1st April : Fool filled Day

April Fools' Day - celebrated every year on 1 April by playing practical jokes and spreading hoaxes.
The jokes and their victims are called April fools.

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Place : Yamuna Velodrome, I.G. Stadium, Delhi.
Year : 1989

We were in the National Cycling Camp training for the Asian Championships to be held
at the end of the year.

Life and conditions in the Indian sports camp is tough.
Being away from family, friends, home food and comforts, no evening outings, parties, family functions, festivities..... going through sweat and toil (not to mention the  partiality, politics and unfair practises)  

while our school / college friends are enjoying their teen life.  
Hardships are readily endured for the love of sport.
But to go through it you got to be physically tough, mentally - super tough.


01 April 1989

The day was almost over. 
Throughout the day all the boys in camp had tried their level best to fool us girls.
They succeeded a few times to fool some of the beautifools. 

Towards evening one of the girl cyclist received a box of mithai "Nathu's Sweets" from her visiting parents. 
After consuming all the 'moti-choor laddoos' in one go, we had an idea!

We decided to replace the mithai in the box with mud balls and offer it to the boys.
Lets take a shot at fooling the boys, we said.

So, we made Mitti ke Ladoo (mud balls).

Recipe : 
We got 1 kg of mud.
Removed the gravel, leaves, twigs and sieved it to get super fine mud.
Then we added 1 cup fresh water to make the mud sticky and gooey in consistency.
Uniform mud balls were rolled by hand and each was placed on small round cut doilies (made of butter paper), which had "Nathu's sweets" printed on it.    

We embellished it with...
a light sprinkle of talcum powder,
roughly chopped almonds,
and topped it with a kishmish (raisin).

The final product was ready.
To some it looked like chocolate fudge.
To Punjabis it looked like "Amritsar ki Pinni"                                                                                                             

It was neatly arranged in "Nathu's Sweets" box and carted along to the boys. 

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Please note :
Sportsmen/athletes are forever hungry. 
Goodies are always welcome.
All of it will be consumed instantly, 

and calories will be burned easily.

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Barely had we handed over the Mithai box to them, it was torn apart and all made a dive for it.

(Some had a mouthful of the mud-full.) 

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All had been fooled successfully.

It had been a fool-filling day.


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