My first captain

I was immeasurably saddened by this morning’s obituary notice about Vaastu Sastri S Raman, who was my first captain in the Madras cricket league back in the 1960s (not counting the 1962-63 season when I warmed the benches for MRC ‘B’). I had been meaning to make contact with him for the past few months, because I remember him with gratitude for recognising my talent and encouraging me unstintingly when I was a beardless stripling. The path to hell is paved with good intentions, and I kick myself for missing yet another opportunity to do the right thing by old friends and mentors. The following was written a while ago and will be part of my forthcoming book.

"Do you remember who got dropped by the MRC B captain in a league match back in the sixties after his team entered the field and a quick headcount revealed twelve on the ground?" he asked. Though taken aback by these opening remarks of the bridegroom at a recent wedding I attended at Coimbatore, even as I greeted him, I knew the answer in no uncertain terms. "It was me," I informed Krishna, but he was not so sure, so he asked his father, N Murali, who bowled medium pace for the club after I left it. "It was either your brother Sivaramakrishnan or 'Vaalberi'," he confidently asserted, referring to Thyagarajan of that unfortunate nickname.

I maintained my stand and confronted "Bobji" Rangaswami -- who had led the side in 1962 and pointed the offending finger that signalled my inglorious exit from Teachers College B. "Bobji" smiled vaguely but seemed to have no recollection of the episode. Soon enough, in came Vaalberi, who too stoutly denied being given the marching orders after entering the ground all those years ago, but admitted to carrying a grudge still about being unfairly excluded on some other occasions, mainly on account of a rival's superior resources that enabled him to foot the lunch bill at matches.

 Murali was still not convinced I had been the victim of Bobji's belated success at counting up to twelve, so two days later, he asked my brother at the reception held at Chennai, if it had been he who had suffered the indignity of being found supernumerary at such a late hour. Sivaramakrishnan assured him that he had never played for MRC B and that the child prodigy he had in mind had indeed been his brilliant and deserving elder brother.

 Murali should not have bothered to ask so many people, because I could never be wrong about an incident that had had me close to tears. Ask any fifteen year old who has been dropped from the eleven - before or after the toss -- and he will tell you that he is not likely to forget the experience in a hurry. To be dropped after actually crossing the ropes to take the field was much worse than my friend Balu's experience of being run out first ball of the match off a ricochet from the bowler's hand, after he had sat up all night brushing up on Don Bradman's coaching tips for batsmen.

Though that first year in league cricket was forgettable in terms of personal achievement, the lunches courtesy the Hindu family were excellent, and I learnt to swear like a Madras rickshaw wallah from the good doctor Bala who opened our innings.

My second season was memorable. Playing for Jai Hind CC under the adventurous captaincy of the inimitable S Raman, I blossomed as an off spinner. He had complete faith in my bowling ability and gave me some superbly attacking fields. He was our best - and often only batsman - and my bowling efforts were wasted as my team invariably crashed to two-digit totals, losing ten matches and barely managing to draw one.

Decades later, Raman—a  good TT player in his youth like his younger brothers Lakshmanan and Bharathan, and now a vaastu expert—stopped me at a petrol station and extolled my bowling virtues, much to my embarrassment, moved as I was by his warmth and generosity. "You are good enough to play for India; next time I meet Venkataraghavan, I'll ask him why you could not play along with him for the state, so that the national selectors can consider you," he threatened. This was at the end of my career, but Raman felt I was still fit enough to bowl off spin for Tamil Nadu and India!

My embarrassment that morning was nothing compared to what I was to experience soon afterwards. He accosted Venkat and me at the upanayanam ceremony of a young cricketer, and actually proceeded to ask him why he had done nothing to promote my cricket career. He gave him a detailed account of my many sterling qualities of head and heart, and described the glory of my flight and the viciousness of my spin in such glowing terms that a passerby would have been pardoned for mistaking the object of his admiration to be Jim Laker or Erapalli Prasanna.

(The brothers S Raman, S Lakshmanan (bharatanatyam artiste Krishnaveni’s husband) and S Bharathan were all outstanding sportsmen in cricket and table tennis. All three of them are no more).

The unpretentious precursor of T20

The unpretentious precursor of T20

School Spotlight: ‘Mozart of Indian Music’ visits Middleton-Cross Plains : Wsj

School Spotlight: ‘Mozart of Indian Music’ visits Middleton-Cross Plains : Wsj

Made for each other - The Hindu

Made for each other - The Hindu

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http://epaper.dnaindia.com/story.aspx?edorsup=Sup&queryed=820009&querypage=12&boxid=14403&id=22835&eddate=2012-7-23&ed_date=2012-7-23&ed_code=820009&wintype=popup

Winning it for Sachin

I WROTE THIS BEFORE THE FINAL OF WORLD CUP 2011

I have been incapable of hero worship all my life—though I respect many great people—with the possible exception of Sir Garfield Sobers, quite simply the best all round cricketer of all time. I grew very fond of the boy Tendulkar when he first burst on the international cricket scene and loved watching him in the 1992 World Cup, for instance, when we all found his new uninhibited brand of opening batting so refreshing and exciting. The endearing innocence of his schoolboyish approach to batting suggested that he believed every ball could be hit for four or six. And, like any sensible cricket follower, I watched in silent admiration the purity of his straight drive, the speed of his flashing blade and his incredible enthusiasm for all aspects of the game.

Over the years, the admiration grew into awe, as Tendulkar kept smashing record after record, demolishing the world’s leading bowlers along the way. Who could ever forget his mastery of Shane Warne or his duels with Glen McGrath, not to mention his almost casual dalliance with Shoaib Akhtar and Co. in the 2003 World Cup?

Admiration, yes. Awe, yes. Hero worship, no. For long years, I held the opinion that Gavaskar and Viswanath were greater batsmen, each in his own way. I held against Tendulkar his tendency to crawl in his nineties, and his perceived inability to finish matches.

Over time, I was forced by his phenomenal success against all comers on all kinds of surfaces, in all forms of the game, to modify that view, and concede that after all, he is possibly the greatest batsman of all time, save Bradman—whose statistics place him above all else.

More recently, in the post Ganguly era, Tendulkar seemed almost unattractively mortal in his scratchy, overcautious approach to batting, and I joined the chorus, albeit small, that started asking why he was not retiring from the game he had adorned in his previous, more natural incarnation as a batsman.

All of a sudden, yet another Tendulkar miracle occurred, and he started visibly enjoying his game, playing an altogether more natural brand of cricket, and accumulating runs at will, while at the same time pleasing the purist as well as the plebeian. And in what has been an altogether more delightful development, he has scripted many memorable wins for India, frequently from hopeless situations. The golden run continues, and it seems the Little Master can do no wrong, and when he has the rare off day, the opposition is too stunned, it seems, to hold on to his catches.

A whole new generation of Sachin fans born after his Test debut has sprung up everywhere. They invade every cricket ground, every venue from drawing room to barroom where cricket is watched, to sing Saachin…Sacheen, cheer every ball he fields and erupt everytime he puts bat to ball. They want to will the Indian team to win the World Cup, because they believe the Indian team cannot do it on its own. They want the Indian team to win the World Cup not only for the millions, but also, and most of all, for the Little Master. ‘Win it for Sachin, it’s his last World Cup,’ is the cry everywhere.

I was annoyed at first by this almost infantile obsession with one man, one hero, one icon, to the exclusion of everything else that I hold dear in the game of cricket. What kind of obsession is this that drives an entire nation of drooling adolescents, I asked. How does it matter if one man finishes on the winning side, when someone like VVS Laxman has never even played a single World Cup match, I almost cried out loud. Does this Indian team have what it takes to win the Cup, I argued. Does it have the fielding, does it possess the firepower in its attack, do its batsmen have the stomach, the heart, to do it on the big stage, match after match till they reach the pinnacle? Time and again, I came up with one constant answer: No.

Once the Cup starts, I begin to sing a different tune. Old man Tendulkar—isn’t he the oldest member of this team?—repeatedly shows how young at heart he still is: by the way he runs after the ball in the deep, swoops on it and throws flat and furious back to the wicket keeper; by the way he runs between wickets; by the price he puts on his wicket, cursing himself when he gets out unnecessarily; by the simple grandeur of his strokeplay, eschewing the fancy stuff most of the time; by the obvious affection he has for his young teammates and his unadulterated joy at their successes; by his sheer enjoyment of the team’s memorable wins over Australia and Pakistan; his thoughtfulness in praising his captain, colleagues and the crowd while accepting the man-of-the-match award.

Yes, I am a convert now. I want India to win the final. For herself and her millions of cricket lovers. For Captain Cool MS Dhoni and his brave warriors. But also for Sachin Tendulkar, the boy who tried to grow up, but decided to go back to being a boy all over again. For the love of cricket.

It will be a great moment if India does finish on the winning post. It will be a peak unmatched since 1983. It will be a peak that the team will have to scrap hard to defend, especially in the post-Tendulkar scenario, about to unfold before all of us. But if they lose to Sri Lanka after playing the best cricket they can, I’ll have no regrets. For I’ll know India—and Tendulkar—did their best. And that will be a great victory, too.

Guru Bishan Singh Bedi

"OUT OF 24 hours, you spend six hours on the cricket field. What do you do with the rest? Do you read? Go to the theatre? Listen to music? You must have a life beyond cricket. Cricket is a game that demands intellect, maturity, independent decision making ability, and all this, you cannot acquire by merely playing cricket."

This was Bishan Singh Bedi, left arm spinner extraordinaire from Indian cricket's fabled past of 30 years ago. He was addressing a young spin bowling prospect, during a practice match arranged at Chennai to provide exposure to slow bowlers who had arrived from Australia to polish their art with the help of India's past masters. The visitors belonging to the Australian Cricket Academy were in Chennai, courtesy the MRF Pace Foundation, to learn a few lessons from great spinners like Bedi and Erapalli Prasanna. This has obviously been seen as a successful experiment, as the ACA has been sending its boys here for the last couple of years.

Between watching the match in progress and making notes on his wards' performance, Bedi was dipping into a book on leadership. He also found material relevant to his theme of the inter- relatedness of sport and other facets of life in The Hindu's Folio on 'Reaching Out' and encouraged his trainees to read it, as part of a mind-expanding exercise.

The sardar is a firm believer in the key role that the psychological aspects of cricket play in the success or failure of a player or a team. "I am not spending too much time on technique with these boys," he says. Instead, he is concentrating on instilling self-confidence in his young pupils, the ability to reflect calmly when under siege, and thinking a batsman out. The thought processes and confidence level of each bowler are reflected in his field placings, for instance. An off spinner who needs a sweeper cover is obviously lacking in self-belief, and he has just told the batsman and the whole world that he is making contingency plans for bad bowling. In his playing days, Bedi was a practitioner of yoga to stay physically and mentally fit and he had a few followers among international cricketers, wicket keeper Alan Knott of England one who took serious lessons from him.

All round knowledge and thinking ability are essential not only for sportsmen but also for sports administrators, says Bedi. Illustrating what can happen when these are absent, he recalled how India foolishly agreed to a proposal by England that as part of the playing conditions of India's tour of England in 1979, the number of fielders on the onside would be restricted to five. This spelled disaster to the Indian spinners, especially the off spinners, as it forced them to have one fielder more than they needed on the offside and one fielder too few on the legside. What is worse, they were simply unused to a field like that, and could not make the necessary adjustments to bowl well in the Test series.

Bedi was constantly challenging the boys to think for themselves, and to articulate their views on a variety of topics. "What is the difference between joy and happiness?" he asked one of them. The boy made a brave attempt and Bishan was quick to appreciate the effort, but he provided the answer himself, to set the youngster thinking on the right lines.

"Imagine your father has bought you a new car for your 21st birthday. How do you feel when he hands over the keys to you? Don't you feel joyous and excited? But what happens after a couple of months? You are still happy to drive a car, but that sense of unbridled joy will be missing, won't it?" he asked. "Enjoy your cricket. Don't let the joy factor disappear. That's the key to a successful cricket career."