bamba & the osc!

bambalapitiya and it's environs were much a part of the lives for many of us during our salad days. certainly it was for the osc and i have been asked, many a time, by those added on to the original mbb mailing list, as to who are the osc. who indeed!

answering that knotty question would probably take many tomes but i am mindful that the cousin wants these rants short and i will therefore be brief as i can.

the osc stands for oriental sports club. its other abbreviation is sfsc and you don't want to know what that stands for. no, really! it's a collection of guys who grew up around three roads in bambalapitiya; frankfort place, melbourne avenue and milagiriya avenue. it also included others, like me, who were connected to these guys in some way. the original founder members were faizul ( now in canada), kumar ( now in the uk) and ronnie ( in the states). there was even a formal application for membership which was kept in what was famously called the blue file ( "can duckweed play on sunday" "ah! is his application in the blue file?") . faizul tells me that he still has it.

there was also a membership fee which was something like 0.25 cents a month. a very steep fee considering that no drinks were served at the bar. then again, no one paid. there was a board with a president, secretary and a treasurer but this was more a dictatorship than a democracy. kumar insists that he continues to be president purely because he has not been unelected and also because no one else wanted the job.

the formal activity of the club was soft ball cricket. some rugby ( the osc once played against the havelocks bambaras and your scribe, all of 6' and 40 kilos, was prop with the other prop being mohan amith all of 4' and about 60 kgs. yes, i agree, the mind boggles!). table tennis at st pauls milagiriya. chess. lots of fooling around, climbing trees, hora police, cycle races, beach rugby, swims and so on. but, in general, activity of the club consisted of hanging around at all hours of the day and night and so annoying our parents.

the gnaneswaran's at number 23 frankfort place was the club house and also the nets for our practices. the neighboring houses had enormous repair bills to their roofs and glass panes whilst at night telephones would be abuzz with angry parents demanding all manner of compensation. decades later when miriam j joined the company i was then working for, she said " ah! when are you going to pay dad for that light bulb you broke".

and, when we got kicked out of no. 23 (which was often) we all gathered at the wall that ran along the galle road at the top of frankfort place. this was generally in the late evening. at the height of membership it was quite a crowd. i recently met a guy from the bamba flats who told me that they used to be pretty wary of walking past the hoard of mean and scruffy looking guys hanging around that wall. us, mean? tsk! meals, such as they were, were courtesy of jayanthi's, the kade across the galle road from the wall.

we had fun. we had seasons in the sun. who can forget those challenge matches? whilst we had a group well in excess of 20, getting together 11 for a cricket match was stressful. guys suddenly remembered chores to be completed and aunts to be visited. 40 used to be the average score by the club on a good day (this writers contribution was a princely 4). did we win? who cares, now. then there was beach rugby. getting up as planed at five and finding out that except for the pot who was mad on rugby, no one else wanted to get up till 6.30 was slightly annoying. so we threw stones at closed windows and got shouted at by irked parents.

we were tough. faizul and ronnie cycling to nuwera eliya and back was amazing. as were their trips down south. no, kumar, we are not going to talk about the light bulb. a day would start with beach rugby, then cricket and still more cricket. late evening would be time for road rugby and one needed to be tough for that. many of us still wear scars as a result of being stuffed into the milagriya culvert chasing after the loose ball.

then there were heroes. hetti, all on his own, stopping the rampaging july 83 mob from entering no. 23. mani, doing the same in india for some singhalese pals and paying for it with his life.

and oh yes! there was romance. but lets not go down that particular road.

but all of this does not even begin to describe the osc (and i can see my cousin chaffing at the bit). a group of friends had fun. and grew up ( or think they did). so, what?

i have no idea what. partly it is the fact that the entire group has remained best of friends after more than 35 years even though more than half the group is scattered to the four corners of the globe, married settled down and are now er... responsible adults. partly it is due to the fact that the osc has remained tenuous through growing up, marriage, kids, mortgages, alternate life experiences, disagreements and so on. partly it is of course due to the fact that they never grew up in the first place ( the women are nodding). we are multi ethnic, multi racial, multi religious and ( at times) mighty silly. remember the grass chaps? but, all of this is only part of the picture.

the osc, is a group of very good friends who have remained so. let it be at that. guys, take a bow.

faizul, fahmy, ronnie, kumar, gopi, malcolm, suresh, hetti, mevan, michael, joey, nilesh, rodney, yogan, mahesh, siva, mani, lawri, naleer, mohan