@BCCI #ThankYouSachin

@BCCI #ThankYouSachin

7:30 pm on a boring Tuesday night, here in California, I switch on the Television to catch some action at Edens. It had rained for past couple of days and the curator had mentioned about the pitch having even bounce. As an Indian I could read between the lines, flat track with no pace in the pitch. But as a cricket enthusiast and purist, I was expecting something from the wicket in the early winters from the eastern part of India.

Bhuvi and Shami began to bowl with an upright seam and the bowl did something in the air, couple went past the bat and couple took the edge toward the vacant third-man. But there wasn’t anything alarming and exciting happening, there were either dead defense dot balls or few boundaries here and there.

Even the commentators got bored and began to talk about what legacy Sachin leaves and what Indian batting would look like, as if it was breaking news. Then a caption came up on the bottom of the screen about tweeting to @BCCI with #ThankYouSachin are one would get a Sachin’s poster autograph on it. Sounded exciting, but I didn’t think it was worth trying as they have mentioned something about 15 of those.

In the mean time I logged onto twitter to get catch some banter and the usual suspects had tweeted and retweeted and from an outset it looked like an automated tweet from the account @BCCI with your username appended in the autograph. Soon the timeline was flooded with reply from @BCCI about the autographed photo.

The best of the lot was from @AntiSrinivasan N.Srinivasan click here http://urldg.com/hoVArP for your Sachin Tendulkar personalized digital autograph.

The fact that the account just did an auto reply to any tweet, you could ramble anything in the tweet along with two keywords and you get Sachin’s autograph.

So I got 10 autographs from when I tweeted with a counter 1,2,3 … along with @BCCI #ThankYouSachin in each of my tweet.

It sounds stupid and childish, but given the pitch condition and lack of assistance, this sounded a more fun event. Soon I had 25 photos of Sachin Autograph. Tweeter seemed a fun place and took over cricket and boring commentary of VVS and Sivaramkrishan.