Hero's journey - thoughts on M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story

[Did a shorter version of this review for Cricinfo]

To begin with an admission that will seem astounding to regular readers of this site: I was more stirred by the opening scene of M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story, set at the Wankhede Stadium during the 2011 World Cup final, than I had been by the actual match five years earlier.

The main reason for this is that my love affair with cricket ended a decade ago, occasioned partly by Tendulkar’s decline, partly by the ugly, fair-weather displays of nationalism-jingoism associated with the sport (one example being the crowd assault on Dhoni’s Ranchi house after the 2007 World Cup failure). Besides, even when I was a compulsive cricket fan, I was more into individual players than teams, and not patriotically invested in India’s victories.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I was one of the very few people in the country who didn’t much care when Dhoni, the real Dhoni, hit that winning six on April 2, 2011. And so, I was unprepared for my reaction – the adrenaline rush, the growing anticipation – when I saw Sushant Singh Rajput as Dhoni in the dressing room, deciding he will go in at number five, then padding up and heading out into the deafening arena. Call it the power of a tense, tightly constructed scene that uses camerawork, space and sound effectively or a sudden burst of nostalgia for a once-adored sport.

In other words, M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story begins on a rabble-rousing note. But after this World Cup scene (which Neeraj Pandey’s film will of course return to at the end), the narrative back-tracks to a quiet afternoon in July 1981 and MSD’s birth in a Ranchi hospital ward as his father Paan Singh Dhoni (Anupam Kher), a hardworking lower-middle-class man, waits nervously outside. A series of well-constructed vignettes follow: the child Mahi being coerced by a coach to leave football for cricket and take up wicket-keeping (though he prefers batting); the support of his friends as it becomes evident that he has special talent and drive; the misgivings of his father, who has sensibly conservative ideas about what constitutes a secure future; repeated frustrations followed by a job in the Railways and the possibility of Mahendra becoming a “bada aadmi” in this profession (“Ticket-collector se badi cheez kya ho sakti hai?” as Paan Singh puts it).

Rajput starts playing Dhoni from age 16 onwards, and these early scenes have a slightly off-kilter quality – like the actor’s head has been digitally superimposed on a slim teen body – but that doesn’t matter after a while, because this is a fine performance. He captures not just Dhoni’s boyish exuberance and the enigmatic smile that stops just short of being cocky, but also something of the placid, Buddha-like inscrutability that emerges in moments of stress; a sense that he is calling on inner reserves only he knows about. This is a convincing portrait of a young man who can be impetuous but is also grounded enough to buy snacks for his friends as a sort of “celebration” after not being selected for a team – because he never wants to forget this day of failure (and, by implication, because such a day is what will bring him nearer to his eventual goal).

The film’s first half, with its depiction of the rhythms of small-town life, is a reminder that director Pandey has a feel for place and period (see his recreation of 1980s Delhi in the con-job film Special 26). There are many engaging little moments such as an early encounter, in a Bihar-Punjab match, between Dhoni and his future teammate Yuvraj Singh (played here by Herri Tangri as a regal kid whose very presence leaves most people awestruck). The cricket scenes are shot with panache and wit, even when they centre on a deadpan hero. Meanwhile, the stage also gradually shifts to show us officials in the sport’s higher echelons in Mumbai and Delhi, pulling strings and deciding the fate of thousands of struggling youngsters around the country.

In the second half, a tonal unevenness sets in, and to a degree this is understandable given the arc of MSD’s life. It seemed natural that the early scenes would have the texture of a gritty, understated small-town story about aspiration, the sort that Hindi cinema often does so well now (in another such film, the 2013 Kai Po Che!, Rajput played a character whose cricketing dreams don’t pan out). But once Dhoni gets his chance in the Indian team, he rises to stardom fairly quickly, and as more glamorous locations take over –  plush hotel rooms, advertising studios where he says cheesy lines while endorsing a range of products – the film’s look and pace alters as well; it becomes glossier, more languid. In one scene a gaping old-time acquaintance visits him in one of those swanky hotel rooms and hesitantly tells him while leaving that the woman who showed him in should have been more decently dressed – here is a view of two Indias in opposition, and of a young man who crossed the wobbling bridge.

The real problem is that around this time, M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story also becomes slacker, more random, and whimsical in its decisions about what to show and what to leave out (there isn’t even a scene that shows the circumstances that led to MSD becoming captain) – and when this happens, one recalls that this is largely an “authorized” project, with the real-life Dhoni and his associates having been consulted and kept abreast of the script.

There are also two romantic interludes – first with a girl named Priyanka (Disha Patani), who dies in a car accident, then with the cricket-indifferent Sakshi (Kiara Advani) who becomes Dhoni’s wife – that feel much too generic given how this film has so far unfolded. This section includes an exotic-location song sequence, superfluous flashback inserts, and embarrassingly forced attempts to generate pathos (wondering about their future together, Priyanka dolefully repeats the line “Bahut time hai naa hamaaray paas?” as if she were aware of her impending fate). Briefly glimpsed in these scenes is the suggestion that a man who is so assertive as batsman and captain might be defensive-passive when it comes to relationships, but the film doesn’t take this idea anywhere. The two-woman trope is handled better than the one in the recent, utterly lackluster Mohammed Azharuddin biopic Azhar, but that isn’t saying much. (The goofy climactic scene of that movie had the “wronged” Azhar being vindicated when his two wives walk into the courtroom side by side to support him and provide the ultimate character certificate!)

These sequences notwithstanding, the film builds unerringly towards that World Cup win, which is presented here as the culmination of a remarkable career (never mind that real-life sport doesn’t usually provide such tidy or definitive endings – MSD did, after all, also captain India in its 2015 loss, but there isn’t space here for such troughs). Ending with real footage of the post-match celebrations is a guaranteed way of having the audience out of their seats and applauding; as mentioned above, I was one of those viewers.

And yet, in the final analysis, I thought the film worked best when it did the small moment well. In one notable scene, a subdued MSD explains why he is so frustrated by his railway job – not because he considers it below him (“Kaam chhota nahin lagta,” he says), but because it doesn’t allow him to give cricket enough time and attention. This nuanced scene comes as a refreshing counterpoint to a shoe-polish ad that the real Dhoni did a long time ago, where he turned to the camera and said, “I decided not to be ordinary. I chose to shine.” A good, smooth line for the product, but also one that condescendingly implied that people in some professions can be dismissed as “ordinary” and that real winners can simply choose to reach the very top through hard work and perseverance.

M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story is a bumpy film, very stimulating in its good parts, oddly inert at other times, but in its better moments – like that “Kaam chhota nahin lagta” scene – it ducks the grand, overarching narratives and gives us a ground-level story about a young man following a calling with the knowledge that things might not work out perfectly, but that he has to at least give it a shot, he can’t die wondering. That’s a compelling tale in itself, and a more inspirational one in some ways than the one hinted at in the film’s more triumphal scenes – the ones about a blazing star who was so good and so determined that he was destined to reach the top no matter what, and who might well have had that World Cup-winning six inscribed on his horoscope chart.

--------------------------------
[Some old cricket-related posts are here, including this one about my obsession with the sport between 1996 and 2006]

"I was asked if the Tamil Tigers was a basketball team" - a Q&A with Shehan Karunatilaka

[Did this interview with Shehan Karunatilaka, author of Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew. I wrote about the book here.]


Chinaman centres on an elderly journalist’s obsession with a nearly forgotten spin bowler, who he believes was Sri Lanka’s greatest cricketer. How long have you been a cricket fan, and how did the idea for this book come to you?

I watched Wettimuny score 190 at Lords in 1984, watched us get thrashed around the world for a decade, and then in my early 20s saw us win a World Cup and change the face of cricket. But after Sri Lanka’s dismal exit from the 1999 world cup, I stopped following the game. I just found better things to do. And it’s not much fun watching Australia win everything.

It amazed me that no one had written about the one thing that Sri Lanka is truly world-class at. The idea came in bits and pieces over the years and when I realised it had to be about an obsessive cricket fan, I became one for a while. But these days, I’d much rather watch Newcastle United.

To you, as a Sri Lankan and as a writer, what does the fictional Pradeep Mathew represent? Did you see him as a pretext for telling other stories about Sri Lankan society/politics, or did you start with the core idea of a tragic, enigmatic hero and then gradually build the other stories around him?

The former. Sri Lanka is a study in wasted potential and lost opportunities. We’ve all heard stories about mythical Ceylon and how it inspired Lee Kuan Yew to build his capitalist utopia in Singapore. Half a century after independence, we’re an underachieving nation. We’ve spent seven decades squandering all our natural gifts and embracing war, nepotism, corruption and laziness.

The tale of a forgotten genius spinner seemed an interesting way of exploring this without getting too preachy or heavy handed. Not sure if I succeeded.

The structure of the book is very lively: non-linear, full of little asides. Why did you choose to do it this way? And as a reader, do you prefer disjointed narratives?

It certainly didn’t happen by design. I just uncovered so many wonderful stories about cricket and Sri Lanka in my research that I couldn’t help but chuck everything into the mix. Fortunately, the choice of a drunk as narrator (the journalist WG Karunasena) allowed me to ramble and make it seem like a stylistic device!

I read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut, who also intersperses plot with asides and has that beautiful tone that veers between hilarity and horror, something which I wanted to purloin for WG’s character. I’m not a big fan of disjointed narratives. I’m still unable to fathom Ulysses. But I am in awe of writers like Salman Rushdie or directors like David Lynch, who can fashion a story out of chaos.

Your depiction of an elderly narrator searching for fulfilment as his life draws to an end is spot on. What observations did you draw on to make WG such a well-rounded character?

My main challenge was to write as a 64-year-old and not as a 32-year-old trying to sound like one. I interviewed countless drunkards, uncles, grandpas and elderly journos to try and capture that voice. Even though I was chatting to most of them about cricket, details from their interior lives seemed to creep into our conversations. I gratefully let them ramble and took detailed notes.

The book was originally self-published – was that because you wanted to retain control over the work or did you have trouble finding a publisher?

I didn’t anticipate that a novel on Sri Lankan cricket would interest an international reader. I just wanted to write something that stayed on topic and was entertaining and truthful. Once it was done I sent it to the printer just like all Sri Lankan writers do. I kept optimistically sending queries to international agents and publishers, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

Then, at the Galle Literary Festival, I was fortunate to meet Amit Varma, author of My Friend Sancho, who was kind enough to give me some useful email addresses. I fired a few queries to some of India’s leading publishers and was lucky enough to get a response. By then the self-published version was already out in Sri Lanka.

Chinaman mixes fact and fiction: you mention actual matches and real-life cricketers and incidents. In a story that touches on match-fixing and other controversies, were you worried that the book would get into trouble?

All the lawyers I spoke to said that getting sued would be great for sales. In the Sri Lankan edition, the names and the references are much more obvious, but I didn’t think I’d get in trouble, because I wasn’t saying anything that was disputed or untrue. Cricketers like to party and enjoy the company of women who aren’t their wives. Some of them fix matches. These are hardly revelations.

Most of the stories in Chinaman are embellished versions of anecdotes shared with me by cricketers and commentators. I’ve taken care to only use real names if I’m saying something nice. So most of the time it’s badly disguised pseudonyms.

You’ve created an elaborate online world for the fictional Mathew. Did you do this alongside the writing of the novel or was it done as a promotional measure after you had finished writing it?

Apologies. But I have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ll need to ask my friend Garfield about that!

[Interviewer's note: “Garfield” is a character in the book, the estranged son of the narrator WG]

You’ve lived and worked in England and New Zealand, among other places. Where were you living when Sri Lanka won the World Cup in 96 and what effect did the win have on you on a personal level? Did you find a change in the attitudes of other people (non-Lankans) towards you?

Hell yes. I was an undergrad in New Zealand at the time. I had dreadlocks then and let everyone assume I was from the Caribbean. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of being Sri Lankan, it’s just that no one had heard of us. And it wasn’t a fact that impressed girls you were trying to pick up. One asked me if the Tamil Tigers was a basketball team.

But after we won the World Cup, I’d wear a Sri Lankan flag as a bandanna on the streets of Wellington and Palmerston North and get greeted with immediate recognition from strangers. I shaved off my dreadlocks soon afterwards.

1996 was a fairytale even for those outside of Sri Lanka. We were an underdog up against a bully everyone hated and we had tricks up our sleeve and it was a story everyone could get behind. If nothing else, it helped us all believe that we as Sri Lankans could be as good as everyone else.

At a broader level, what was the importance of that win for your country? Has cricket been a uniting force?

After ’96, cricket in Sri Lanka inevitably became a commodity that attracted politicians and big business. The book, or rather WG, believes that sport can be a political and poetic force that can transcend reality. I don’t actually believe that.

While I can’t deny the power of sport in capturing national consciousness, like say in South Africa during the ’95 rugby world cup, it think it would be a bit wet to suggest that ’96 helped us overcome our divisions and prejudices.

Having said that, when a cricket match is on, we all use it as an excuse to forget about floods and tsunamis and wars and human rights. During the 2007 world cup, the LTTE even declared a ceasefire, which of course they broke right after Gilchrist hammered us out of the final.

Even if we win another world cup, it’ll never be like ’96 again. Now the country expects us to win, back then it was a miracle.

“Unlike life, sport matters,” your narrator says at one point. To you, what is the significance of sport?

I think sport is a harmless distraction and a lot of it can be forgettable. But there are moments that can be truly magical where a sporting event can attain myth. And to a sports fan, a game can represent something far greater than life and that was really what I was trying to capture.

Can you name some of your favourite sports-related books?

I’ll have to give you a very condensed list. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. Simon Barnes’ The Meaning of Sport. Marcus Beckmann’s charming Rain Men. And the sports writings of CLR James, Ed Smith, Lawrence Booth, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton and Hunter S Thompson.

If you steal from enough sources, you get to pass it off as research.

[A version of this appeared in the Hindu Literary Review]

The absent spinner: cricket and life in Shehan Karunatilaka's Chinaman

[Pure coincidence that this is the second novel with a cricket theme that I've read recently; wrote about the first here. Though both books involve the making of a film about an underappreciated cricketer, they are very different in most ways]

“Wasting talent is a crime,” says Graham.

“A sin,” concurs Ari.

I think of Pradeep Mathew, the great unsung bowler. I think of Sri Lanka, the great underachieving nation. I think of WG Karunasena, the great unfulfilled writer. I think of all these ghosts and I can’t help but agree.

I don’t know if Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is “the Great Sri Lankan Novel” (as some of the publicity has suggested), but it’s a tremendously moving and funny book that works on many levels. It deals with big human subjects such as mortality, regret and self-actualisation, but does so with admirable lightness of touch. It’s a highly engaging cricket book too, one that uses the sport to examine aspects of Sri Lankan history, politics and contemporary life. But cricket isn’t just a MacGuffin in this story. To appreciate Chinaman fully, you need to have at least a very basic interest in the game, even if you don’t live and breathe it the way the man who tells the tale does.

That narrator is a 64-year-old sports journalist named WG Karunasena (“Wije” or “Gamini” for short), and as the book opens we learn that he is dying, his liver ravaged by years of alcohol abuse. Soon we will gather that Wije’s personal list of his life’s proudest moments includes (in no particular order): his wedding; the birth of his son (named Garfield, after Sobers); being awarded Ceylon Sportswriter of the Year; watching his son hit three sixes at age eight; and “watching Wettimuny at Lord’s in 1984, the first time I realised that a Sri Lankan could be as good as anyone else”. We also learn that a disagreement about the legitimacy of Muttiah Muralitharan’s bowling action turned into the ugliest argument Wije has ever had: “More foul-mouthed than when Ceylon Electricity overcharged me Rs 10,000. Angrier than when my wife found out I had been fired from my third successive job.”

Generally speaking Wije has no illusions about having led a particularly consequential life, but in the tradition of tragic protagonists who have a date with the Reaper, he has one magnificent obsession: he wants to make a documentary about the 1980s spin bowler Pradeep Mathew, whom he considers an unsung hero, the greatest cricketer Lanka ever produced. With the help of his closest friend Ari Byrd, and financial support from a former English cricketer, Wije gets the project off the ground, but there are snags - for one thing, it turns out that Mathew may no longer be alive. And if he is, he’s doing a bloody good job of being elusive. Wije’s search for this enigmatic man will lead him to meetings and conversations with disparate types ranging from cricketing coaches to match-fixers to a mysterious underworld figure.

Among the many notable things about Chinaman is Karunatilaka’s spot-on portrait of the interior life of an old man searching for fulfilment – his loneliness and cynicism, his regrets about his estranged son, his relationship with his wife and friends. (A lovely, unexpected passage three-fourths of the way through the book relates a beachside conversation between Wiji and his wife Sheila that rings so true it’s hard to believe it was written by an author only in his thirties.) Through all his trials, Wije also retains a broad, nihilistic sense of humour – lying on a hospital bed near death while a nurse adjusts his bedpan and his wife smothers him in kisses, he reflects that this moment “is the closest I have come to a ménage a trios in my wretched, uneventful life”.

Absorbing and believable as this voice is, the book’s non-linear structure – darting about like a ball on an uncovered, crater-ridden pitch – is just as effective. The plot is interspersed with little subsections containing asides and bits of information about the game, even drawings; less adeptly done, this sort of thing might have impeded the narrative, but here it allows us to glimpse the inner world of a man who has spent much of his life thinking about the game.

Fact and fiction mix in intriguing ways here: there are references to matches that actually took place – such as this one in the 1985 Benson & Hedges World Series, which was Lanka’s heaviest defeat – but with minor alterations. (In Karunatilaka’s revised version of the match, the eventual result is the same, but Mathew takes five wickets.) There are several mentions of real-life cricketers, but there are also names that mash two or more real-life personalities together, such as “Graham Snow” (a former English captain who, in an amusing passage, bawls about his personal problems to WG and Ari, thinking they are psychiatrists) and “Mohinder Binny”. I thought the use of these composite names was gimmicky, but much more effective is the tantalising way in which Karunatilaka incorporates himself – or at least a character named “Shehan Karunatilaka” – in the book’s last section, which could be a comment on the relationship between a fiction writer and his creations, or the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. Does Pradeep Mathew really exist, it makes us wonder. Who or what is he?

Well, on one level it’s easy enough to see Mathew as a cipher that enables other stories to be told. He can also be viewed as a wish-fulfilling device, a representation of the idea that Sri Lankan cricket could have had a genuine world-beater even in its sorry 1980s – a true force of nature, a bowler who could dismiss such batsmen as Allan Border and Dean Jones with "miracle" deliveries. (Karunatilaka has gone to some lengths to create an online world for the fictional cricketer, including a webpage with photos, stats, articles and a fake Cricinfo profile.)

However, Mathew is also a tragic figure, a victim of countless external factors, and a reminder that sporting genius doesn’t ply its trade in isolation. In the alternate universe described in Chinaman, he bowls one of the great spells in cricketing history against New Zealand – such a brilliant spell, in fact, that it leads to the pitch being declared unfit and all record of the match being erased from the books! He takes on a supercilious Yorkshireman during a TV interview, an improbable instance of a cricketer from a diffident team giving it back to a white supremacist. Years later, he encourages Arjuna Ranatunga to beat the Aussies at their own game by sledging them back, advises Muralitharan not to change his action, and insists that Jayasuriya, the new one-day opening batsman, be allowed to play his natural game and hit over the top in the first 15 overs. None of these priceless contributions to Lankan cricket become public knowledge.

In a fairer world, Mathew might also have been a uniting force in a country sundered by racial conflicts – a cricketing superstar who happens to be the son of a Sinhala mother and a Tamil father. But then sport at its best, Chinaman postulates, can make the injustices of the real world more tolerable, sometimes even balance them out – even if its effects are temporary. “I have been told by members of my own family that there is no use or value in sports,” Wije says at one point. He retorts that there is little point to anything. “In a thousand years, grass will have grown over all our cities. Nothing of anything will matter. Left-arm spinners cannot teach your children or cure you of disease. But once in a while, the very best of them will bowl a ball that will bring an entire nation to its feet. And while there may be no practical use in that, there is most certainly value.”

An entire nation was, of course, brought to its feet when Sri Lanka won the World Cup in 1996, and the Chinaman narrative covers the sense of wonder and triumph of those days (“Sri Lankans across the world stand taller, believing that now anything is possible. The war would end, the nation would prosper and pigs would take to the air”), while never losing sight of the possibility that it might turn out to be an illusion – a flare of light in the midst of a continuing darkness.

But what a flare!

In 1996, subcontinental flair overcame western precision and the world’s nobodies thrashed the world’s bullies. Sixty years earlier a black man ridiculed the Nazi race theory with five gold medals in Berlin before Mein Fuhrer’s furious eyes.

In real life, justice is rarely poetic and too often invisible [...] In real life, if you find yourself chasing 30 runs off 20 balls, you will fall short, even with all your wickets in hand. Real life is lived at two runs an over, with a dodgy LBW every decade...

...Unlike life, sport matters.

[Here's an old post about my relationship with cricket, which coincidentally began just before the 1996 World Cup. And here's a piece I did for Cricinfo about the two cricket-loving fops in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes]

On Aditya Sudarshan’s Show Me a Hero

I’ve written earlier about the spate of mass-market novels authored by young students/graduates and published by low-investment houses like Srishti** – mostly simplistic stories about youngsters who learn hard truths about life through friendships and romance, and eventually grow up (or, in some cases, achieve the all-consuming goal of losing their virginity while remaining just as mentally stunted as before). The majority of these novels move at a brisk rate, with lots of conversation but very little description. Rarely if ever are the protagonists genuine introverts or loners, though in some cases they think of themselves as such.

This is no surprise: many of these writers pride themselves on not being avid readers themselves (see this old post); what matters is that they think they have a story to tell and that they’ve mugged up thesauruses so they can (mis)use “big” words while expressing simple-minded ideas.

On the surface, Aditya Sudarshan’s Show Me a Hero might seem like the standard-issue youth novel, what with its dramatic subtitle “Lights, Camera, Cricket...and Murder” and its mass market-friendly plot about a group of young people trying to make a film about a controversial batsman who once played for India. And sure enough, this book is quite a page-turner in its way – especially the second half, which centres on a mysterious death and an investigation, with a few red herrings strewn about. However, Sudarshan is a wise reader himself (he’s done some fine literary criticism for the Hindu and other publications) and this makes itself felt in the book’s central voice. The narrator Vaibhav, a thoughtful young man with a mature head on his shoulders, spends a lot of time observing the people around him, trying to make sense of the world and his place in it, analysing (sometimes overanalysing) his own reactions to situations.

Vaibhav comes from a well-to-do family and has had a sheltered childhood, but as the story begins he is living in a rented room in a Patpatganj apartment while half-heartedly holding a low-paying job with a wildlife organisation. A hint of excitement enters his life when he reencounters an ex-classmate named Prashant, a mercurial young man on a mission. Prashant turns out to be obsessed with the former cricketer Ali Khan, who had stirred hackles during his playing days because he didn’t conform to the expectations we tend to have of our public figures (wear your patriotism on your sleeve, say all the politically correct things, respect the tradition you were born into). As Prashant, Vaibhav and a small circle of friends begin the shooting of a film about Khan, their paths cross with goons who want the project scrapped, and tragedy soon follows.

Show Me a Hero isn’t a completely satisfying novel, but (and this might sound strange) I don’t really mean that as a criticism. The thing is, it’s dressed up as a work of genre fiction - and marketed to seem like more of a cricket novel than it is, presumably to cash in on the World Cup - but it doesn’t provide the reader with the comforts, the cosy tying up of loose ends, that genre works are expected to provide. Sudarshan has a real feel for the uncertainties of sensitive youngsters trying to deal with a complicated world (and with the hegemony of older people), and his writing doesn’t involve neat resolutions. He has the courage to reach for a downbeat ending, whether it involves a man who might not have been the proud, individualistic hero everyone thought he was, or the likeable girl who gently turns down a likeable boy just when it seems they are “destined” for the perfect romance.

There are some good character sketches here too: an intrusive landlady, a typically belligerent Delhi driver who is ready to “kill” someone because they dented his beloved car but who turns into a fawner when he meets a former celebrity, a grief-stricken mother who wants to believe the best about her abrasive boy. At times I felt a minor conflict between the self-conscious solemnity of Vaibhav’s narration and the demands of a fast-paced story, but on the whole Show Me a Hero does a fine job of ignoring the hazy line between “literary” and “genre” fiction. It’s good to come across a youth novel that has some interiority.

--------
** For more on such writing, see the last two paragraphs of this post

IPL, tennis, Jaya Arjuna, narrow domestic walls

Some people derogatorily use the word "intellectual" (or the more direct "pseudo-intellectual") to brush off a dissenting view. If you didn't care for a "masala entertainment" film that everyone else liked, it can only be because you're pseudo. Mention a book that isn’t on the current bestseller list? Yup, again, it must be because you're trying too hard to be different.

What's more amusing is when this accusation surfaces in the context of something as plebeian and mass-friendly as sport. As I’ve mentioned earlier on this blog, the Indian Premier League – all two months of it – entirely passed me by, so that I was still irritating friends with uninformed questions towards the end of the tournament: “You mean Shane Warne is playing for Jaipur – how is that even possible? Didn’t he retire a few months ago? Does Preity Zinta bat or bowl? Is this a unisex tournament?” During this period, much of my spare time has gone in watching tennis and participating in the messageboard of the TennisWorld website.

The average response goes: "The IPL is on and you're going on about tennis? You must be one of those snobbish pseudo-intellectual types who likes moving against the herd!" Now I have nothing against being called pseudo-intellectual or snobbish (or a vagrant sheep for that matter), but it's an ironic label given that most of my comments on the TW site run along the following lines:

"Rafa gets the break!! Woo-hoo!! Now HOLD SERVE, you moron, and take this to a third!! Bury the Djoker!"

Friends tell me IPL cricket is so exciting because of all the action off the ground: the cheerleaders, the movie stars, the Harbhajan-Sreesanth controversy. What does a bland sport like tennis have to compare with this, they ask.

More than you'd think, actually. For starters, in recent times, the mothers of players have been in the spotlight, and when mothers get involved in anything it always makes for good drama. During the tense Monte Carlo semi-final between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, the usually unflappable world number 1 shouted "Be quiet!" to Djokovic's shrieky mom, who was creating an unnecessary ruckus in the stands. Meanwhile, Britain's Andy Murray exploded in rage during a match, accusing his opponent of saying something inappropriate about his mother. Hindi-film scriptwriters might want to see the video – while Murray didn't actually slur "Maa kasam, chun chun ke maaroonga!" in Dharmendra style, it still makes Harbhajan's "Teri maa ki" to Andrew Symonds pale in comparison.

Speaking of Harbhajan, his physical assault on Sreesanth has nothing on a tennis player's recent assault on himself. This year's most viewed tennis clip by far is the one that shows Russia's Mikhail Youzhny repeatedly smacking himself on the head with his racquet – and drawing a nasty stream of blood in the process – after messing up a forehand. Cricket may have long ceased to be the gentleman's game, but tennis is no longer all strawberries and cream and long, leisurely days in the Wimbledon sun either. At this rate, contact sports like WWE will soon be an endangered species.

Lanka notes contd

Anyway, it turned out that my lack of interest in the biggest thing to hit cricket since coloured pyjamas was even harder to explain in Sri Lanka, where not only was it assumed that anyone getting off a flight from India would be reciting IPL match stats in his sleep, but where my very name helped steer the conversation. “Hi, I’m Jai,” I said when we met our guide/tour representative Keith at the airport, and on hearing these simple words his face lit up with the combined effulgence of a million glowworms, causing the people around us to look up in astonishment at the night sky. “Jaya like in Jayasuriya?” he exclaimed, scarcely able to believe his good fortune. “So pleased to meet you!”

“Um, yes – Jaya,” I replied, “but with an Arjuna instead of a Suriya!” At this our man sighed long and deep, and people around us looked up to check if monsoon winds were gathering. “Arjuna like in Arjuna Ranatunga, our great captain?” “True,” I conceded, “but without the ‘Ranatunga’ – or the captaincy, for that matter. I gave up both after we won the World Cup in 1996, ha ha.”

The joke fell flat but on the whole we had got off to a good start, and over the next several days we learnt about Keith’s love for cricket, his strong views about the game and its players, and even the ways in which it had affected his personal life: he told us about a promising job offer he had received in Australia, which he turned down on no other grounds than “the behaviour of their cricketers, and the way they treated Muralitharan”. (I decided to avoid disclosing that Australia had been far and away my favourite team back in my viewing days.)

Jayasuriya’s violent knocks for the Mumbai team were key talking points and it was noteworthy that throughout our stay, the one channel that would unerringly be available on every hotel-room TV set was SET Max. “Do people in India like Jayasuriya?” Keith asked tentatively. “Oh, we always admired him,” I replied, “but we like him a lot better now that he’s playing for a domestic team in a friendly environment rather than hitting Indian bowlers all over the park in an international match.” The next morning, Keith reciprocated with a few unexpected words of praise for an Aussie cricketer. “Did you see how Hayden celebrated with Murali after they took that wicket?” he asked, “I think he’s not so bad.”

I’m sure that the people who thought up the IPL were driven by baser motives than tearing down the narrow domestic walls of partisanship, but they might just have managed it anyway. On the other hand, if future editions of the tournament are as successful, India might soon revert to being a collection of sovereign states.

Pointless quotes beget pointless posts

Meaningless quote of the day:

"He has scored 16,000 runs. I haven't even played 16,000 balls."

- M S Dhoni, asked about Sachin Tendulkar not doing too well in the Commonwealth Series (before yesterday's match, of course)

First, the answer has absolutely nothing to do with the question. It's just another way of using past achievements to brush aside any talk about current form. Also, this peculiar interpretation of Authority: if cricketer A has 16,000 runs and cricketer B has 3,000 runs, the latter has only 3000/16000 x 100 = 18.75 per cent authority to comment on the former (even if the latter is the former's captain). This in turn leads to the misbegotten idea that someone who hasn't actually played cricket at the highest level has Zero per cent authority to make statements about Test-level players. (It applies to other fields too. As a reviewer I'm often asked things like: "What gives you the right to say mean things about Jodhaa Akbar when you've never even stood behind a camera, much less got Aishwarya and Hrithik to writhe together on a palace floor?")

But even looked at on its own terms, Dhoni's quote would have made sense only if his batting strike rate was something like 20 runs per 100 balls (which means he would have needed close to 16,000 balls to score the 3,000-odd ODI runs he currently has to his name). Going by his actual strike rate, if he had faced 16,000 balls, he would have scored close to 15,000 runs. So the difference between balls faced and runs scored isn't as large as the quote makes it sound. A more useful answer would have been, "He has scored 16,000 runs. I haven't even eaten 6,000 omelettes."

Sorry, it's one of those Monday mornings...

Intellectual meets fanboy in Men in White

[Did a version of this review for Cricinfo magazine]

A few months ago, in the wake of the hysterical public reaction to the Indian team's early World Cup exit, Mukul Kesavan wrote an editorial for a daily newspaper, denouncing the average Indian cricket follower as a "lazy, pampered know-nothing" with an unreasonable sense of entitlement. The piece drew some strong negative reactions. Accusing Kesavan of being an armchair intellectual, blind to the tribulations and feelings of the average fan, one blogger asked rhetorically if he had ever been inside a stadium in a non-journalistic (hence non-privileged) capacity.

Calling a sports writer an armchair intellectual is another way of saying he lacks genuine passion for the game – the kind of passion that makes you forego all pretence to refined objectivity, turns you into an atavistic chest-thumper each time the fortunes of a favourite team or player are at stake. But Kesavan's love for cricket, Test cricket in particular, is there to see on every page of Men in White, a compilation of pieces that were first printed in this magazine and in other publications. The answer to the stadium question can be found here too, in the Introduction, where he recalls a run-in with police brutality at the Ferozshah Kotla when he was just nine. The point is, the experience didn’t end his relationship with cricket. He went back again. And yet again.

Like most cricket lovers, Kesavan is very opinionated (in fact, he expressly states the value of subjectivity in a short piece on Don Bradman's World XI) and he holds forth here on a variety of topics. He makes a persuasive case for doing away with the match referee ("a bureaucrat, removed from the action, his decisions opaque to authority") and some of the special rules created for ODIs ("one-day cricket is crying out to be deregulated. Currently it's a kind of licence Raj where inefficient batsmen flourish"). He recounts helping India win a Test against the Aussies in 2001 (by the simple expedient of keeping his eyes shut in the final half-hour so that no more Indian wickets fell). He discusses favourite players (the likening of Kapil Dev to Br'er Rabbit is one of the neatest throwaway descriptions I've read), the culture of cricket in Chennai and the implications of a racist remark by commentator Dean Jones. Other highlights include his childhood memories –playing the "Lutyens Variant" of cricket in a neighbourhood park, something most of us can relate to, and listening to radio commentary. And in one of the most perceptive essays in this collection, he discusses the role “anecdotage” – the treating of period gossip as undisputed fact – has played in the creation of cricket’s mythology (was Bedi really a better bowler than Chandrasekhar?).

But the most compelling thing about this book is Kesavan’s recognition of the conflict between fair-minded sports analysis and that visceral feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when a cherished team does badly. And equally, the recognition that both qualities co-exist in himself. At one point, while discussing the “non-paying and non-playing” spectator who treats defeat as a personal betrayal, he complains that for the typical Indian cricket fan, no real-world match can compare with the fictional one in Lagaan, where Aamir Khan's Bhuvan hits a six off the last ball to take a village team to victory against British colonialists. But in the very next paragraph, he restrains himself. “That’s a cheap shot,” he writes. “After 40 years or more of rooting for India, I may not contain multitudes but I know that I have to make room for at least two people: that middle-aged, freeloading, non-playing slob on the sofa and the child on the concrete terraces for whom the sight of Farokh Engineer swaggering down the steps of Willingdon Pavilion to open the Indian innings was a doorway to heaven. Separately and sometimes together, both of them wrote this book.”

Later, in a tongue-in-cheek essay on a "Super Test", played between Australia and a World XI, he observes that watching Sehwag and Dravid playing for a non-Indian team purged him of "tamasik patriotism and other base feelings". When Shane Warne takes Sehwag's wicket in this match, he can coolly write, "You had to give it to the great man, he'd out-thought Sehwag by bowling leg-and-middle..." But if it had been an Australia-vs-India tie, he admits, the sentence might have read: "Luck on that scale was the only way that rutting, peroxided pig was likely to take an Indian wicket."

This self-awareness is what makes Men in White so readable. Essays collections of this sort don’t always hold together, but the pieces here form a body of work that tells us as much about the nature of a cricket lover’s evolving relationship with the sport as it does about the sport itself. They reflect the ambivalences and inconsistencies of our opinions (commenting on his adulatory piece about Rahul Dravid, Kesavan says, “I set out to write a hard-nosed assessment of an overrated batsman, and look what emerged”) and the role that irrational perceptions play in shaping our feelings towards teams and players. (Just by the by, I strongly disagree with Kesavan's view of the Aussies as a graceless bunch, incapable of appreciating the talents of opposition players.)

For those disillusioned by poor administration and the increasing mediocrity of the one-day game, Men in White is a reminder of what cricket can be at its best. But it’s also a reminder of what our reaction to sporting victories and defeats tells us about ourselves.

Obligatory ramble about Sachin

I promised myself I wouldn’t blog about Sachin Tendulkar again (especially after writing this long personal post last year), but wouldn’t you know it, I’m breaking that promise now. Here’s an expansion of some of the things I said in a comment on Amit’s blog.

Looking at a couple of the other comments on that post, I’m astonished by how many people think SRT has an obligation to be the Best Batsman in the World for all time. This for instance:

Expectations are always from Sachin Tendulkar because he is Sachin Tendulkar. Because he is one the greatest ever. Because he can make a bowler ask this question to his mother “Why was I even born?”.

However, time and again, it has been noted that he has not delivered when it mattered the most and when people looked up to him to save the matches. India has failed miserably every time he has failed. And of late, he has been failing continuously when we need our best batsman to give his best.

Look at that chest-thumping first paragraph and then the shrill second paragraph, and see if you can reconcile the two opinions stated. Assume for argument’s sake that everything said in the second para is true (at least over the past 2-3 years). In that case, wouldn’t this be the logical conclusion to draw: Sachin is NOT the best batsman in the world anymore and it isn’t fair to keep judging him by that standard.

In fact, as any balanced observer of the game (even his biggest worshippers, like yours truly) would know, SRT hasn’t been the world’s leading batsman for at least six years now; he hasn’t even been India’s best batsman for at least four years, going back to roughly the time when Rahul Dravid had those great series in England and Australia. (For much of the period since, he wasn’t even India’s second-best batsman, at least in Tests – Virender Sehwag was.)

There’s a delicious irony in the nature of Tendulkar-directed criticism. On the one hand, people lament that SRT is in the team solely because of his past achievements and the weight of his reputation, and that he should instead be judged strictly by his current worth. This is fair enough. But on the other hand, these same people use those very past achievements as benchmarks to condemn him.

The real question to be asked (as Amit does in his post) is: Is he still good enough to be in the Indian side? Forget about what he once was and what we wanted him to be, and think about the here and now. As I’ve said before, back in 1989 when that 16-year-old kid walked into the Indian squad, he did NOT sign a pledge to the entire Indian populace that he would be The World’s Best Batsman and the sole repository of all their hopes and ambitions for the next 20 years, and that those were the only terms on which he would play cricket. In the history of sport, great champions have suffered far stranger and more dramatic declines than what has happened to Tendulkar in the past 4-5 years. Deal with it.

Amit’s answer to the question “Is Tendulkar good enough on current form?” is “Yes”. I’m not so sure myself – I don’t know enough about India’s bench strength and to what extent promising young players have been kept out in the past few years because the middle order has been so established and so “untouchable”. I also think there’s some merit in Gaurav Varma’s comment that with an eye on building a team for the future there’s a case for dropping SRT even if he’s good enough to figure amongst India’s top six batsmen.

But my concern here isn’t the “should he be dropped” debate, it’s the very ugly nature of the criticism directed at SRT over the years. I’m aghast at the irresponsibility of most of India’s sports media in this respect. Through discussions with sports-journo friends and acquaintances, I know that there’s a strong current of anti-Tendulkarism in these circles – has been, in fact, for several years, even going back to the days when he was the country’s best cricketer. And given the way many media insiders really feel about him, it seems like a diabolical conspiracy that newspapers and TV channels have continued (with a subtle mocking undercurrent) to refer to him as “the world’s best batsman” in reports, long after that label ceased to be true – using it to repeatedly pull him down and gloat over his failures. Whenever India suffers an embarrassing loss, don’t we all know what photographs we’ll see blown up on the front page of every newspaper the next day? Tendulkar getting out bowled. (Admittedly, that is an enticing photo option, especially when he’s down on his haunches.) Tendulkar walking forlornly back to the pavilion, a huddle of excited opposition players in the background. A beaten/dispirited Tendulkar, used as a symbol of our supposed National Failure. The Man Who Let Us All Down. Once again.

And when he plays a good innings in the next match, every TV channel will dig up at least one idiot ex-cricketer (Kris Srikkanth, anyone?) who’s willing to come and say something like “see, this is why he is the best batsman since Bradman”. And the cycle is perpetuated all over again.

There’s also the persistence of the ridiculous hype around “Tendulkar and Lara, the two best players in the world”. To anyone who actually knows their cricket, this idea has been irrelevant for years. In the last 3-4 seasons Lara has performed much better than Sachin has (and equally importantly, avoided injuries better), but even he hasn’t consistently been among the top 3 batsmen in the world during this period. And yet the media continues to sustain this grand, 10-year-old fantasy of “Tendulkar vs Lara” and fans continue to fall for it. (I can’t help wondering what youngsters aged 12-13 or less must make of this hype, since they wouldn’t have seen either of these greats back when they were indisputably the best batsmen around.)

From a selfish point of view, as a Tendulkar loyalist, I wouldn’t at all mind seeing him removed from the team. Apart from sparing him further humiliation, it would (at least temporarily, till a new icon is found, built up and torn to pieces) end this malicious voyeurism we see every time a hero fails. It would also force our indolent, feeble-brained sports-page editors and reporters to find new clichés for their match reports (instead of the sneering “once again, the world’s best batsman failed when his team needed him the most”) and to look for new photo options for the front page when India next suffers a humiliating and unexpected loss. And rest assured, the humiliating losses will continue, even after this “non-performing, overrated, national disappointment” has been ejected from the team: for if 75 years of Indian cricket history has taught us anything, it’s that this country, for whatever deep-rooted reason, is never going to produce a team of consistent world beaters like the Australians, or the West Indians of the 1970s and 1980s, or even the South Africans. Maybe there’s something to the idea that the national character just isn’t suited to a high level of sporting achievement.

(Did I say “world beaters”? Sorry! This is a sport that only 8 or 9 countries play with any measure of seriousness – and moderate success in it somehow becomes a salve for all our frustrations and personal disappointments. Maybe we’re just a nation of masochists.)

A couple of previous Sachin-related posts here and here.

Stones, glasshouses, Waugh of words

In a measured column written for a World Cup supplement that accompanied today’s Times of India, Steve Waugh comments on the recent slugfest between Sunil Gavaskar and Ricky Ponting. An extract:

“Arrogance is a very subjective thing. Indians might find our addressing seniors by their first names, and jokingly moving a senior official from a picture frame (for which Ponting was reprimanded by Cricket Australia and apologised later) thoroughly unacceptable, but that is our culture and not a manifestation of arrogance. Many of us view the Indians’ inability to carry their own bags from the team bus to the dressing room as evidence of class distinction, but with repeated trips to this part of the world we understand that this is the way here. Many Indians are at sea outside because they can’t adjust to the do-it-yourself culture abroad, and as a result are reluctant to move out of their hotel rooms. I feel this is why Indians were such poor travelers for so long. But young players are adjusting better these days...”

The full piece is thankfully non-acrimonious, especially given Gavaskar’s extremely foolish reference to the death of David Hookes. I enjoy Waugh’s writing, most of which really is his, not ghost-written. His tour diaries as well as his doorstop of a book Out of My Comfort Zone (which I wrote about here) are fine portraits of his personal growth – from a callow, insular young Australian with little knowledge of the world outside the Sydney suburb he lived in to a true global citizen, an ambassador for his country and for the game. Cricket lovers (especially those who have plenty of unforeseen free time now that India’s out of the WC) really should pick that book up. It’s a bit unwieldy in parts (what 800-pager wouldn’t be?) but more than worth it.

Why we love cricket; or, the divine savage

Another of my crazy little theories. I was deeply impressed by a newspaper photograph of ruffians tearing down Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s under-construction house in Ranchi, and looking carefully at the expressions of the men it struck me that they were all blissfully happy. This didn’t seem like a group of anguished cricket fans at all, it was merely a bunch of people who were thrilled about having a good pretext to break things. Particularly noteworthy was one man towards the left of the frame, his foot raised like a Ziegfield Follies girl, his face the image of primal ecstasy. (Do try to locate the pic, I couldn’t find it on the Net or I would have put it up.) The thought that went through my mind when I saw him was, “This chap is probably not even very interested in cricket, he watches Godzilla movies instead.”

Ah yes, my theory. It’s this: India being an exceptionally religious country, most of us (humans, I mean) are conditioned to believe that we are shaped in the Divine Image. Darwin's we-came-from-monkeys thesis isn't especially popular here, never mind that one of our most revered deities is, in fact, a monkey. Suggesting that man might be more animal than divine would amount to denying the Gods (and if you do that, you fully deserve to have your house torn down, you atheist scum!).

But the burden of being celestial is too heavy for most of us to bear. We need occasional breathers. Every now and again, we need to stomp on the bricks of half-constructed houses. And by treating cricket as religion or as a symbol of national pride (and under-performing cricketers as fallen Gods or betrayers of national pride), we give ourselves the right to be sanctimonious and indulge our animal emotions at the very same time. This can take many forms: vicious water-cooler conversations in office, a banner that says “Reach Barbados or stay forever in Trinidad” or something more tangible, such as what the people in the photograph were doing. Cricket is the great liberator, allowing us to return to our caveman selves without feeling guilty about it. No wonder we love it so much! QED

(On a more serious note, some excellent pieces that demand to be read: Mukul Kesavan on the desi fan, Sambit Bal on cricket needing a reality check [I nod in vigorous agreement with Bal’s thesis that it might be a good thing if India were to be knocked out in the first round] and this older piece by Amit Varma, “Do we really love cricket?”)

P.S. “Wouldn’t you be this happy if you got the chance to break down someone else’s house?” I asked my mother, showing her the grinning man in the newspaper photo. The question was half-facetious, so I don’t know whether to be pleased or worried that she thought about it for a few seconds and then said “Yes.” The human condition strikes again...

The Illustrated History of Indian Cricket - a review

[Did this for Cricinfo Magazine. This is an example of why I prefer, where possible, to make my own decisions about whether or not to review a book. I wouldn't have volunteered to write about The Illustrated History of Indian Cricket – my reaction to the book was lukewarm, I didn’t feel strongly about it either way, and I think that comes across in this workmanlike piece. But Cricinfo asked me to do the review and as it happened I’d already read most of the thing – so it felt like a waste to say no.]

A quick warning first: if you're looking for anything like a comprehensive study of Indian cricket over the years, this isn't it. In Boria Majumdar's The Illustrated History of Indian Cricket, the emphasis is on the "illustrated" rather than the "history". As a collection of photographs, this is a more than passable effort. As a study of the development of the game in India, it falls short.

In fact, as it turns out, very little of the book is actually written by Majumdar – he plays more of an anchoring role, allowing lengthy newspaper reports and quotes to tell most of the tale. Sandipan Deb's Introduction is arguably juicier than any of the other original material; Deb starts by averring that "cricket is the greatest game invented by man and nothing else comes even close", and then builds a decent little innings by dissecting the nature of India's complex relationship with the sport: "The story of Indian cricket is the story of a society, a tapestry woven as a permanent work in progress by a nation in search of definition."

This is pretty much where the personal insight ends though, with the remaining text portions of the book covering territory that has been explored before, and explored with greater depth (including in Majumdar's own Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket). Even a cursory look at some of the subheads here will show you that this isn't meant to be more than a snapshot of milestones. The "Match-fixing" section, for instance, takes up barely a couple of pages; after supplying exactly two sentences about the Hansie Cronje imbroglio of 2000, Majumdar devotes the rest of this space to informing us, via extracts from S M Toyne's The Early History of Cricket, that match-fixing existed as far back as the 1740s.

Elsewhere, too, the writing is very basic: the summarising opening sentences of chapters run along the lines "The 1940s was a decade of struggle for Indian cricket" and "The 1950s saw India win its first Test match and then its first Test rubber". What follows these sentences isn't exactly full of acumen either, and the series-by-series descriptions are as mundane as the hurriedly typed, cliche-filled match reports one gets to see in newspapers.

All of which means that as a "history" this book isn't likely to be of much use to a cricket fan who really knows about the game. It's best treated as a schoolboy primer, a source of information for laypersons and trivia-seekers (though even in this context, it would have helped if more scorecards of key Test matches and ODIs had been included in an appendix; as it is, there are just a few scattered obligatorily through the text).

Nor is The Illustrated History... quite picturesque enough to be a high-quality coffee-table book. But ultimately, whatever value it has rests on the rarer photographs and these do, to an extent, save the book. Here, for example, is Vijay Hazare, that most elegant of batsmen, caught in a decidedly inelegant pose (something of a cross between Kapil Dev's Nataraj shot and a tailender about to be bowled behind the legs). Here's Ranji in full regalia, as effete an Indian maharajah as you could wish to see; and here are scans of the love letters he wrote to a lady named Mary Holmes.

Then there's the Indian team at Victoria station during the 1932 tour, a caption reminding us that "the 18 players spoke eight to ten languages between them, belonged to four or five different castes…but these things are forgotten in the quest for cricketing success". A British newspaper's caricature of the same squad. Vijay Merchant huddled inside his overcoat in the pavilion on a chilly day on the 1946 tour. The Nawab of Pataudi Jr standing contemplatively on a balcony, looking like the dashing hero of a French nouvelle wave film of the 1960s.

And then, of course, we come to the better known, more widely circulated photographs, from the post-1980s period...but by this point, unless you're the most enthusiastic Kapil or Sachin fan, your eyes will be glazing over.

Updates + mini-review: You Must Like Cricket?

Been busier than usual on other fronts, so reading and writing have been on a downward curve. Most of the professional writing I’ve done in the last few days has been patchwork-ish - hurriedly put together lists, little reportage pieces here and there - not the kind of stuff I put up here. Plus I’m feeling very lazy and it occurs to me that for once it might be interesting to spend a week or so just doing things without writing about them immediately afterwards. Hence decline in blogging.

Cinefan reminder: it started today, though for some reason the “opening film” is tomorrow evening. The schedule is up on the official site now, also downloadable in PDF format.

R.I.P. Syd Barrett. The man is at the centre of one of rock music’s greatest “what ifs”: what sort of a band would Pink Floyd have become if he had retained his sanity for even a few years more? It’s so pointless asking these questions, but it’s also such fun. Here's a fine profile from the Observer.

Also, a tip to anyone who’s ever been fanatical about cricket (or about any other sport. Or, I’m tempted to add, about anything): pick up Soumya Bhattacharya’s You Must Like Cricket? Memoirs of an Indian Cricket Fan. Very enjoyable book about three decades in the life of a cricket obsessive. (The sub-title is misleading: Bhattacharya isn’t just any “cricket fan”. He’s the sort who, when asked when his daughter was born, answers, “Um, well...the year India beat Australia after following on. Laxman’s double, you know.” Later, he interrupts the handycam filming of her first attempts at walking because of a rerun of a rerun of a minor landmark in a Tendulkar innings. He knows he’s too far gone, he’s aware that he’s been disappointed by the Indian team more often than not, but he can’t help it, and he doesn’t want to help it. This is obsession at its purest.)

What I most enjoyed about You Must Like Cricket? is how the writing style approximates the enthusiasm of a frenzied fan who can’t wait to share his opinions and experiences - Bhattacharya moves from one memory or anecdote to another, breaks the flow of a passage by putting in a lengthy observation in parentheses; and it works. The effect is that of the author sitting in front of you, relating stories, opinionating, gesticulating wildly, all without pausing for breath. This is very unselfconsciousness writing: whether he’s explaining how he simulated the sound of clapping and roaring inside a stadium when he was role-playing as a child, or recounting how he and his friends quietened a group of rowdy north Indians on a train by producing a radio while a match was on: “[it was like] those films in which explorers win over tribes by showing them colourful trinkets”. Or telling a woman at a party that he is more interested in the Indian team’s progress in South Africa than in the Gujarat riots.

Despite the freeflowing style, there is a cursory attempt at structure. Bhattacharya starts with his initiation into the game as a five-year-old living in England, watching Wadekar’s team humiliated in the summer of 1974 and bemused by his parents’ reactions to the Indian loss; then moves on to his growing years in the small town of Bankura, where radio commentary was the only avenue of entertainment; his first genuine hero G R Viswanath, who stirs in him the partisan protectiveness that most sports fans know only too well (he admits to being pleased by Gavaskar’s failures in the 1983 World Cup because everyone in his family preferred Gavaskar to Viswanath). And this is only the beginning of a long (and continuing) odyssey. “Cricket gives me a sense of time,” he writes, “I tend to think of every major event in my life in terms of something that happened on a cricket pitch...the truth is, it is the only way in which I can remember anything at all.”

Charters and Caldicott in Bollywood?

[Wrote this for the April issue of Cricinfo magazine, now on the stands. Had a very broad brief – anything to do with the depiction of cricket in movies – and so I decided to focus on two cricket-mad characters from a cherished Hitchcock film. More than anything, it feels good to see my name in a magazine I’ve fervently read for years – and many of whose writers (both staff and outside contributors) have long been personal favourites. Also thanks to Rahul, for allowing me to keep extending my deadline, and for some very kind words at the end of it all.]

Quite cricket

"England's on the brink," whispers Charters to Caldicott. "We must get in touch with London immediately." It's an early scene from Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, and this is talk loaded with all kinds of possibilities – after all it's 1938, with the spectre of war looming over Europe, and this is an espionage story involving coded messages and unlikely spies. Stranded in a train station somewhere in Germany with numerous other passengers, the two Brits talk furtively about the need for "news of the latest developments". A suspenseful 10 minutes or so later comes the kicker: the information they are so desperate for is the score from the Oval Test match.

As played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in one of Hitchcock's most compact early films, Charters and Caldicott became so popular that they featured in a number of other movies in the 1940s and early 1950s, mostly comedies or thrillers set on trains. Each time they were the archetypal conservative Englishmen abroad: keeping their own counsel, perplexed by the manners and customs prevalent in other countries, perennially discussing their beloved sport, even using cubes of sugar to explain fielding positions to each other (and drawing frosty glances from fellow passengers who wish to use said cubes to sweeten their tea).

Nor was cricket a mere sidenote in these films: occasionally, it supplied an important plot turn. In The Lady Vanishes, for instance, the young heroine, trying to convince the authorities that an old lady has mysteriously disappeared, approaches Charters and Caldicott: surely they remember seeing dear Mrs Froy? But the two men don't want to risk the possibility that the train will be delayed – they have to get back to London in time for the final day's play, dash it – and so they deny any knowledge of a missing person, further complicating the plot.

Even in the 1930s, when cricket was still very much an English sport, there was something incongruous and mirth-inducing about the magnificent obsession of Charters and Caldicott – as indicated by their status as comic relief in film after film. On long train journeys through the Continent they would naturally suffer foreigners who barely knew of the game, let alone understood why it would rouse such passion. But even the other British characters in these movies regarded them with bemusement. ("I don't see how something like cricket can make you forget seeing people!" exclaims the heroine disdainfully. "Oh you don't, do you?" sulks Charters, "Well, there's obviously nothing more to be said.") They were misfits everywhere they went.

Whimsical though the idea might be, I can't shake the feeling that Charters and Caldicott would have been more at home in cricket-themed Indian movies – movies like Dev Anand's gloriously kitschy Awwal Number, Ashutosh Gowrikar's ambitious Lagaan (two films that have very little in common, notwithstanding that Aamir Khan finishes a crucial match with a sixer in each) or Nagesh Kukunoor's graceful Iqbal. There would of course be teething problems in such a leap across time and space; initially they would be very much the insular Englishmen – "oh I say, must we watch the Natives besmirch the good old game now?" – and Bollywood's cinematic idiom would be a mystery greater than any Hitchcock ever filmed. But nobler sentiments would eventually prevail.

They would instantly relate to the unselfconscious reverence shown to the game by Bollywood, appreciate how much hinges on the outcome of the match in Lagaan, and how much it matters to everyone watching. They would approve of Iqbal, a film that literalises the notion of cricket-as-religion – in scenes involving the little shrine where the protagonist puts up photos torn from magazines; Iqbal bowing his head and closing his eyes in prayer before beginning his bowling run-up; the unexpected second chance for salvation given to the embittered former cricketer played by Naseeruddin Shah.

One thing they wouldn't understand would be Indian cinema's persistent, self-conscious need to present cricket as a metaphor for Something Bigger: as in "A story above cricket", Iqbal's slightly pretentious catchphrase which forgets that sport is never just about bats and balls anyway; the reason it's so compelling in the first place is because it's grand human drama presented with such immediacy. But Charters and Caldicott never needed any such justification anyhow: they were the breathing antitheses to C L R James's famous line "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" The only thing they knew or cared about was cricket itself; it would never have occurred to them to use it as a symbol for, say, England keeping Germany at bay during the War (and what did those blasted Germans care about the game anyway?). Their love for the sport was pure and untrammeled; in spirit, in all the things that matter most, they were no different from the glaze-eyed masses watching in reverential silence as Aamir Khan takes guard with everything at stake.

On an Indian train, Charters and Caldicott would never have faced the ignominy of a blank stare when they asked someone for the latest score. In Bollywood, they would have fit right in.

1996-2006: a cricketing odyssey, and closure?

[Note: very long and ponderous post, best read over two days. Consume Dispirin before commencing. I did, before and after writing it.]

An important anniversary went by early last month – marking exactly 10 years since I became a serious cricket follower. I didn’t care to make much of it then, but certain events in the last week or so have made me aware that the relationship might be on its last legs now. So now I want to talk a little about the journey.

One morning in February 1996, I’m not sure of the exact date, a little booklet arrived at the doorstep, folded within the newspaper (it was either the TOI or the HT, the only papers whose existence I knew of back then). It was a primer to the soon-to-begin World Cup with a very simple format: 12 double-spreads, each devoted to one of the participating countries, with pen-portraits of the squad members – brief 50-70 word profiles and ODI statistics.

Up to that point, I had only a nebulous sense of what was happening in the cricketing world, and of the basic rules of the sport; cricket had never figured too prominently on my personal radar. Also, as it happened there hadn’t been too much of a buzz in the recent past: India played astonishingly little international cricket in the one-and-a-half years leading up to WC-96 and their most recent home series, against New Zealand, had been largely washed out. (A statistic I enjoy parroting is that Sachin Tendulkar scored fewer Test runs in the calendar year 1995 than the English tailenders Angus Fraser and Devon Malcolm did – and not because he was out of form.)

But as 1996 dawned and I heard people in college discussing the various teams, favourites to win the tournament and so on, I felt interest growing in me. The booklet, and the layman-friendly way in which it presented all the things one needed to know about the teams and the players, was the final stepping stone to a world that so many people around me already inhabited.

Another thing that helped was this strange fascination I have for thinking about numbers (dates, running times of movies, telephone numbers, even licence plate numbers of random vehicles on the road) –turning them over in my head, playing with permutations and combinations. Flipping through the booklet, my eye went straight to the run aggregates and batting averages of the cricketers (like most rookie cricket fans, I didn’t care about the bowlers) and I started making mental comparisons, reading meaning into the statistics.

With all the artlessness of the amateur who doesn’t understand finer nuances, I was deeply struck by the fact that Navjot Sidhu had the highest average of any member of the Indian team – a little over 40 (Kambli was close behind, though with far fewer runs). In fact, this early impression was to lead to a mercifully brief phase where I constructed a whole romance around Sidhu being the most valuable, and most undervalued, member of the squad. (Incidentally Tendulkar and Mohammed Azharuddin both averaged 36 point something at that stage, for around 3,000 and 5,000 runs respectively.)

[I also remember being surprised by the entry for Australia’s Michael Bevan, which showed that he averaged 82.1 but had a highest score of only 78. Not knowing that “not outs” weren’t considered when computing averages, I didn’t see how this was possible, and decided it was a typo.]

Anyway, with the booklet constantly by my side, I settled down to World Cup 1996. By the time the tournament ended, two things had happened: one, I was a cricket fan for life (or so I thought then), and two, I realised that it didn’t matter much to me whether India won or lost. Sure, I was annoyed at the way that semi-final against Sri Lanka turned out, peeved (after the post-match deconstruction had begun) by Azharuddin’s decision to bat first. But I couldn’t begin to relate to the gloom that seemed to have descended over everyone I met after the match ended.

Coming at a time when I didn’t write much or articulate things about my worldview (even to myself), this would become a catalyst for self-analysis. Over time, it would help me come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t a patriot; that I didn’t understand why the concept should be so highly valued; that it was all right not to be obsessed with the idea of “my country”; that however much people would like to think of “positive, constructive patriotism” as something entirely distinct from nasty jingoism, the line between the two can become non-existent very quickly.

Of course, however lofty the idea of humanity taking precedence over patriotism might be in the context of general interactions between people, they can’t apply in the same way to sporting contests – where the whole idea is to produce a winner. To deal with this, I had to draw a distinction between my personal feelings about cricket on the one hand, and the public (or “official”) stance on the other. The official stance was that, well, of course the team is bigger than the individual and when there is a clear-cut case of individual goals conflicting with team goals, it has to be obvious which one to choose. But my private position was: what I’m really concerned with is the performances of my favourite players, everything else be damned.

This personal conundrum about teams vs individuals has stayed with me through the last 10 years. What enthralled me about cricket was not whether a particular team won or lost, but the little human dramas that were played out through the course of a match. I was fascinated with the minutiae; the bigger picture never seemed to matter that much. Where I was concerned, it were individuals that made the sport worth watching. Lara. S Waugh. Shane Warne. Wasim Akram. Aravinda De Silva. Andy Flower. A few years later, Adam Gilchrist.

And then of course there was Tendulkar, my obsession with whom began belatedly, a few months after WC96, with a gorgeous 85 he scored in a match against Sussex early in India’s tour of England. The next two years marked his finest times as a batsman (though they also included his sorry first stint as captain) – and as it happened, that period coincided with some serious troughs in my life. There were entire days, weeks, months during which Tendulkar’s innings were the only bright spots, quite irrespective of the result of the match.

Looking back, I don’t know why I ever assumed my interest in cricket would last forever. I probably thought the way it worked was that old heroes would keep getting replaced by new ones, and the show would go on indefinitely. I suppose that is how it works for most people. But after my first 3-4 seasons of following the sport (a time when I used to watch every single match that was on, get up religiously at 5.30 AM for every day of every Test played in Australia), there was a significant decline in the frequency of my cricket-watching. I started working full-time, got busy with other things; life was no longer as empty as it had been for extended periods between 1996-1998. Though I admired many of the younger cricketers (the ones who made their debuts in the past 4-5 years, or the ones, like Dravid, who became superstars in the past 4-5 years), I never had the time or inclination to turn them into personal heroes. Meanwhile, one by one, the early heroes retired: Aravinda, Akram, Steve Waugh. Lara continued to be the proverbial box of chocolates, Warne was out of the sport for a while.

And Tendulkar’s place in the scheme of things began to change too, starting with that famous 2001 series between India and Australia. In the first Test in Mumbai, he top-scored in each innings (with a 76 and a 65) as most others struggled. At that point in time, his combined Test average against Australia and South Africa (the two best teams in the world) was around 48. No one else in the Indian team came close to this; even Dravid, already acclaimed for his solidity in difficult situations, averaged less than 30 against those two countries. But that Mumbai Test marked the beginning of the end of SRT’s famous string of back-to-the-wall performances in lost causes. The next match was the famous one at Kolkata, with Laxman, Harbhajan and Dravid the heroes. Subsequently, as Sachin’s decline began, as injuries became more frequent, as Dravid and Sehwag became, respectively, India’s number one and number two Test batsmen, as India recorded famous victories under Ganguly’s captaincy without SRT playing the defining role in any of them, I became increasingly apathetic to Indian cricket. Watching India win had never been a point of attraction in itself, and watching others lead the team to victories held little charm for me.

It feels strange to know that cricket might not matter at all soon. But that doesn’t stop me from being curious: sometimes I wish I could peek 10 years into the future to see whether there will still be any residual feelings towards the game then. On one level, I hope there will.

[This was a very difficult post to write, and of course there's plenty I've had to leave out, but some of the things I’ve recently read have made it easier. Like this post by Rahul Bhatia, where he says “I could never be as emotional about India as I have been about Tendulkar.” It was quite startling to hear such a sentiment expressed by someone else (that too a professional cricket writer who is expected to be pragmatic about the game). Kadambari Murali wrote an impassioned personal piece in the Hindustan Times a few days ago, as did Nirmal Shekar (a long-time Tendulkar loyalist) in The Hindu. And another strange thing has been happening. With news of SRT’s latest injury (assuming there is one at all) and the realisation that the Tendulkar Era is coming to a conclusive end (in fact, might even have ended already without us having had time to prepare for it), people seem to be softening. In the last few days some friends/acquaintances who have been fiercely critical of him in the past have said things I never expected to hear from them.]