Activities

Here is a glimpse of some of the activities I like to do.

Cricket

Like most Indians, I love playing and watching cricket. Fortunately, Pittsburgh has ample opportunities of playing some serious cricket. Pittsburgh Cricket Association is a recognized body of  United States Cricket Association and it organizes a League Championship in the summer months. I played for a team called PittsPunters in the Summer'05 League and we ended up being the regular season champions and runners up in the playoffs. It was great to be playing the season ball cricket again after a long time.

Carnegie Mellon Cricket Club is also an active organization which organizes taped tennis ball tournaments in CMU every Fall and Spring. Though a bit less serious than the season ball cricket, these are a lot of fun to play in.


Squash

I started playing squash as an undergraduate in IIT Delhi and have since then enjoyed playing this sport. I play for the Carnegie Mellon team in the C League of the
Pittsburgh Squash League. We won the championship in the 2004-05 season.


Running

John got me started on running in Fall'04. I had always thought of running as a boring activity but now I find it a relaxing experience, especially running on the trails in Schenley Park. I ran the 10K Pittsburgh Great Race, 2005 , my chip time was 53:08.


Hiking

My interest in hiking is again attributed to John. I have gone on a couple of exciting trips with him and a couple of other friends. Here are the pictures from those trips.


Skydiving

It is amongst the most adventurous activity I have done. I went for an Accelerated Free Fall (AFF) jump at Canton Air Sports (about 80 miles north west of Pittsburgh) on the first weekend of August '05. Exiting out of an airplane at an altitude of 13000fts and then free falling for about a minute before deploying the parachute was an out of the world experience for me. Here is a video of a person doing an AFF.