Are we entering a golden age of Indian fast bowling?

On a hot and humid late summer afternoon in Mumbai in the late '90s, I was at a school cricket ground close to where I lived back then, and as tends to happen in those parts, there were a couple of games of cricket (or six) going on simultaneously.

There were multiple cricket "pitches" - I use air quotes here because at these venues, cricket is played with a hard tennis ball, where the actual pitch is indistinguishable from the rest of the outfield - side by side, and if you watched from a certain vantage point, you could see various bowlers trundling up and down those pitches, like an assembly line put together to deliver balls in the direction of a set of stumps 22 yards away.

A casual observer on that day may have noticed something quite striking. On every pitch (including ours), there were various bowlers (including myself) trying to emulate the one bowler who had recently caused India all kinds of strife in a recent Test and ODI tri-series. Those ODI matches from a run-of-the-mill triangular series would be forgotten, and the Asian Test championship concept would die a slow and unremarkable death, but there was one passage of play that anyone who had watched it would not forget in a hurry.

Shoaib Akhtar, aka The Rawalpindi Express, had bowled those yorkers to Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar, one tailing in from outside off, the other brutally forcing its way through Tendulkar's defences and nabbing him first ball to silence nearly a hundred thousand people at the Eden Gardens.

They were deadly. They were accurate. They were fast. Not Kapil Dev fast. Not even Javagal Srinath fast. This was a different animal. This had stirred something quite primal in an entire generation. It had ignited a blood-lust for raw pace that no amount of outswing or Anil Kumble flippers would satiate.

And that brings us back to that squeeze of pitches where many bowlers with widely varying physical characteristics tried to run off impossibly long run-ups and pivot at the last minute, stretching every sinew of their being, throwing every fibre of their life force behind the circular object, making it defy the laws of physics and cover that stretch of red soil in the blink of an eye. None of them could match the efforts of Shoaib, of course, but the fact that they were trying showed you just what he had lit up.

This was not a new story. The general script was familiar but the antagonists changed over the years. Craig McDermott and Mike Whitney, then a zinc-painted Allan Donald, Curtly Ambrose had preceded Shoaib. This Indian team of wristy and artistic, skillful and majestic batsmen had often found a nemesis whose pace had been too rapid to handle.

In response, we would invite visiting teams to try to tame the cobra that was the viciously spinning cricket ball, usually delivered by a trio of spinners looking to bamboozle with their trickery and outwit the batsmen with guile rather than just batter through their defences. That made us happy, of course, but it left behind this itch that made us yearn for fast men we could call our own.

Fast forward to present day and I feel like our generation has been able to collectively scratch that nearly 18-year-old itch. In the recently concluded ODI series against Australia, India had five bowlers in their squad - Mohammed Shami, Umesh Yadav, Jasprit Bumrah, Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Hardik Pandya - who can all get past 140 clicks on the speed gun.

This would not be possible without Zaheer Khan and Ashish Nehra before them, but the fact that we can take for granted that we have a pack of bowlers capable of hitting the pitch hard and forcing batsmen to make mistakes due to sheer pace needs to be acknowledged.

For the first time in my memory of watching cricket, India have a pace attack that can mount a challenge in Test cricket outside the subcontinent. As a fan who grew up in times when our seam bowlers depended on well-disguised slower ones, legcutters and "line-and-length" bowling for most of their wickets, I hereby proclaim that we have entered the Golden Age of Indian fast bowling.

Of course, I say this knowing fully well that the path to greatness needs to be travelled yet, and that success on international tours is far from guaranteed. It may happen that one of them, or all of them, may lose form, or fitness, or both. This may well turn out to be another false dawn, but I have reason to believe that this time is different.

My hope lies not just in the fact that this new crop of bowlers eat better, train better and have access to better resources than their predecessors did. Nor is it just that we have a more settled team and a more attacking captain at the helm. My belief in this new age lies beyond the bowlers who are currently wearing the India shirt. This could be the dawn of a new era where quality Indian fast bowlers are just as par for the course as prolific batsmen or mystery spinners.

There is a simple reason for it: When Shoaib was busy wreaking havoc at the Eden Gardens all those years ago, the five fast men in India's recent squad were between the ages of six and 12. When the next set of young bucks runs in to bowl in amateur matches similar to the ones I remember, they won't have to look enviously at an opposing team for inspiration. They will find an abundance of heroes in blue.

Rahul Oak works on advertising products at Google during his day job, but spends a disproportionately large fraction of the rest of his time thinking about cricket. His first book, Medium Fast and Furious is available in stores and online