Prakash Mungekar was only four, when cricket came into his life. Then residing in the IIT-Bombay campus in Powai where his father worked, Mungekar, now 61, remembers how he first heard the game on the radio, on the afternoon of October 10, 1964. At the time, he couldn’t make sense of the “loud noise” coming out of the system, initially confusing it for a war report. “I asked my mother and she told me that it was live cricket commentary,” he recalls. Puzzled, nonetheless curious, he continued to listen to the game, not knowing that this was the second Test being played between India and Australia at the Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai. That day, India won the game by two wickets. Since such a victory was so rare, the campus, he says, was in a tizzy. “People were playing drums and bursting crackers for hours,” he says. “In the evening everyone was talking about Chandu Borde [who won the game for India]. He also became the first player I was introduced to.”

Mungekar, a retired engineer, remembers being awestruck by that experience. Noticing his son’s interest in the game, his father took him to the park the following day, and showed him how cricket was played. Less than a week later, while emptying sugar from inside a paper packet into a jar, he chanced upon a photograph of a man holding a bat. The picture was that of Sir Don Bradman. This set the ball rolling for a 55-year-long obsession of collecting Test cricket imagery. Today, Mungekar is the proud owner of over 15,000-plus photographs that he has sourced from a variety of sports and regional magazines, newspapers, books and old packaging.