was 20, I still (foolishly) fancied my chances to play the game at a higher level; at 53, you tend to be a little wiser and accept that just writing on it is not such a bad deal after all.

Some good fortune — or misplaced passion, as my mother used to put it — got me into journalism. Whle studying law, I got a break in a sports magazine and was caught and bowled for life. If one breathes and eats cricket, writing on it did not seem such a difficult thing to do. Moreover, someone else paid for you to watch the games. Hey, this was the best job in the world!

The family tradtion of practicing law, therefore took a backseat as I settled for a ringside, panoramic view of cricket and sport, then politics, entertainment — of the magnum opus called life — through the prism of the newsroom.

I must confess here to being obsessed with the newsroom. Some might argue that after 30 years, there surely must be a sense of déjà vu that has set in, but I am still in thrall with the dynamics of how news is hunted down, how stories are developed, how pictures are shot, how features are written, how pages are made: The struggle for effective communication with the reader is ceaselessly fascinating.

There is also, of course, the broader philisophical aspect of newspapering and its implication in a functioning democracy. Would we be as free if there was no Fourth Estate? I can do no better than quote from Thomas Jefferson here: ``Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. “

News, newspapers, journalism have provided me not just an identity, but meaning in life. Along the way, I have edited two sports magazines, a city eveninger, two entertainment supplements, dabbled in radio and television, covered a couple of general elections -- all of which have only hardened my conviction that this profession is as magnificent as it is crucial.

Through this roller-coaster ride, cricket writing has never been out of my system, and readers of this blog will find the sport a recurring feature — as subject, metaphor or idiom.

Some might ask if this would not diminish the gravitas of serious issues, to which my counter is unoriginal, ancient and finds its genesis in the writing of the celebrated West Indies philosopher and cricket writer CLR James: ``What do they know of cricket who only cricket know.”