Surf it All! Surf it Fast!

Having been a fan of cricket from the 1996 World Cup, I have seen multiple cricketing events take place in the last nineteen years. These include six World Cups, numerous T20 world Cups, eight editions of Indian Premier League (IPL), multiple instances of the Champions League, test matches and more. Barring a period 2004 to 2009 when I was not following cricket as much, I have been hooked to the proceedings of the matches in many a way.

It is not always that you get to sit in the luxury of your home to sit and watch the matches. If only one got their exams written or homework done by just watching cricket matches. I could go on about how awesome the careers of sports journalists can get, but then I would be digressing.

In 2002-03 time frame, when the Indian cricket team’s tour to Pakistan happened, I was in my second year of engineering. And it was one of those busy times of the semester when you had internals, lab exams, tuitions and assignments all piled up. It was not easy to sneak out and take a look at the score and get back to what I was working on, especially considering I would be under the watchful eyes of the professor. That 2002-03 time frame was also the time when cellular phones, commonly known to us as a mobile, started showing up in the pockets of a lot of my classmates. One thing that was amazing about the phone back then was the fact that one could get text alerts in the form of SMSes. One internet site tied up with a cellular service provider and ended up having a service plan were you could get score alerts whenever you wanted them. The joy that this brought to our class was unparalleled. The professors would go on lecturing, while the mischievous bunch of us would keep looking at the score on a friend’s mobile phone every now and then.

A few years later when the IPL fever caught up, it turned out that the cricket websites had upped their game majorly. The best thing about a prominent sports site was the fact that you did not need to go to the website every time to see the score, but the score would get updated in the title of the tab of the browser regularly. So, I was teaching a class when one of the seasons of IPL was on, but it was a pretty important match of the IPL which would determine the fate of the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) team which I support. So, in between giving instructions to my students, I would take a quick look at the internet browser window which had the cricket site tab open, among other tabs and get updated on the score.

These two ways ensured that I was updated about the cricket score very well and still managed to stay on top of more important things. Now, there is this nice UC Browser that should serve the purpose. Go to: http://www.ucweb.com/