Watching live Test cricket in India in the 1970s was often an ordeal. Huge and noisy crowds crammed into stadiums with minimal facilities and uncomfortable seating (just concrete platforms for those in the peanut gallery) made for a gruelling experience. Though cricket was a winter game in India back then, with the partial exception of venues such as Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, spectators elsewhere sweltered in the heat, with handkerchiefs, towels and newspapers serving as improvised sunshades.
My experiences as an avid cricket fan back then largely centered around
Chepauk in Madras (now Chennai), a city that for all its many virtues certainly had nothing that remotely resembled what one might call winter. In these days of empty stadiums for Test matches, it's hard to believe that lines would form at 7am or earlier as close to 50,000 people made their way into the ground. They were all ticket holders, but as there was no assigned seating in the cheaper stands, you had to get there early to guarantee yourself a good spot - defined as one with a clear view, and which let you escape the worst of the sunshine as the day wore on. Given the Neanderthal facilities, breakfast, lunch and tea (or rather, coffee) had to be packed into the multi-tiered tiffin carriers and thermos flasks. The shiny metal of these containers often created problems, as players would suddenly find a disconcerting glare emanating from the stands - until the erring object was spotted and put back into a cloth bag.
Food was an important element in lasting out the ordeal. While the top tiers of the carrier were for snacky foods like idli, dosa and vada, the middle and lower tiers were for the full three-course southern meal of sambhar rice, rasam rice and curd rice - or for variation, tamarind rice, lemon rice or tomato rice. Separate plastic bags containing crisp poppadams, banana wafers, pickle and water bottles completed the ensemble. Test matches at Chepauk often coincided with the harvest festival of Pongal, so delicious sweet rice or sakkarai pongal, garnished with ghee-fried cashews and raisins, was an added attraction.