#
What makes us who we are to a large extent is the things that we love, the things that
#
we care about, even the things that we are obsessed with. Millions of Indians over the
#
decades have been shaped by cricket and united by their common love for this game. But today
#
it's all changing. In the last few years, aided by technology, the world around us has
#
been transformed and we live different lives today with many more choices and therefore
#
much less time. Who can watch the leisurely drama of test cricket unfold over five endless
#
days? The rhythm of our lives has changed and so has the way that most of us relate
#
to cricket. Those of us who fell in love with this subtle and sophisticated game often lament
#
how things are not the same. But is our greater lament directed perhaps towards ourselves?
#
If so much of ourselves have been shaped by a game that itself seems out of place in this
#
modern world, what does that say about us? What are we really lamenting?
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen. My guest today is a great historian and fellow cricket
#
tragic Ramachandra Guha, who has just released a delightful new book called The Commonwealth
#
of Cricket, a lifelong love affair with the most subtle and sophisticated game known to
#
humankind. Contrary to the impression I might have given with my introduction earlier, this
#
book is not a lament, but a celebration of cricket from a man who has been obsessed with
#
it, laid it at a decent level and has written about it extensively. Ram has been on my show
#
three times before. We did a two part special on Mahatma Gandhi last year, which was all
#
about history. And we did a popular Republic Day episode a few months ago, which was all
#
about politics. Today's episode is going to be about cricket. A quick note before we
#
move on though, I teach two online courses on writing and podcasting and registration
#
for both of them is open now. The art of clear writing builds a prism through which you can
#
look at your own writing and that of others and which aims to make you your own best writing
#
coach. For more details and to sign up, head on over to indiancut.com slash clear writing.
#
The art of podcasting will give you conceptual tools on how to think about audio and podcasting
#
and will feature deep dives into storytelling and interviewing. To sign up, go to scene
#
on scene dot i n slash learn. Both courses cost rupees 10,000 plus GST or about a hundred
#
and fifty dollars each and they are linked from the show notes. And now it's time to
#
get on with the show, but first a quick commercial break. There isn't a day that goes by when
#
I don't feel thankful to be living in these times. When I was a kid growing up in the
#
1980s, there was a limit to how much you could read and how much you could learn. But today
#
all the knowledge in the world is one click away. This episode's sponsor is an awesome
#
site called the great courses plus. If you head on over to the great courses plus dot
#
com, you'll find a crazy library of online courses on subjects ranging from music, math,
#
cooking, history, political theory and anything else you can think of actually. In fact, there's
#
a course from there that I've been engrossed in and would like to recommend. It's called
#
your deceptive mind, a scientific guide to critical thinking skills taught by Steven
#
Novella, a prominent figure in what is known as a skeptical movement. The lecture titles
#
for this course include the necessity of thinking about thinking, the neuroscience of belief,
#
flaws and fabrications of memory, pattern recognition, seeing what's not there, our
#
constructed reality, heuristics and cognitive biases and critical thinking and science in
#
your life. It's just one of the many great courses at the great courses plus and you
#
can get one month of unlimited free access if you use the following URL, the great courses
#
plus dot com slash unseen. That's right. Unseen, the great courses plus dot com slash unseen
#
for one month of unlimited free access. What are you waiting for?
#
Ram, welcome to the scene and the unseen. Thank you. I'm the last two times the last
#
three times in fact that you've been here. We've shared a number of different emotions,
#
our mutual admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, our mutual disdain for Narendra Modi and Rahul
#
Gandhi and I was looking forward to this episode because this time it's about our mutual love
#
for cricket. I just loved reading your book. It brought back, you know, although you were
#
writing, it was almost like a story of your life, but so many memories from my own life
#
came back to me of having watched and fallen in love with different aspects of cricket.
#
So, you know, in the spirit of things, I want to begin this with a loosen up. You know,
#
you're very fond of all time 11s or, you know, wickets in the east had all time 11s of different
#
states and provinces and so on. In this book, you've got all time 11s of cricketers you've
#
shaken hands with cricketers you've seen in the flesh and so on. I'm going to ask you
#
and I think all our listeners will be immediately perked up at this because everybody loves
#
lists. So give me an all time Indian test 11.
#
So, Gavaskar and Sehwag and I discuss in the book, a conversation Suresh Menon and I had
#
in the Chinnaswamy stadium where we agonized over whether it will be Gavaskar or Merchant
#
partnering with Sehwag. So Gavaskar and Sehwag, we eventually went for Gavaskar. Number three
#
would be Dravid, not because he's from Bangalore. Number four would be Satin Tendulkar, not
#
because he's from Bombay, which I generally detest and I always want Bombay to lose.
#
Number five, again, as described in the book for a long time, the choice of between the
#
my boyhood hero, G.R. Vishwanath and my uncle's boyhood hero, Vijay Hazare. But now I think
#
Virat Kohli has a unchallenged place to that spot. Number five, number six and seven are
#
very easy. There are two greatest all rounders. Vinu Mankar has six and Kapil Deva has seven.
#
I'll leave eight for the moment. So you have nine, 10, 11. Now, obviously, Kumle has to
#
be one. So he's, you know, he's our greatest spin bowler ever, arguably our greatest spin
#
bowler, but he has been nine. So that's 10 and 11. One more fast bowler for sure. And
#
again, I would set aside my partisanship in favor of Karnataka, which would want me
#
to choose Javagal Srinath or my historian's nostalgic eye, which would want me to put
#
Amar Singh and I would choose Zahir Khan because left arm, change of pace, good in all conditions.
#
Now number 11, if you're at home, it would have to be one more spinner. And I think it
#
would have to be Arapali Prasanna because we did an off spinner. I mean, we have Vinu
#
Mankar. So it's tragically can't be Bheri. So Bheri was a greater bowler than Mankar.
#
Mankar is an all rounder, must be there. It can't be Bheri because you have Vinu Mankar.
#
It can't be Suvash Gupta or Chandrasekhar because we have the wrist spinner. Kumle, it has to
#
be an off spinner. And I know Ashwin's record is extraordinary, but he hasn't really proved
#
himself in test matches abroad in the way Prasanna did, for example, in Australia or
#
in West Indies, right? So, or in New Zealand also. So that is number eight. Now I've left
#
number eight for the last because that may be my most controversial choice. Before I
#
come to number eight. So Prasanna as our third spinner to complement Kumle and Mankar, if
#
we are playing in the subcontinent, if you're playing overseas in South Africa or Australia
#
or England, we may need a third seam bowler instead of the third spinner. And I think
#
that could, though I've mentioned Srinath, it would have to be Amar Singh because Amar
#
Singh was a fabulous swing bowler. And, you know, hugely admired by Wally Hammond and
#
Larry Constantine, two of his greatest contemporaries. And I think that tells you how remarkable
#
a bowler he was. He was also a decent bat and by all accounts a fabulous fielder. Now
#
number eight is the wicket keeper. Now, here's, I think, where I am going to be controversial
#
and lay myself open to the charge of being partisan in favor of someone from my hometown
#
for a test side, not for a one day side, for a test side would have to be Kirmani Omu Dhoni.
#
Because first of all, Dhoni again, as a batsman, there's actually little to choose between
#
them in test cricket. Kirmani was a great fighter down the order. Again, Dhoni never
#
scored overseas in test cricket really. And as an all-round keeper, particularly to spin
#
bowling and to fast bowling. I mean, the catches he took of Kapil Dev or the way he kept to
#
be a sardishekhar. To keep to kumlai, you certainly want Kirmani and not Dhoni. So that
#
would be my most controversial choice. So to repeat these 11 in batting order, Gavaskar,
#
Stehwar, Dravid, Tendulkar, Kohli, Makkad, Kapil Dev, Kirmani, Kumlai, Prasanna and Zahir
#
Yep. A fantastic 11. And I'll quickly read out my 11, though I won't explain it, but
#
just read out my 11 because listeners will no doubt be interested. And the first six
#
are actually in common with you. Gavaskar, Stehwar, Dravid, Kohli. I have Kohli at four,
#
Tendulkar at five, Makkad at six. Then Dhoni, Kapil. And I have picked Ashwin and Kumlai.
#
And the 11th is more on the basis of what I think will transpire. And it's a bit of
#
a, we are talking of an ongoing career, which is I'm picking Bumrah to accompany Kapil with
#
Yeah. I mean, around the two years in, I think Bumrah might be in my 11 too. And maybe ahead
#
of Zahir Khan. Ahead of Zahir Khan is the second fast bowler to be with Kapil. And sure,
#
sure. I mean, Bumrah is, I think, one of the way, very likely, more likely than Ashwin
#
to get into my 11 actually.
#
Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, you're picking Prasanna over Ashwin and say my picking, you know,
#
someone like Kohli over Vishwanath is reminds me of what, you know, you've written in your
#
book about the two chauvinisms, nationalism and generation. Yeah. And nationalism, of
#
course, I'd like to discuss in length with you later on in the episode. Yeah. But maybe
#
I think, I think, I mean, you're picking Dhoni over Kirmani is much more the question of generation
#
more than Kohli over Vishwanath. Kohli is truly, truly great. You know, there's a story
#
I tell in an earlier book. I think it's in spin another turn of a match I was watching
#
in about 2001, which was some eight or nine years after Kirmani had played his last test
#
match. It was the Chinnaswamy stadium. It was a one day international between India
#
and England. More missed a tough catch down the left side of, I think, Mike Gatton. And
#
next to me, there was a coloring, I understand. Just, I'd never seen it. He muttered, he said,
#
Kirmani would never have dropped that. That was the first thing he said. The second thing
#
he said, addressing More, bring him back even today and he'll keep better than you, which
#
was completely unfair to More, who was a five cricketer, decent wicket keeper, a battling
#
person down the order. And, but that's what Kirmani was. I mean, that kind of emotions
#
for his wicket keeping and not just here, not just here. I mean, you know, same fabulous,
#
fabulous keeper. And, you know, if you've not seen him live, you know, you'll never know
#
what kind of keeper he was. Fair enough. I mean, it also the availability heuristic has
#
worked. One has seen Dhoni recently, though for the last two years in whatever I've written
#
have been extremely critical of him because I think he's been a liability to the side
#
in the shorter forms of the game. Overstayed is welcome. And of course, his conflicts of
#
interests were just, I think, unpardonable, utterly unpardonable. And the other sort of
#
interesting point that comes is here is that, you know, both of us have chosen Vino Mankad
#
and I remember sharing this team of mine with a friend and my friend just, you know, sent
#
me a couple of links. One was to Vino Mankad's record. The other was to Pauli Umregar's record.
#
And obviously on paper, Umregar has a better stats. And it tells you that, you know, there
#
is so much that stats don't reveal all the years that Mankad missed because of the war
#
and all of that and how some of his performances came when he was like 42, you know, when he
#
played his last test match and all of that. So I think, you know, cricket tragics might
#
have a slightly different view of the world. Let's kind of move on to, you know, what one
#
of the things that delighted me about the Commonwealth of Cricket is that it is more
#
in a sense about the Commonwealth of Ram Guha. I mean, it's essentially an autobiography of
#
a very deep and abiding love for the game. So I have sort of, you know, and I want to
#
go through, you know, all of that, your childhood, your youth, playing in Stevens, all of that.
#
But before that, a broader question, which is, and I'll explain why I asked this. And
#
the question itself is this, that would you have been a different person if cricket had
#
not existed? And, you know, the reason I asked this is that it seems to me, and there's a
#
dual question in this and another larger question about test cricket in particular, that I've
#
been thinking recently about how the form of what we do, whether it is the kind of writing
#
that we do or the kind of podcast we do or whatever that shapes our work and then our
#
work shapes our personality. And therefore the forms that we engage with shapes the people
#
that we become. In a similar sense, it seems to me that number one, the form of cricket
#
is ideally suited for a time where there isn't much opportunity cost to time because there
#
aren't so many forms of entertainment competing with cricket. Correct. Cricket is what there
#
is. And then that whole sort of immersive act of watching something day in, day out,
#
looking deep into something, you know, and cricket, like you said, that time allows you
#
to notice all these subtleties, especially subtleties of character to express themselves,
#
which obviously will then also impress themselves on the fans of cricket. So, you know, do you
#
think that your love for cricket and in fact our love for cricket, people of our generation
#
who love cricket to some extent are shaped by the way the game is and that in the modern
#
day, you know, things have changed because people have very fragmented interests and,
#
you know, that sort of patience for the longer form just isn't there. You're absolutely right.
#
And it is a very important question, yours and let me reflect on it and answer it as
#
slowly and as carefully as I can. But to begin with a minor disagreement, it is a minor disagreement.
#
I see this book not as an autobiography, but as a memoir because it's much more about what
#
I've seen and observed than what I have played or achieved. Right. So it's a fine distinction.
#
It's a, you know, it's a hair splitting petty pedantic distinction. But I see this more
#
as a memoir, creating memoir than an autobiography. Anyway, that said, for example, Sudeet Mukherjee's
#
book, An Autobiography of an Unknown Cricketer is more an autobiography, firstly, because
#
he played much better cricket than me. He was a 20-year-old player and he describes the
#
matches and including his earrings and his spells in my period here. But that said, that's
#
a caveat. So we left that aside. Now, I think one of the things I don't really talk about
#
much in this book is radio. Right. I mentioned it briefly, but I grew up at a time well before
#
you. I mean, you were, you came of cricketing maturity before the smartphone, but the television
#
was already probably part of your life when you were a little boy. Right. But I was the
#
first cricket match I watched live on television was when I was 20. And it was not played in
#
India. It was played in Pakistan. It was our tour of Pakistan in 77, 78, it was telecast
#
live, 78, the winter of 78, which was telecast live. So I never had live television in my
#
drawing room growing up. I had the radio and the radio meant you have to imagine. I mean,
#
again, the sense of imagination and creativity that the radio fosters, particularly when
#
communicated by high quality commentators like John Hallert or Tony Cozdear or Anil
#
Madhuri or Trevor Bailey or Lindsay Hussett. You have to imagine the stoke, the fielding,
#
the ball, the setting, the crowd, you know, and so on and so forth. Right. So I think
#
it stalks that kind of imagination. And of course, it's a long duration. So you get up
#
at five 13 is a match in Australia and listen to lunch break, your lunch break, which is
#
the end of play for them. So I think that's certainly why it's kind of deep leisurely
#
interest was stoke by the fact that there wasn't even television. It was radio. And
#
of course, they weren't competing interest. I mean, there was no television. There was
#
no smart smartphone. You could just indulge it all the time. You could, of course, read
#
about it. You could play about it. You could discuss it. But in my case, I mean, there
#
would be many cricket lovers like me. So if you take someone who is an exact contempt,
#
almost exact contempt of your mind, a very wonderful writer on the game, who both of
#
us admire, and a wonderful writer and many other things as well, Mukul Kesavan. Now Mukul
#
Kesavan, I think was born is a little few months older than me. But we were joined says
#
Steven's college the same year we graduated from high school in the same year. And actually,
#
we first became friends listening because I had one of the few transistors in the hostel
#
book was a day scholar and the winter sun when you could actually sit out of the lawn
#
in Delhi again, think of the blue sky, no pollution. And I'm in with my transistor in
#
the in the quadrangle, listening to the Australia series of 7778 when he was captain and got
#
300s. And of course, Australia was depicted by Packer. And Mukul joins me sitting on the
#
lawn and check it now. Now if you take Mukul, the difference in Mukul and me, not many differences.
#
I mean, his sense of style, I can't remotely ever think of equally is I think the best
#
word for word, the best writer in English in India today. All right. However, cricketing
#
wise, there's an important difference between Mukul's absolute obsession for cricket and
#
mine, which is that Mukul never played cricket except in the guddy. He did not play for his
#
school. He did not play this college. But what that meant was that, of course, I was
#
much more consumed by the game than Mukul. But I also other sides of my personality were
#
underdeveloped. Maybe if Mukul had been as good a cricketer as I was good enough to play
#
for the college, then he wouldn't have had the kind of refined poetic sensibility that
#
I totally like. Because when he was not listening to cricket, he was reading, you know, Latins
#
and Emmys and Conquest and so on. So in some ways, and now when I compare myself to my
#
son Keshava, whom you also know, and who's also a cricketer, who's also a cricketer,
#
I mean, by the age of 20, he had that much more than I ever had. Because again, like
#
Mukul, he wasn't really a competitive cricketer. So there are also costs to that kind of obsession.
#
I don't regret it. But both the time, the available technologies, the lack of distractions
#
such as television and smartphone, the greater opportunity to develop an interest in a more
#
leisurely, drawn out way, full blown way, but also the fact that I was playing cricket
#
and was consumed by making it as a cricketer as well. That I think and count for the passion,
#
the intensity with which I have lived this game.
#
So tell me about your childhood. I mean, you know, one of the figures I've found it very
#
interesting to read about was your uncle, your mama, Mr. Duraishwami, who you said could
#
have played cricket for India easily had it not been for the fact that he had one bad
#
arm because of something that happened in childhood. So, you know, tell me about how
#
that love for cricket comes and was your playing cricket partly in a sense also influenced
#
by having a role model like him in the family who was such an outstanding cricketer and,
#
you know, obviously wanted you to do well as well.
#
Very, very much so. Very much so. I mean, as again, I talk about the book, the relationship
#
between with one's mama is particularly close, you know, mother's daughter. In this case,
#
he was devoted to my mother as well. He had no children of his own. I became the object
#
of his, both his affections and his unfulfilled ambitions. And he poured all that out on me.
#
So, of course, my father also played cricket, which I also relate in the book at a lesser
#
level than my father and uncle played club cricket together in Dehradun. When he was
#
growing up in Bangalore, my father had the good fortune of working in the same lab as
#
the father of the great Benjamin Frank, who's not forgotten now tragically, who should have
#
played for India, magnificent attacking batsman who played for Bengal and for Mysore and for
#
the rest in the pentagon. And, you know, was truly one of Karnataka's great pioneering
#
cricketers well before Vishwanath and David and so on. So my father knew Frank, Frank's
#
gifted him a bag. So there was a little bit of that already in the house, in my own little
#
house with my father. So we play, you know, on the lawn and my uncle as I relate my book
#
came on a visit, saw me bowl a leg break, beat my father on the outside edge, followed
#
by googly and beat my father as he went to drive ball through the gate. I have no recollection.
#
But Doré thought my nephew has two hands and two legs. He can bowl a leg break at
#
a googly at the age of five or six. I'm going to beat him, but let's pick it up. So yes,
#
I know. So Doré was certainly a great, great hero of mine growing up. And in many ways,
#
this book is a tribute to him, to our long standing relationship, including the occasional
#
disagreement, which I talk about in the book. And, you know, he, I never showed it to him.
#
So some of the facts about growing up are actually wrong. I mean, one fact he pointed
#
out to me was about the club he ran called Sporting Youngsters. Now, Sporting Youngsters
#
was a club, uh, which he founded in Jharagul. And one of the relationships that described
#
in the making of that club was between my uncle, the son of the senior most scientists
#
in the, on the Forestry Institute and a son of a chaparasi or peon called Ram Bahadur,
#
who was an Olympic footballer, apart from being an outstanding cricketer, another era
#
of my youth. But uncle, when he read the book told me there's an error. He said Sporting
#
Youngster was not founded by me. It was founded by my elder brother, Tungu. So I have five
#
mamas, Doris in between Tungu was older. And I kind of forgotten that because Tungu founded
#
Sporting Youngsters, left it to his younger brother to run and went off to become an engineer
#
in Germany. And probably started following, I think started following Bayer Munich. So,
#
but I did want to show this book to my uncle. So in the, so a couple of facts, now I kicked
#
myself that I should have also honored my other mama as well. He's no longer alive,
#
but as the true founder, you know, it's like writing about the Indian National Congress
#
only about Gandhi and not mentioning Dadabai Nawrozia, right? That kind of thing. So I
#
feel a bit sad about that, but that was inevitable because I didn't want Doris to know. And I,
#
my prayer was that he would live long enough for me to present him my first copy, which
#
I did. And he's been complaining ever since saying there's too much about me and not enough
#
about other people, including my brother Tungu who founded Sporting Youngsters.
#
And it's interesting, you should mention sort of this, because one of the sort of questions
#
that I had was, you know, about the nature of memory itself. Like, you know, when I read
#
about you being a leg break and googly baller, instantly my memory went back to my childhood
#
when I tried to learn leg break and googly when I was in school. Where was this? No,
#
this was in Chandigarh. So I have no storied history. I didn't even play for my school
#
unlike you. But I remember, you know, how I learned it. I learned it from this book by
#
this great English coach called Alf Gover. Yeah. And he'd written a book on coaching
#
and there were diagrams in that. And my memory of that suddenly was so sharp. Whereas cricket
#
wasn't even very that important to me. It's just that this was an early memory, which
#
was sharp. And one of the things I've noticed in your book is that there are so many incredibly
#
sharp, well-edged moments. You know, for example, I was struck by this early line in your book
#
where you say, quote, I have no memories of the first cricket match I saw yet I have heard
#
so much about it since that I can write about it as if I did. And then you describe it in
#
great detail. And in other places, you know, you, the first time you met Mansoor Ali Khan
#
Pataudi, you know, in the early seventies, you'd gone to the hotel to meet Kirmani to
#
ask for a ticket. Kirmani wasn't there. Mr. Pataudi was having breakfast. You asked him,
#
he said, Kiri's gone to the room. You left. But you remembered that he was having a fried
#
egg sunny side up. And you know, you've got all these little details. Like when you were
#
playing for Dehradun, there was a team from Serampur which had come and you throw in this
#
delicious detail, which, you know, the kind of thing I love in writing where you say that
#
Serampur had better leeches than Dehradun. And that's, and elsewhere you speak about,
#
you know, Lloyd smashing Prasanna and you write, quote, the ball traced a flaming path
#
over the turf, the stalks of grass, bowing their heads, crushed as a missile sped from
#
the giant Three Mound Mace to the boundary. Stop quote. And these are, of course, the
#
days before television. And you have sort of, you saw this live on the ground, I think.
#
I can still see, in fact, in my memory, though I don't repeat in the book, the stalks of
#
grass were crushed and the power of the ball striking them was so intense. Like when you
#
match lightning strikes, they went up. You could see some tiny flames. And that's kind
#
of my memory. I didn't put it in the book. Yeah. I mean, it was just Lloyd's back foot
#
play was just murderous. So what is it with memory? Like are these memories so sharp because
#
it was cricket and you were so obsessed with it and loved it? Or was it also a question
#
of that, you know, about memory? This they say that one remembers the extremes as one
#
grows older. You remember what just happened and you remembered your early youth and the
#
middle begins to fade. No, it is cricket. It is cricket. I mean, the other things that
#
I don't talk about in this book, memories of example, there was an innings which I can
#
describe to you now because it's not in the book because there was too much about my club
#
already in the book. Right. Now this is a match in about 19 probably 85 or 86. All right.
#
In 1987, because I was in America in 86, 87 Sudhakar Rao from my club, who was an India
#
reserve had stopped playing club cricket for eight or nine years. And my club was about
#
being relegated. He came back for this match to save my club staying in the first division.
#
And we were playing B.U.C.C. who are a great driver and still remain. I talk about Rahul
#
Dravid and Kirmani from B.U.C.C. and my speaking at their centenary function and so on. And
#
they had a wonderful fast bowler all around who later tragically died in a train accident
#
called Ranjit Kanvilkar who played for Karnataka and possibly also for South Dune. Marvelous
#
all rounder. And Sudhakar came back and he just came a little bit. He didn't even practice.
#
He took somebody's back. He came for this match and we were five down and they were
#
two. Those days you have to draw the match. They were two hours to play. And it was the
#
Chindeswamy stadium where occasionally actually a league match was held in those days. And
#
I went to watch. I came back from the University of Science. I heard my club was in trouble.
#
I went. I sat in the dressing room. So I went out when we were 40 for five and he played
#
for two hours. And I remember this 40 year old wanting to remind Ranjit Kanvilkar of
#
who he was. I mean, he played two crashing cover drives over this young, terribly fast
#
bowler, which I can still see the Chindeswamy stadium. I was watching the Pavilion and he
#
was batting on the Bermel end. Right now. So I can say it's not like 87 to 30 years
#
ago. Right. As an inconsequential club match. But it's Sudhakar Rao, the aging veteran who
#
had once almost played for India, who was part of Karnataka's first Ranji trophy winning
#
teams, coming to say his club stay and showing a young Turkish play stuff. So this is a kind
#
of thing because it's cricket because cricket means so much to me. I can remember incidents,
#
strokes, catches. One more memory, which is not in this book again, which I'll tell you
#
is about the World Cup match of 1999, India versus Pakistan in Manchester, which I watched
#
live. I mean, I've described it in the corner of a foreign field, but I don't describe this
#
particular incident. Saeed Anwar was batting beautifully. He was a 40 year old taking the
#
match away from us. I think we had 180 or 190 with a low score. And Mekatesh Prasad
#
who had got two or three wickets, got one to seam away, got Anwar's edge and Azhar lunge
#
left to his left and took the catch. Only Azhar could have taken that catch. Right. So this
#
was 1999. About 10 or 12 years later, I met Mekatesh Prasad at some KSC. I do. And I said
#
that Azhar catch. He said, sir, you remember the catch. You don't remember my five wickets.
#
I said, no, because the feat of athleticism that went into that catch. So if you watch
#
it live, I mean, do you remember these things on television? You really won't remember.
#
No, I know exactly what you mean because I have watched a lot of matches live. In fact,
#
I think one match where you describe yourself being in the press box 2005 India versus Pakistan
#
where Sehwag played that innings. I was actually in the press box. I don't remember you there.
#
But you know, you mentioned that you and Suresh Menon were there. And I think it was in that
#
press box for possibly, you know, a few feet away from me where you had that conversation
#
about who do you drop, Gavaskar or Merchant to sort of accommodate Sehwag. So let's go
#
back to sort of the personal narrative now that, you know, you're playing for your childhood.
#
You know, you become passionate about it in school. Meanwhile, your mamas moved away to
#
Bangalore, but you're still playing and then you decide that you want to go to Strain Stephens
#
and be part of the team there. And this almost seems like it becomes a mini obsession with
#
you for a period of time. So tell me about that period. Like at that point in time, were
#
you someone who was thinking that I want to play for India and you know, how did all of
#
that unravel? You know, it's again, this is where one has to be stop oneself and think
#
carefully of what was I thinking at that time. I mean, I was 16. I only wanted to go to St.
#
Stephens. I only wanted to play cricket in St. Stephens. And again, I don't talk about
#
this book because again, because it's mostly a memoir, not an autobiography. In January
#
19, I was already interested in writing. I won the best essay prize in my school. I wrote
#
for the school magazine. My favorite teacher, history teacher, the first person who got
#
me interested in history, had left the Doon School to join Sindhya School in Gwalior.
#
Again, just a bit of a digression, but I know your show encourages digressions. This man
#
was a very interesting man called Arthur Hughes. He was of the ICS, a Welshman of the ICS,
#
stayed on in India after independence, loved school teaching, joined the Doon School, where
#
he started a magazine called History Times. Obviously there were four editors, two of
#
whom were Amitav Ghosh and myself. The third was one of our most outstanding diplomats
#
called Gautam Mukhopadia. And there was a fourth, I can't currently forget. And I was
#
already interested in writing, vaguely in history because of Arthur Hughes. I graduated
#
in 1973. In those days, you are six months off between school and college. You know,
#
you finished your ISE in December and you joined university in July. So I'm six months
#
off and I got a letter from Arthur Hughes who had left the Doon School and joined Sindhya
#
School and said, there's a beautiful, anyone who knows the Sindhya School, what a fabulous
#
campus it is. Please come and teach for six months. There's a great library. You can talk
#
about history. You can nurture your writing skills. So I had this very attractive invitation,
#
you know, to develop my literary and historical interests as a 15 year old. And my uncle Doria
#
said, you have to come to Bangalore and play cricket with my club for six months. And I
#
don't know whether I did the right thing. I think I did the right thing because I saw
#
Karnataka beat Bombay. So I went only to play cricket and that was, so I gave up in a sense
#
a very interesting and exciting literary opportunity for a schoolboy to teach little kids, to,
#
you know, nurture them in the way Arthur Hughes was nurturing me, to talk to my mentor, my
#
first history mentor and use the great library that was there in the Sindhya School. So cricket
#
was playing with, sensitivity was my obsession. Did I think I would play for India? Probably
#
I kind of like it. I thought maybe Ranji Trophy, you know, unlike Doria had two hands, maybe
#
he didn't play Ranji Trophy, I can play Ranji Trophy. But I quickly realized in my first
#
year in college that even that was beyond me. Yeah. And it's really interesting. I was,
#
you know, it almost feels like who's who your time in Stephen's because it was not just
#
any college side. You know, Arun Lal was your captain. You mentioned how, you know, Rajinder
#
Ramanath was your batchmate. And what I was kind of intrigued by was, and you had of course
#
bowled to Mohinder Ramanath and Chetan Chauhan elsewhere. You got Raman Lamba out once famously,
#
which was sweet revenge after he talked to you about in a previous match. And one of
#
the sort of things that struck me about this was that, you know, your college mates also
#
included Piyush Pandey and Chandan Mitra. You've spoken about how once you went to watch
#
a match and besides you were Pranay on Radhika Roy, you've already spoken about how you and
#
Amitav Ghosh were co-editors of her magazine. Now, what kind of strikes me while reading
#
all these names and sort of from my own memories, which were much later, but from the eighties
#
is that people who made something of themselves in India by and large tended to be from a
#
small group of elites who all kind of knew each other. And it was that kind of circle.
#
And it's almost as if there's a similar thing in cricket, but you're living through a time
#
where you sort of describe a transition of that. Also, you talk about Sonnet Club and
#
how, you know, Sonnet Club just came up so suddenly. In fact, Lamba was from Sonnet Club,
#
as you mentioned. So tell me a little bit about that, because, I mean, how did that
#
change gradually, not just within cricket, but within society?
#
Absolutely. I mean, what that captures is the very narrow elite base of that time. I
#
mean, there was a very nice piece in Mint about my book by young writer Bhatia, where
#
he mentioned this, that, you know, I was, I bowled as a schoolboy to Tom Walter when
#
I was in college. I hitched a lift with Kiran Bedi, and later I watched him at the Pro-Hero
#
and so on. And none of them were famous then. I mean, Kiran Bedi was, because she was the
#
first female cop, so she was already known when she gave me a lift to the Mori Gate Cricket
#
Ground of St. Stephen's College. But the narrow base of the elite, and it was narrow. For
#
example, all the 50% of the IFS officers came from St. Stephen. The editors of English language
#
newspapers came from St. Stephen. Now, a lot of that has changed, and that's damn good.
#
I think that's damn good. There's been a deepening of the Indian middle class in this kind of
#
catchment area, the diversity of places people come from, and of course a deepening of the
#
catchment area of Indian cricket itself. And again, Karnataka beating Bombay in 1974 partly
#
paved the way for that. In Bollywood, I mean, I think there are some, I mean, though one
#
obviously deplores the manner in which Kangana Ranaut expresses her criticisms, there is
#
some truth to that, that Bollywood is also a club of inner people, the same families
#
promoting their own people, their own progeny and so on. St. Stephen's was completely elitist.
#
It was not elitist by, I'd say it was not elitist in class terms. Sometimes thought
#
it was of rich people, no. It was elitist in favoring those who are fluent in English.
#
So command over English was a marker of success in St. Stephen's, and then became a marker
#
of your success in the foreign service, in the bureaucracy, in journalism, in the corporate
#
world and so on. And fortunately, that has changed. And I think that's, that's a lot
#
to do with mandal and market, you know, deepening of the caste basis of the Indian elite and
#
the market where, you know, privilege and entitlement is rewarded, is not, is only rewarded
#
in the Congress party, you know, right? And very rarely outside the Congress party, which
#
is good, which is our democracy function. You know, one could actually trace the arc
#
of your admiration and contempt and just go from one Gandhi to another Gandhi. It kind
#
of strikes me like that. So you just said something interesting and I want to take a
#
digression and sort of mentioned that a bit because my next question was going to be about
#
your cricket writing in any case. And the digression is really, you know, that when
#
I sort of, I teach an online writing course and there I sometimes speak about how the
#
way that Indians speak English is shaped slightly because of this post-colonial baggage that
#
English has been a marker of class. And therefore we always want to signal our sophistication
#
by showing how good we are with English, what kind of fancy words we can use and all of
#
that. So one, what are your thoughts on that? And two, you made a sort of, you know, you
#
talk about your taste in cricket writing, you know, sort of shifting from Cardus and
#
A. Thompson and you obviously discovered Cardus's writing through Thompson as you point out
#
from Ray Robinson and Jack Fingleton, which, you know, exactly mirrors my taste as well.
#
So you know, how did that sort of aesthetic shift come about? And you know, how did your
#
taste evolve? And when you began to see yourself as a writer, who were the sort of writers
#
you looked up to? And when you wrote about cricket, you know, who were your models in
#
So first of all, though, not contrary, but complicating what I said about command over
#
English being an easy entree into the Indian ruling class, which it no longer is and happily
#
it no longer is. At the same time, I'd like to say that if you write in one language,
#
you should do it well and elegantly and accessibly and with style. So, you know, please don't
#
tell me that Chetan Bhagat is a better writer than Vikram Seth. He is not, you know, I mean,
#
they communicate into a certain audience. But as a lover of English, give me Vikram
#
Seth over Chetan Bhagat any day, in an aesthetic sense. So that way, I still set a great deal
#
of store by style. Since I write in English. If I wrote in Hindi, my models would not be,
#
you know, the khichdi that you see on television, but a great Hindi writer, whoever that might
#
be, right. Or likewise in Tamil and Bangla. So I have high aesthetic standards when it
#
comes to music, when it comes to literature, when it comes to cricket. You know, I don't
#
believe in dumbing down for the sake of satisfying political correctness. Why did I move from
#
Cardiff and Thompson to Robinson and Fingleton is principally because Fingleton and Robinson
#
understood the game better because they had played. Whereas Cardiff and Thompson were
#
just armchair guys. I mean, Cardiff played a little bit of cricket, which he talks about
#
memorably in his autobiography as his assistant master in a school. But I think the best writers
#
today, the best writer unquestioned is Gideon Haig because he understands the game, but
#
he also understands style. You know, he has wit, flair, a deep sense of history. And even
#
Fingleton later on became a professional journalist. He was also made his living as a wordsmith
#
writing about Australian politics. So let's not disparage Fingleton's style. Well, of
#
course, it wasn't as lyrical and effusive and sentimental and allegic as, as Thompson
#
or Cardiff, but it was good enough for the purpose at hand. And he had a masterly command
#
over the techniques, the laws, the idioms and the history of the game, right. As a person
#
who had played with Bradman and Bill O'Reilly and Walter Hammer and all the rest. So, but
#
you know, in a sense, you have a writer has to evolve their own style. So I don't think
#
I've drawn all these influences. So I think probably the structure of Wickets in the East
#
is modeled on something Thompson wrote on English counties, but it's also Indianist
#
idiom. It has history thrown in. It has my uncle Doris stories of that. I think it's
#
also important not to, how do I put it this way? When I wrote Conover foreign field, which
#
came much later and which is a very different kind of book that the year I wrote Conover
#
foreign field may have been the only year in my adult life when I did not reread Beyond
#
the Boundary because I did not want to be influenced by it anyway, you know, in anyway,
#
remotely be influenced by it because you cannot, it's the best cricket book ever written, possibly
#
the best sports. Anyone should not try imitated emulate, you know, Ashish Nandi made a mistake
#
in his book Tao Cricket to try and do a Beyond the Boundary for India, you know, with kind
#
of some cultural rights of that kind. I just thought a straightforward social history basically
#
in my book Conover foreign field based on in the archival material I did. But I, you
#
know, I was very lucky in having a father who encouraged reading and bought me books.
#
He would go to Delhi and get me books. So Stevens College had a superb library, you
#
know, of cricket books. That's what I discovered Beyond the Boundary. They had four or five
#
books by a Singleton. They had Ronald Mason, who's a wonderful English stylist. That's
#
where, you know, in a whole 70 or 80 cricket books, heartbound with the name written in
#
gold lettering by the college library and outside. And I would often go there. It was
#
on the first floor of our college library. I don't think I use the library for very
#
much. I didn't read the economics textbooks, which is why I did so miserably in my economics
#
exams. But I don't think PLR and Kirti Azad took out those books. Maybe that's why they
#
played for India and I only played for Stevens College. So I think I was fortunate in having
#
my uncle Dore read very little, but my father, recognizing my interest in cricket, bought
#
me books. The neighbor, as I relate in my book, called Anup Singh Rawat, gave me my
#
first wisdom when I was seven. So that gave me a sense of the larger world of cricket
#
beyond India. I would get Sport and Pastime, which was a very decent magazine of that time
#
by Singleton off on Broad. And my college had this wonderful library. And so yes, I
#
mean, I read a great deal of cricket. And even now, occasionally I return to it. Some
#
of my favorite writers when I can't sleep at night.
#
Yeah, no, no, I agree with everything you said. Like when I, you know, mentioned, you
#
know, what I tell my writing students about English being a marker of class and all that.
#
But the what I am expressing disapproval of is, you know, using flamboyant and fancy phrases
#
for their own sake, you know, the kind of old British pomposities that are left with
#
us, like, instead of saying stop something, we'll say put an end to something, that kind
#
of thing. And, you know, my admiration for Singleton is perhaps equal to yours. In fact,
#
the way I look at my taste is I thought a lot of like, I love reading Cardiff's for
#
the beauty of the pros. But very often, I think the style overwhelms the substance.
#
And I wonder how much the pressure sometimes might be on cricket writers to make every
#
moment memorable, which they are writing about, which I think would have been a temptation
#
that Cardiff's perhaps given more to than Singleton. And obviously, I prefer Vikram
#
Seth to Chetan Bhagat as well. But I won't elaborate on that because poor Chetan may
#
be listening and feel bad. But one interesting thing that struck me was that you mentioned
#
this recurring dream you once had, that you go to a sort of a railway station bookstore,
#
and you find the first edition of Cardiff's autobiography, which you've read many times,
#
but you've never seen the first edition. And tell me a little bit about that dream.
#
Again, this has to do with the anglicized Indian middle class of that time. I mean,
#
I don't tell the whole story in my book, but I should elaborate a little bit sociologically
#
for you and your listeners. So I studied in St. Stephen's College much later, much later.
#
This story goes back to when I was nine or 10. I was hoping to, or 11, I was hoping to study in
#
St. Stephen's College, which was the pinnacle of English language education in India with
#
due apologies to Sansevier's Bombay and Presidency Calcutta, or rather no apologies to Presidency
#
Calcutta and Sansevier's Bombay. Right. However, I had an uncle who had studied at Oxford.
#
I was never going to get to Oxford, but my uncle's father, my, sorry, I beg your pardon,
#
I had a first cousin who studied at Oxford. He was much older than me. He was an eight-year-old
#
uncle. My first cousin who studied at Oxford. He was born in 1934, 25 years older than me.
#
My father's elder sister's son has studied in Oxford. My father's brother-in-law was much
#
better off than my father. So he could send his son to Oxford. He would obviously only send me
#
to St. Stephen's, but my uncle had studied at Oxford, which means he was like at least one or
#
two castes above me. Right. So I was much older. I was nervous. I was fearful. When I went to stay
#
with my aunt in Delhi, I saw the book, but I didn't dare ask my cousin who was 24 years older than me.
#
He was 35 when I was 11. Can I borrow that book? So it was always forbidden fruit because it was in
#
my uncle's bedroom. I saw the spine, but I never took it out. I was too nervous and scared to ask
#
my Oxford-educated cousin to, you know, let me, let me run to 11. You would have thought who's this
#
Pippa Snapper talking about Curtis. I mean, I really wanted to meet Curtis. So I think that's why
#
that inaccessibility of, uh, the childhood inaccessibility to me of the autobiography of
#
the greatest ticket writer of the time remained imprinted in my mind. And which is why I had that
#
dream in my teens, in my twenties and into my thirties of almost getting that book and never
#
getting it. That's, that's stunning. And if one of my listeners can locate a first edition of that
#
book by Curtis, you know who to send it to. Yeah. Let's move on now. And you know, you've described
#
your, um, sort of your years and, uh, Stephens in this very succinct paragraph, which I'll quote,
#
quote, for five years and saying Stephens, I live for cricket. And had it been asked of me,
#
I might have died for cricket as well. Never before and never since have I poured as much
#
passion and energy into anything. Uh, stop quote. And of course you, uh, you know, uh, describe it
#
in great detail in your book and absolutely enthralling detail because playing for Stephens,
#
it seems was an enormously big deal. It's not just paying for any college. I mean, half those
#
people were like first-class cricketers and it's a lot of names there. But then you point out about
#
how you went off to do a PhD in sociology where a Marxist teacher convinced you that cricket was a
#
bourgeois deviation and you gave all your treasured books away. Tell me about that phase of your life
#
and how easy was it to just turn your back on something which you were so incredibly passionate
#
about? Yeah. So, uh, yeah, it was, I mean, I was just convinced and, uh, uh, I had a friend in
#
Calcutta who doesn't figure in that book, uh, whom you would know of, uh, a college friend of mine,
#
a person of decency, character and integrity. He was a few people who's been an Indian journalist
#
for 40 years and retained that character and integrity and decency. And I thought was, I mean,
#
that can be very dear in old friends. And he introduced me to jazz and to the pleasures of
#
smoking ganja as well. So I owe him, I owe him many things. And he also got my first article
#
published in the business standard, not on cricket. So, but when I, uh, want to do, I was convinced
#
that I have to give away my cricket library and it's kind of a, you know, an indulgence and a waste.
#
And I have to buy a workshop scholarship, left-wing scholarship to fill the place,
#
the place on the shelves that can be vacated by my disposing my cricket library. I didn't want to
#
sell it because Marxists don't believe in profit, but I wanted, I was smart enough, smart enough
#
to want a deserving buyer. So I read the writings of, uh, in the telegraph for which Paranjoy worked
#
of a young Mudar Patheria, who was a good writer of that time. And I told Thak, this young man,
#
would you be interested in my cricket library? He set up a meeting and I went to see Mudar.
#
And he said, what do you have, sir? I said, um, first edition of between wickets, uh, uh,
#
uh, Pelham Warner's book on lords inscribed by Pelham Warner and his eyes popped and popped and
#
popped. And he, I said, uh, how would you want for it? So I said, nothing, just, uh, the, uh,
#
the cost of cutting it from, uh, there are room with my father says it'll be 750 rupees.
#
So he got all of that for 750 rupees. And this is the hilarious thing that shortly afterwards,
#
Mudar gave up writing a cricket and became a stockbroker.
#
All right. So I have to build that library brick by brick, which I almost have done. I mean,
#
of course I didn't still don't have Cardiff's autobiography, but I have almost all the books
#
I then had except for Pelham Warner's book on lords. So Mudar, I mean, Mudar is our dear friend
#
and, uh, you know, he's a lovely fellow and I wish he would write more on cricket. I'm told
#
he's got a good library, a good museum of things on cricket now, but that's the story of that.
#
I had to give it away, but I didn't want to make a profit. And, uh, you know, Mudar was the
#
beneficiary. I think a worthy beneficiary of, of my gift. No, there's, there's so much delicious
#
irony in that, that, uh, you know, uh, a newly formed, uh, Marxist would, you know, uh, give
#
away all his cricket books to someone who then goes to be immediately becomes a stockbroker.
#
So, uh, well done, uh, doing that. So tell me about kind of those years and how you eventually
#
got back to cricket. Like you described a very, uh, interesting story where, uh, I think you're
#
in the U S and to pass the time, you're kind of bowling, uh, you're reviving your, uh, skills
#
at spin bowling against a ball in your apartment. And, uh, the person who lives below complains
#
that, you know, Hey, it's disturbing my wife and all that. So you stopped that and you start taking
#
notes for a book, which eventually becomes wickets in the East. So, you know, did sort of your new
#
found, um, uh, love for cricket also have something to do with now go hand in hand with writing as
#
well? Yeah. So again, you know, one of the issues about writing this book was it's mostly new.
#
There are a few stories that have been retold, but, uh, I, there are many stories I've told
#
before, which I didn't tell you because I didn't, you know, I, one of them was actually a rediscovered
#
ticket originally when I was in Delhi in 1983, 84, and G.R. Vishwanath was batting on the telly.
#
My boyhood hero, the first, and I saw him get a hundred and that then slowly it came back
#
that I went to America. I was lonely. As I described in Commonwealth of cricket,
#
I was watching baseball, but it was deeply dissatisfying. A poor second best to the
#
most subtle and sophisticated game known to humankind. And it was cold and it was four,
#
four feet of snow outside. And I was lonely, of course, heated inside the house. And I started
#
bowling off breaks. And then I started my, my friend from below, uh, he was now a very
#
distinguished professor of Buddhist studies at Duke University condition. Jeff said, you're
#
disturbing my wife. And then I started writing that that's really how it happened. And again,
#
since this is a, again, a story I don't tell here because there's only so much you can tell
#
without, you know, uh, meandering and digressing too much and destroying the integrity of the
#
narrative. I originally wrote we can see the East as a series of eight newspaper articles on
#
different states. So Kandaka cricket, Tamil Nadu cricket, Punjab, Delhi cricket, Bombay cricket,
#
et cetera. I've already started writing for the press on other subjects. I took those eight
#
stories to an editor. I knew who had published my articles on forestry and ecology. And he said,
#
our sports desk will not allow a freelancer to write eight articles for us. So the trade unit
#
of sports journalists, I have deeply get to them. They're the reason I became a writer of books
#
for cricket because I had eight articles I couldn't publish in the press. I showed them to my editor,
#
Rukun Arvani, who had just published my first book, the Unquiet Roads of the Chipko movement.
#
And he said, there's a book in here. So that's, there's a book in these. And he told me how to
#
elaborate my arguments and stitch together the narrative in a kind of some kind of current way.
#
And that's how it became because these, otherwise it may have, if we hadn't had a insecure and
#
nervous and competitive and rivalrous sports desk in the times of India, they may have just appeared
#
there and died. Yeah. So let's kind of take a quick commercial break now and come back to talk
#
more about your fascinating journey. And I have a bunch of larger questions to ask you and also a
#
disagreement to air. So that should be fun. So let's leave that for after the break.
#
As many of you know, I'll soon be coming out with a four volume anthology of the Seen and the Unseen
#
books organized around the themes of politics, history, economics, and society and culture.
#
These days, I'm wading through over 3 million words of conversation from all my episodes so far
#
to curate the best bits. And for this to happen, I needed transcripts. And that was made possible
#
by a remarkable young startup called TapChief. TapChief at tapchief.com is a digital platform
#
that allows companies to outsource work to their network of freelancers. And TapChief's network
#
includes more than 125,000 people as of now. You want people to make you a webpage or design a logo
#
or compose a jingle or do some digital marketing for you. TapChief gives you an easy way to reach
#
out to freelancers competing for your work. I can say from firsthand experience how valuable this
#
has been for me and solve the problem I was actually a bit worried about. So do go over to
#
tapchief.com and check out all that TapChief has to offer. Maybe they could solve your problem too.
#
Welcome back to the Seen and the Unseen. I'm chatting with Ram Guha about his incredible
#
new book, his enjoyable new book, The Commonwealth of Cricket, which I think all cricket lovers of
#
whatever age in India will agree with. You know, when we went into the break, you were talking
#
about your writing of Wickets in the East, which is such a delightful, charming, romantic book and
#
one of your early books that I really enjoyed. And, you know, I was struck with something that
#
you've written in this book, The Commonwealth of Cricket, which is about how, you know, one's
#
adoration and admiration and impression of cricketers can pass through the generations.
#
And, you know, you describe at one point in the book about how you were sitting with
#
Raj Singh Dungarpur and telling him about how you were writing about the Palwankars.
#
And at this point, he said, and I'll quote from your book, quote, when Raj Bhai heard that I was
#
writing a social history of cricket, whose heroes were the Dalit brothers, Palwankar Balu and
#
Palwankar Vithal, he said his father, also in his time a princely patron of cricket, had told him
#
that Vithal was as good a batsman as Vijay Hazare. I was delighted to hear this since Balu and Vithal
#
had retired before test and Ranji Trophy with cricket began and were now totally forgotten.
#
T.G. Vaidyanathan had insisted to me that Hazare was as good as Sunil Gavaskar. And I was now
#
telling my son, Keshava, that Gavaskar was as good as Sachin Tendulkar. And I'm sure, you know,
#
and even younger, maybe Keshava will one day tell people that, hey, Kohli is as good as
#
Tendulkar. So, you know, what also kind of strikes me when I read this is how much of our memories
#
of cricket, our collective memories, in a sense, because, you know, what has passed on to us also
#
becomes a part of our imagination and our sort of constructed memory also, in a sense, how so much
#
of it really depends on these spoken word mythologies almost, you know, and, you know,
#
you had earlier mentioned how Wally Hammond was an admirer of Amar Singh and all the things we've
#
heard about Amar Singh. And I was sort of reminded of Hammond's flamboyant quote about how, you know,
#
when the ball came off the pitch and Amar Singh bowled, it was like they were coming off the
#
cracks of doom, which sounds to me like a very Cardassian thing to say in its sort of flamboyance.
#
So what do you feel about that? And do you feel that in this modern age, where every image is
#
documented forever on YouTube, and there's almost, you know, too much of a sensory bombardment
#
happening of our senses, that some of this is kind of lost. And what is the trade off here? On one
#
hand, there is a danger of over romanticizing a past age. But on the other hand, I think,
#
you know, that there is so much charm to that as well. And you and I, of course, would be
#
partial to forming our notions of cricket that way, because that's how we grew up.
#
Yeah, I think it's, I think, although I wish there was footage of market bowling and Hazare
#
and Merchant batting. The fact that there's so much footage of Tendulkar batting, I think,
#
is a wonder and a joy, not just for you and me, but for generations yet unborn, you know,
#
because however great Kohli is, he did not face Donald and Vakar Younis and Vasim Akram.
#
Michael Stark is not Vasim Akram, let's be clear about this, you know. And so I think,
#
we know Tendulkar's greatness, not just because of the strokes he plays, but because of the bowling
#
he played against. I mean, the only bowler today, I mean, the only world cricketer today,
#
and he's slightly past the hill, who's comparable to Donald and Younis and Vasim Akram and Glenn
#
Magra is Jimmy Anderson on a moving track. So I'm grateful for what we have of Tendulkar,
#
you know, because it tells you what a sublimely great player he was. And I was telling Rajdeep
#
Sathya Sahib the other day, you know, you always complain about my love for Karnataka cricket,
#
but there's only one chapter in this book devoted to a single cricketer, and that's a
#
Bombay cricketer, Sachin Tendulkar, right. So because there was something about how he played,
#
when he played, and the character of his stroke play that makes him sublime. And I'm glad we
#
have that on YouTube. And you know, I wish we had the same things for, we have a little bit of
#
Gavaskar, less of Vishwanath, virtually nothing of Hazare and Umrigar and Manjarikar, let alone
#
the bowler. Mankar did virtually nothing. Vishen, I can, Vishen, there's a bit and I saw so much of
#
him that I know how great he was. So I think probably we are lucky that we have all of this
#
to make more recent comparisons across generations as we go further down the road.
#
And just thinking aloud, I'm kind of struck by another sort of trade-off of the changing times.
#
One is, as you've pointed out, you know, the Indian elites earlier were drawn from a small pool of,
#
you know, English-speaking people who were educated in a small set of places. So your
#
ecosystem is smaller, your pool of places is smaller, which is why you had these dominant
#
regional teams in, you know, Bombay, Delhi, Mysore, which later became Karnataka, and you had these
#
sort of dominant, but otherwise there was really nothing. Now, a couple of things have happened in
#
modern times, it seems to me, to go in opposite directions. One is the pool has widened enormously.
#
And you would imagine, because of access and because of, you know, just more points of entry
#
to the game, including the IPL, which we can talk about later, but the pool has widened enormously,
#
which it would seem to me then increases the chances for better and better players coming up
#
and would almost demand that the current generation be much better than the past generation, which,
#
as we see, is not quite the case, really, as you pointed out. And, you know, it's that same logic
#
where you point out about how Srinath was passionate about the local game in Karnataka,
#
where he said that he managed to, from Mysore City, he managed to break into the Karnataka team,
#
because, you know, G.R. Vishwanath, who was a selector, happened to go down and watch a match
#
and better players, and him didn't make the cut. And Srinath later said that if he gets involved in
#
Karnataka cricket as he is, then a hundred Tendulkar's will emerge or something to that
#
effect. So there is one that the ecosystem is widening, there's a far greater pool of players,
#
so you should have more talent coming up. But the flip side of the aspect is that even though you
#
have a greater pool, you also have greater options of things that you can do with your time. Not
#
everybody may want to play cricket. And so many options have opened up for people to sort of
#
pursue, that there just might be less people interested in kind of, you know, going that far
#
and showing, you know, devoting themselves in the obsessive way that you have to devote yourself to
#
anything if you want to achieve excellence. What are sort of your thoughts on these?
#
You know, I think, what you earlier referred to as the fragmented nature of time, I think
#
I think it's going to affect the further future development and nourishing of professions that
#
demand 12 hours a day for 10 years when you're growing up. Classical music, for example,
#
you know, are we going to get the kind of Indian classical vocalist that we did 20 or 30 years ago?
#
How many Ulaash Kashalkars is India going to produce in the 21st century? Art, maybe literature,
#
philosophy, but cricket I think with the monetary rewards are so enormous on making it to an IPL
#
team. There is a profusion and a mushrooming of academies trying to train the next IPL star. So
#
maybe cricket will be luckier and also because it happens to be the only sport at which Indians
#
are good, where there's sponsorship, there's infrastructure, there's support of different
#
kinds, including popular public support interest. I think what you're pointing to Amit that to
#
perfect a craft to become proficient at a craft where you need to spend between 15 or 20 years
#
as a young child devoted to it will affect things like Bharatanatyam and classical music more than
#
cricket, which is sad, but I think that's where it'll happen. That's a profound point. And speaking
#
of this sort of fragmentation of attention and interest, another thing that strikes me is there's
#
a vivid memory I have from my college days where I used to play chess in those days and I was going
#
for a junior tournament in some town in Maharashtra from Pune where I was then studying. And I remember
#
boarding an ST bus with one of my teammates and there were all kinds of people in the in the
#
crowded ST bus. And there's, you would think that we have nothing in common at all, but then someone
#
puts on a transistor radio and there's a commentary of a cricket match coming through. And that's a
#
moment of magic where suddenly everybody on the bus is on the same side. We are all together. We
#
are all sort of united by that common passion as indeed you and I are right now while we are
#
speaking about it. And it strikes me that, you know, and I just wondered at what would unite us
#
in a similar way on an ST bus today. What was that match? I have actually forgotten. I just
#
remember it was some trick. What year was it? It must have been since I was in college, maybe early
#
nineties in fact. So the well into the Tendulkar might have been betting. Possible. So it might have
#
been that what is Tendulkar's score or whatever one of those things. I don't even remember, but
#
well into the age of television, but there's no TV on an ST bus. And my sort of what I'm just again
#
thinking aloud about is that is it, you know, in a sense, you could say cricket and the passion for
#
cinema, which is of course Bollywood for the Hindi speaking part of India would sort of be a common
#
factor. But today when we have so many fragmented diverse passions all over the place and diverse
#
interests and everybody is in that ST bus is probably lost in their smartphone. Yeah. What,
#
what, what, what, what unites us? That's a very, very perceptive observation. I think virtually
#
nothing, you know, maybe something as ordinary and superficial as singing the national anthem
#
or something where it's more coercive. Someone starts thinking and you have to kind of join in
#
because you feel afraid that you'll be regarded as anti-national or something. Yeah, that's true.
#
I mean, these are things that, yeah, I remember when the world cup was played in India last year,
#
2011, we had a large screen on MJ Road and people would go to the stadium would just congregate
#
there and watch. So kind of a public space where you could just do that kind of stuff.
#
And of course our regime now does not like open public spaces. Even our judges in the Supreme
#
Court, they must be designated and defined. I mean, so I don't know where this kind of collective
#
spirit of enjoyment of music or cricket or art where we'll have it. Yeah. And no, of course,
#
I mean the flip side, which I'd also like to acknowledge and point out in case I sound like
#
a hopeless ladite who is just bemoaning all of this is that we can form communities online and
#
you know, we might have a niche interest and never meet someone physically who shares that interest,
#
but online we can form those communities and you and I can have this conversation. But the other
#
flip side of that is that then a lot of our lives are lived in the abstract online world and not in
#
the concrete physical world, which I think has a variety of effects. One of which is making our
#
discourse much more toxic because people behave in ways which they would never behave if they
#
were with you in the flesh and blood. Let's also sort of now, you know, move on from there to talk
#
about something that you discussed towards the end of the book and which is endlessly fascinating
#
to me is this bizarre moment where a cricket tragic is suddenly asked to take over the
#
administration of the game. And I think you mentioned in your book about how shocked various
#
people were at this, including I think Gideon Hay, who's, you know, been on the show long ago
#
and saying like, what the hell is with the world? You know, it's almost like a 2020 kind of bizarre
#
thing Ram Guha taking over cricket administration. So tell me a bit about that and tell me, you know,
#
your apprehensions and motivations going into that. So firstly, I was one of four, I was part
#
of a committee of administrators cared by Vinod Rai. So I was, I consulted a few people, all except
#
one said I should join. They said, you know, you've loved the game so much. It is murky and dirty.
#
And there's at last an attempt to try and clean it up. You owe it to yourself. You owe it to cricket.
#
You owe it to us. Lots of people in Karnataka who are worried about the way the game was being
#
run into the ground by the Karnataka State League Association also asked me to join.
#
And I maybe naively and out of vanity succumb to that kind of thing. You know,
#
in a sense, I'm glad because it gave me an unusual insight into what was going on.
#
And of course, I spectacularly failed. As I described in my book, I knew it would be very
#
different to anything I'd ever done. So for the first day, I kept a diary. Normally, I don't keep
#
a diary. I mean, the other incidents in this book are recollected from memory. It's not that when
#
I watched the 1996 quarterfinal in Bangalore, World Cup quarterfinal, India and Pakistan,
#
I was keeping a diary. So that when I watched Karnataka beat Bombay in 1974, I was keeping
#
a diary. No, those are all recollected from memory with an occasional look at a scorecard.
#
If I felt I had got some particular fact from, but here I realized I'm going to keep a diary,
#
a diary of what I see, what I observe, the emails I get, the tweets about this. And I kept a very
#
detailed diary, only small excerpts from which I've used in those chapters. So it was intense
#
for four or five months of trying to set right the BCCI. And then I decided that this is going
#
nowhere. I better get back to what I know I am in command of, which is researching and writing
#
historical works. That's what I did. And you know, one of the things I sort of keep noticing and
#
writing about and talking about, you know, the mostly with reference to government often is that
#
number one, power corrupts, you know, that's a cliche, but it's a universal truth. And number
#
two, people respond to incentives, like for example, and I'll ask about your struggles during this
#
period separately and the various causes which you were fighting for. But you know, one of the
#
anecdotes that you sort of relate from this sort of strikes a chord where, you know, the chairman
#
of the committee, Mr. Vinod Rai, he is going to a book launch to launch a book on Tendulkar,
#
and he's sitting beside Tendulkar. And you point out about that, look, if he didn't have this post,
#
he would have been doing none of this. And therefore, he should not have been doing this.
#
And in your case, it strikes me that the incentives to make use of the post are much less because
#
you're already such a renowned public figure in another field, that any lapse of behavior or any,
#
you know, swaying from your principles would obviously affect you and what people thought of
#
you and all that. So, you know, you're very forthright and true to that. But that's not
#
necessarily the case with everyone, which could lead us to the hopeless conclusion that, you know,
#
it's sort of the institutions and the culture which shapes the way people behave. Like one of
#
the points you kind of made while talking about that period is that in that whole conflict of
#
interest saga which you were fighting, and there I completely feel entirely as strongly as you that
#
it's just shocking and it continues. And that among the people who had a conflict of interest
#
like that was someone of such impeccable character as, you know, one of my heroes growing up,
#
Rahul Dravid himself. And Dravid, to his credit, as you point out, had the grace to eventually,
#
you know, sort it out and no longer has a conflict of interest. But at that time, he did and he was
#
like, I'm just, you know, going by the existing rules and blah, blah, blah. But is that something
#
that over a period of time, and as a historian, and, you know, we might even have discussed this
#
in one of the previous episodes, you know, people are ultimately, in a sense, creatures of
#
circumstance responding to incentives, is there, therefore, a sense of, you know, should we then
#
have like, how hard is it then to fight that sense of fatalism that, you know, it's okay that you
#
can have all these principles and whatever when you're away from it, but when you're actually part
#
of it, and a player in the game, how do you respond? So I've rambled a bit, but I mean,
#
there are two heroes of this book. I mean, there are many heroes, but there are two principal heroes.
#
One we've talked about, Uncle Tore. The other is Bishan Bedi. Now, I had the great privilege and
#
honor of knowing both before I joined. So I knew there were certain things I would try to do. And
#
there were certain things I would absolutely not do. There's a story I'll leave out of this book,
#
but I can tell it now. There's a trivial tale, which maybe, you know, in the book would have
#
seen somewhat self promoting or self regarding. In January, I was appointed to CAA. In February,
#
late in January, maybe, or short two, three weeks afterwards, India was playing Australia in a
#
test match in Bangalore. Three days before the match, I get a call from Sudhakar Rao,
#
who was then secretary or maybe a secretary or president of the KSEA and my old club mate. I've
#
talked about him already. So Sudhakar called me and said, Ram, there's the best seats in the KSEA
#
are the KSEA diamond jubilee box overlooking, you know, the wicket over the side screen with only
#
three rows. And you applied the whole day with it's for VVVVVIP. You applied the whole day with,
#
you know, food and liquor and whatever else you want. And so I said, I've kept two seats in the
#
diamond box for you and Dore. And I said, no, Suda, thank you very much. And not because of me,
#
not because I didn't want to affect a favor. I knew Dore would not want that. That his nephew is
#
in the board and his former protege of FCC Sudhakar Rao is now saying you come and sit here.
#
So Dore went in the member stand. I went with Keshava and bought a ticket in the end stand and
#
watched from there. Right. Now, because I had the example of Dore, I mean, Dore is incorruptible.
#
Bishan Bedi is incorruptible. They are the two people at cricket I most admire and already
#
most admired and venerated well before I joined the CIA. So I had to do what they would have told
#
they would, I would have thought they would have done. Right. So which is why, unlike the other
#
members of the CIA, I didn't accept payment either, you know, after, after all of that was done. Right.
#
So because if you don't people who set that kind of model standard, you know, you can never fully
#
achieve it. I know Bishan is more courageous than me. I have no doubt about that, you know, but at
#
least his example or I've known many other other people in public life outside cricket have been
#
extraordinarily courageous and brave. I mean, for example, one person I should name because
#
I've sometimes accused only of praising dead people is the anthropologist Nandini Sundar,
#
you know, who's a younger academic than me, but a person of such sterling courage and integrity
#
and face death threats of certain kinds where I might have succumbed. Right. So if you don't
#
people in your life who have that kind of backbone, you'll be shamed and you, they will shame you into
#
at least taking a little bit of kind of insignificant stand and not accepting a pass in the case of
#
diamond box is not a big deal, which is why I didn't put in the book, but this is what I think
#
happened. You know, I think it's a lot of it is shaped by what you see around me. I mean, if
#
I don't know what sort of Ganguly has seen around him recently to, to behave, to behave the way he's
#
doing now, but I think it values of this kind of, sometimes they come from within, you know,
#
but at other times they are what you see and having people like Doray and Bishan Bedi as,
#
as kind of exemplars, I think will shape has shaped me in certain ways. No, I mean,
#
in a sense that kind of underscores the point I was making, because these are outliers,
#
Doray and Bishan Singh Bedi and yourself, you know, Nandini Sundar, whose book the burning
#
forest I love, these are sort of outliers. Now, you know, tell me a little bit about sort of the key
#
battle that you fought while you were part of that four member group, which is about conflicts of
#
interest, which is something that I think is a concept that people simply don't understand
#
because they assume that, you know, conflict of interest only matters if you are the kind of
#
person who would take advantage of it. Like, you know, Gavaskar at one point saying, I am not the
#
kind of person who would, you know, mess around because I have a conflict of interest, but the
#
bottom line is the existence of a conflict of interest is a problem. And in fact, I would go
#
further and I would say that one would assume that where there is a conflict of interest, it will
#
be misused because, you know, power always corrupts. Tell me a little bit about that battle
#
and how receptive were people to it and how did people within the cricketing community react?
#
I think there's a real problem with the ethical sense of Indians. And I think you need a deep
#
sociological, psychological, philosophical examination into it and theological examination
#
into it, of which I am not capable. But if you take, I mean, if I may digress a little bit into
#
my personal life outside cricket. My father was a government servant. He ran a scientific lab in
#
Dehradun. I was never allowed to even sit in his staff car. You know, he, the staff car came to
#
take him to the station. There was no way that was public, nothing to do with the family, right?
#
I went to Delhi and I was in Stevens College and my classmates were children of government servants,
#
like my father, and they came in the staff car to college. They didn't come by the bus or the
#
university special, right? So it struck me that, Hey, my father has a certain kind of standard of
#
these guys on the outside. Now, I think it's not as if my father was pretty ethical. He'd grown up
#
in the order of the freedom struggle. He had an uncle, his own father's elder brother was an
#
associate of Mahatma Gandhi, who's legendary in Karnataka. His name is R Gopalswami Iyer for
#
fighting for the emancipation of Dalits. I mean, Dalit reservation in government schools comes in
#
part because of what my grand uncle did. My father had seen this. So you see the examples of the
#
freedom struggle and the ethical standards of that type. The further we got to the freedom struggle,
#
those standards dipped and we became more and more transactional. So we don't recognize conflict of
#
interest. We also don't recognize copyright. Many years ago, 20 years ago, a young ambitious
#
cricket writers stole some of my work and I was upset about it. And I was talking to my friend,
#
Nasreen Munni Kabir, who's the distinguished film historian. And she said, look Ram, for India,
#
when it comes to the Bollywood film, copyright means the right to copy. The Indian definition
#
of copyright is the right to copy. Right? So I think there is something seriously problematic
#
with Indian ethical standards. Michael Atherton would never do what Sunil Gavaskar is doing.
#
And that's good. And that's not maybe not because he's intrinsically more of an ethical person,
#
but the moral compass of the people that there in that country, maybe I really have to reflect
#
upon because to answer your question, when I raised this issue about David, his friends were
#
outraged with me. The kind of abuse I got from David took it much better. David's first instinct
#
as I relate in the book was to get defensive because after all, he's such a great man. How
#
dare a mere writer question him. Then he reflected upon it. He thought about it. He met Mike Bradley
#
had a chat with him and realized maybe he had been wrong. And he wrote me a most gracious note.
#
And then we resumed our civil relations. Gavaskar, of course, but his David's fan said,
#
how dare this guy, this loser, this historian who has never even played for his club talk about
#
a man who was at 50 hundreds for India. How dare you talk about that? But so I think there is an
#
issue. And the fact that so soon after that, Ganguly is doing what he is doing. Totally unchecked,
#
totally, totally. Of course, he's got the protection of Amit Shah and Shirdi Vasant,
#
particularly Amit Shah who's and the fact that Amit Shah's son is secretary work with Ganguly
#
is very much part of this. He has the highest and the biggest and the most important political
#
protection in the land for the despicable conflict of interest he's practicing. But it's not just
#
Ganguly. It's an Indian disease. We don't believe in copyright. We don't, we disregard conflict of
#
interest. We have to introspect about our collective ethical failure of which cricket is only a symptom.
#
Yeah. A number of thoughts. I mean, I, of course, remember there was a battle of words and outlook
#
with this young writer. We won't name him because if you haven't named him, I won't either. But I
#
have as little respect for his subsequent work as I'm sure you do. But before we get down to the
#
cricket itself, because I want to ask you sort of more about that period of time and the different
#
conflicts of interest that there were a couple of sort of, again, thinking aloud about what you just
#
said, that, you know, your father imbibed the values of the freedom struggle and all that.
#
And, you know, those values later in a later generation became more transactional. And I
#
have a couple of thoughts here. One is a long time back, I'd written a column sort of musing on why,
#
you know, people keep complaining that leaders of today don't have this intellectual and moral
#
stature of those at the time we got independence, you know, who had got the freedom struggle. And
#
my explanation came from that, look, they were following their incentives. All of the people who
#
rose to prominence during the freedom struggle were not after power because there was no power
#
to be had. They were, in fact, risking their lives and sacrificing their careers for higher
#
principles. So you had that stature of leader because that's what they were going for.
#
And the Indian state then became such a predatory parasitic beast that ultimately it today politics
#
is a game for power. I keep saying that, you know, elections are basically competing mafias
#
who are fighting for the right to have a monopoly on violence for five years. And it seems to me
#
that these change in incentives have also led to a change in the kind of leaders that we see.
#
And therefore, in a sense, a kind of, you know, things that we aspire to the other aspect of it
#
as far as the, you know, the change in values is concerned is an observation I think Jagdish
#
Bhagwati made a long time ago about how people in China are more profit seeking than people in
#
India who are more rent seeking. And we won't go into how whether one agrees or disagrees with
#
his observation on China. But for India, I feel even all these years after liberalization, when
#
you would have expected the mindset to change, it's still true that, you know, because so many
#
of the levers of the power are with the state, we have this rent seeking mindset where number one,
#
we want to be part of that controlling apparatus so we can make some money of others and number
#
two, even in business, so many people have the mindset that I want to exploit someone rather
#
than I want to provide value to someone and therefore make a profit for myself. And therefore,
#
they have this zero sum mentality rather than a positive sum mentality. So these are just sort of
#
two broad observations. I thought before we get back to the cricket, I'll share them with you and
#
ask you for your thoughts. So I agree with you. I mean, I think, again, if I, since you mentioned
#
business, and the fact that, you know, individual businessmen are not just also very keen to strike
#
separate individual deals with the state, you know, with politicians, which is tragic,
#
that's not what economic liberalization should be about, you know, a year ago, I mean, this is
#
this is a non cricketing observation. But still, it may be relevant to what you said a year ago,
#
I wrote to a dozen of our top entrepreneurs and industrialists, all of whom I knew personally,
#
in different capacities, because of my non cricketing work and other kind of stuff,
#
and they invited me to talk to their senior management or one or two had been in university
#
with me. And I wrote to a dozen of them saying, Look, what's happened after the abrogation of
#
Article 370. And the CIA is going to be disastrous for our country, for our social fabric and for
#
our economy. Our reputation in the world is going to be destroyed by this kind of rampant majority
#
terrorism. And we are going to lose track of all the progress we made in 30 years after liberalization.
#
This is well before the pandemic. This is August, September last year. And I wrote to them saying,
#
in the 1940s, before independence, eight or nine prominent industrialists, including Birla, Tata,
#
Sriram, etc, had the Bombay Plan, where they told Nehru and Patel, this is the kind of economic
#
vision we need for India, you all should get together and formulate a plan so that we don't
#
lose track of where we need to go economically. And don't our political leadership doesn't focus
#
merely on demonizing Muslims, because that would be a disaster even economically, let alone socially.
#
And what I said, 12 of you, and I know really, one day in my memoir, I will name all of them.
#
All right, the top of them, I said, Look, Rahul Bajaj is spoken out. He's been attacked because
#
he's alone. But if the 12 of you represented the whole head, these are all these are these people
#
are not Ambani and Adani. They are not crony capitalists who depend on favors and tweaking
#
rules and regulations to become rich. They are people of considerable entrepreneurial and
#
technological achievement, each one of them, I said, 12 of you write a joint new Bombay Plan,
#
call it the Bangalore Plan, because half of you are based in Bangalore. I put it out there,
#
don't mention politics, don't mention Kashmir, don't mention CA, just say that the we are at
#
an economic inflection point, where if the government continues the way it is doing 30
#
years of economic progress will be lost. I got two replies, one said, Kuchhne Hoga, one said,
#
I wish I could, but no one will join me, because they all wanted most of them, the one or two of
#
them were what it may have most of them wanted to strike their own individual deals with the state,
#
right? Now, here is something when they would not have been hurt, you know, it would have been out
#
there, they could have got their all collective brain past immense, they could have got Raghuram
#
Rajan and Arvind Subramanian also to edit their economics, and it would have been a charter for
#
India's future. But of course, they were too scared, too intimidated, happy to, you know, just have
#
their own individual relationship, even they wouldn't act collectively even for it's tragic.
#
That's how if our most powerful people are so unwilling to take remotely any kind of risk
#
for a collective good, it speaks very poorly of our country.
#
So I want to go off on a couple of tangents here. But before I do that, I, you know, magnificent
#
effort and you know, kudos to you for doing this. It seems like the kind of idealistic thing that
#
cannot possibly succeed, but much admiration for that. But, you know, one of the tangents I want to
#
go on is this reminded me of the one single small disagreement I had with your book India of the
#
Gandhi, which I thought I should mention now, which is, you know, one thing that you pointed
#
out is that all of these businessmen wanted to strike deals with the government and be cronies
#
of a sort or whatever, which is of course something that was the only way to actually be in business
#
until liberalization. And it's still a dominant way to make money for money and make money through
#
business. And one of the things that I keep sort of pointing out is which Milton Friedman had,
#
I think, first articulated, or at least that's where I learned it from, is that we must see the
#
see the distinction between what is pro-market and what is pro-business. And they're actually
#
opposite. What is pro-business? An existing businessman would want a protected economy where
#
there is no ease of entry and his business is protected and incumbents can't come in.
#
And that is, so what is pro-business is actually anti-market. And that hurts the people because
#
there is less competition, therefore they have less choice, higher prices, all of that. Now,
#
I remember in India, after Gandhi, if my recollection serves me right, you pointed to
#
the Bombay plan, which all these industrialists had come up with, where they sort of supported
#
Nehru's vision of a state-controlled economy. And you had kind of implied that that was a validation
#
from business people of sort of Nehru's master plan for the economy. And therefore, look, even
#
the business people agreed. But my point is, of course they would, because it was in their interest,
#
but not the interest of the people, because businessmen sort of want a protected kind of
#
market. But having sort of gotten that out of the way, the other interesting sort of
#
the analogy that I'd like to draw going on from what you said is that if I might speculate and
#
think aloud on why these businessmen that you wrote to would have been wary of something like
#
this is similar to why there would be people within the Congress who would realize that the
#
current rule of the Gandhis is bad for them, but they would be unwilling to fight. And the game
#
theoretic principle here in game theory, it's called bell the cat. And you know, from that old
#
proverb, and the thing is, all the mice agree the cat should be belled, but no mouse is going to be
#
willing to take the bell to the cat and attempt it because it's too risky to be the first mover in
#
a case like this. And I suspect there might be a similar sentiment where if all 12 were to meet in
#
a room and decide that now we will put out this statement, it's far likelier than in their little
#
disparate corners to say that I'm not going to be the first because you know, that's a very
#
interesting analogy. The Congress is a little more complicated. I've been reflecting upon this.
#
And for example, two of the people who come out in support of the family are actually at
#
first sight counterintuitive, because they are the two mass leaders Bagel in in Chattisgarh and
#
Gallaudet in Rajasthan, but they want to protect their freedom. They rather focus on Chattisgarh and
#
or Rajasthan and rather than you know, strike out for national leadership. Yes, absolutely.
#
There's certainly a similarity in the two situations. Yeah, let's kind of go back to
#
cricket. And you referred to some of these conflicts of interest and for the benefit of
#
listeners who might not be aware, I'll quickly point out what they were one of them, of course,
#
was and in a separate place, you've pointed out about how the BCCI had taken over the production
#
of cricket. And the problem with this was that they were paying the commentators, you know,
#
3.6 crores per year. And therefore the commentators obviously would, you know, be incentivized to not
#
speak against them. But the other sort of conflicts you pointed out is that one is Sunil Gavaskar was
#
a commentator on cricket at the same time as the company which he owned PMG was representing
#
several cricketers. And therefore it would be in his interest to, you know, talk them up in
#
commentary and whether he did or did not is irrelevant. The fact that the conflict of
#
interest existed is a problem. Another conflict was Dravid was looking after the under 19 teams.
#
And at the same time, he was also looking after Delhi Daredevils as they were then called.
#
And Dravid's defense, of course, was that the BCCI contract is for 10 months. And for two months,
#
I can do what I want. But such contracts seem designed to allow exactly this kind of conflict
#
of interest. And, you know, then of course, there are the many Dhoni conflicts of interest, because
#
he was, you know, associated with this player agency that represented certain players such as
#
Suresh Raina, who arguably played more test matches than he should have. Yeah, test matches
#
also probably. Yeah. Yeah. And and current Sharma who without any kind of first class record got
#
taken on that sort of two to Australia, very famously Srinivasan, you also spoken about one
#
conflict of interest, by the way, as an aside, which you did not kind of mention was your
#
Karnataka folks, Roger Binney being part of the selection committee when Stuart Binney got selected
#
for the two to England and Roger there, of course, said that, look, I had recused myself from the
#
meeting, but that is that is obviously an inadequate explanation. So tell me a bit about your struggle
#
to get this point through, like Mukul, who's who had, you know, written very eloquently about this
#
and had been writing eloquently about this. So I remember a specific fantastic PC wrote, I think,
#
either for cricket, for Hindu on this subject. But these were voices like Mukul's and yours were
#
really like voices in the wilderness. What was your battle like? How was it? You know, what kind
#
of hostility did you get from sort of the players themselves and what eventually took the whole thing
#
to breaking point where I said that, you know, I can't be part of this anymore. So, you know,
#
I had several things that happened. One is I visited the NCA and I was the only member of the
#
COA based in Bangalore, which is the NCA, I spent several hours chatting to them. And two of the
#
coaches pointed this out to me, that there's one rule for Dravid and another rule for us. We also
#
asked to be the spin bowling coach or the batting coach of X team. And the CEO of the board, Rahul
#
Johri said, So, which is very, very startling that this kind of thing was happening. So clearly,
#
Johri wanted to use his powers of discretion to humor, creating superstars who could get away
#
with something right. Now, then, in any case, I felt it was wrong. So I raised it. Diana to her
#
credit was supportive. She saw the issue, but Mr. I did not. And, you know, the CEO of the board was,
#
as I've said, you know, wanted discretionary powers in his just as, you know, our Prime Minister and
#
Finance Minister want powers to withhold licenses and give licenses to different kinds of
#
captains. This is what the CEO of the board wanted for himself, vis-a-vis our super stars.
#
But this was partly a breaking point. There were other breaking points, too. I mean, one was, for
#
example, when we wanted to boycott the champion trophy. So, you know, there was this conversation
#
I had with the NCA coaches who were not allowed, unlike Dravid, to do double tipping, both be a
#
national coach and play some kind of role in the IPL team. But also there was the near-fiasco of
#
the champion's trophy, where there was a campaign led by N. Srinivasan and others for us to boycott
#
with Gavaskar and others joining in. And there was a general timidity of our chairman, you know,
#
that he was unwilling to take on people like Srinivasan and Niranjan Shah, who were attending
#
meetings illegally, kind of, he's temporizing. And I felt I'm going to get nowhere. I also,
#
to go back to when I joined the committee, you will recall I talk in my book of how I urged Mr.
#
Rai and his colleagues to have a senior male cricketer. You know, if he had had someone like
#
Srinath, for example, on that committee, I think we could have pushed back against the board
#
officials and had also allowed for a much fairer deal to run the trophy players. Because apart from
#
conflict of interest, one of my deep-seated problems I faced was getting dues played to
#
run the trophy players. You know, even today, I mean, I don't know what they're being paid.
#
I mean, IPL is happening, run the trophy is not happening. And we don't seem to care about
#
the building blocks of Indian cricket, which is early school cricket, college cricket, run the
#
trophy cricket and so on. So ultimately, I decided that it was a waste of my time. I'd say the one
#
modest achievement I left with was to have Goyal and Sivalkar be given the CK Naidu award.
#
And a female cricketer also chosen for this for a lifetime achievement award for the first time.
#
But really, it's not business as usual. You can see what's happening with the PCC.
#
It's as if the Lodha committee and the Supreme Court never existed.
#
So I'll take another digression. And this is something that is almost in my mind.
#
I don't have an answer for this, which is and it's a problem that sporting boards across the world
#
face. Now, the BCCI technically is sort of a private body. One question is who owns the game
#
because in a sense, a BCCI has a sort of a monopsony that which is the opposite of a
#
monopoly in the sense that there is only one buyer for your services. So if an Indian cricketer wants
#
to play, he has nowhere else to go or she has nowhere else to go other than the BCCI. And
#
therefore that gives that power that buyer disproportionate power, which is never good
#
in any market. Now, typically, what a good market would look like is that you have free entry and
#
you have competition. And that's not an issue. Now, obviously, with a national sport, you can't
#
have that. So what do you do? Now, one answer would be nationalize the sport. But the problem
#
with that is that all our sports are run so incredibly badly in the BCCI for all its flaws
#
is still much better because it is, you know, not run by the government. The other question that
#
comes up is that while I was, of course, delighted when I first heard that you will be one of the
#
people who will be, you know, taking the decisions. And even if you got a couple of things right,
#
like the award to Shivalkar and Goyal, that is still a couple of more things than would otherwise
#
have happened. So thank goodness for that. But the larger question there is that did the Supreme
#
Court actually have jurisdiction to be able to say that this private body should sort of be treated
#
like it's a de facto property of the state and we'll just put these people in charge and all of
#
that. And if not, what is the solution? Because we know how the structures are all the way down the
#
line. It is thoroughly corrupt and dysfunctional and yet nationalizing it is not a solution. So
#
like, do you have any thoughts about this? Because I have no answers. I can just see the problem.
#
No, you're right. I mean, maybe it was a case of judicial overreach and maybe the Supreme Court
#
in the first place should not have intervened. Yeah, it's tough to say, you know, either some
#
ways I thought I'd record it in this book, which I did. And then I kind of moved back to being a fan,
#
you know, I mean, it's just now it's just what I'm looking forward to watching Stark bowl to Pujara
#
and see whether he can get past Pujara's defenses in the early overs. It's because it really can't
#
be redeemed. I mean, it's clear now that the attempts have totally failed. Maybe they were
#
misplaced in the first place and nationalizing is not an option. I wish, you know, again, it goes
#
back to the quality of individuals. Ganguly could have asserted himself much more in the interest of
#
Indian cricket, in the interest of domestic cricket, in the interest of fairness and transparency.
#
If a person of his colossal achievement at stature had pushed back against the intrigues
#
and manipulators, he would have got mass public support. But my counterpoint to that would be that
#
if he was the kind of person who would do that, he would not be in that position of power to begin
#
with. Well, you know, Srinath, for example, when he joined the KSCA, built up the academy,
#
he did good work, you know, so as he was only there for three years, he left. But it's possible to be
#
there for a little while and do decent work. I mean, when Bedi was running JNK cricket, people
#
like Farveya Zasool came through. So if top class cricketers do get into administration, it's not
#
as if they can't do things if they have the right intentions and the courage. Fair enough. So let's
#
kind of move away from sort of the personal narratives of what your journey has been like.
#
Though I love reading that book in the book, and I recommend everyone pick it up. But I want to
#
pick your brains on various aspects of the game now. And one actually is connected with the personal
#
in the sense you recount in your book how at one point, your good friend and the great writer,
#
Suresh Menon, told you that, listen, you romanticize a game so much because you have a
#
distance from it. And if you actually you had to deal with these guys on a daily basis, you would
#
not be have such a romantic notion of the game. So you know, and I note that there is a shift that
#
as you get involved and you get skin in the game, so to say that does change a little bit and you
#
point out the four categories of cricket stars, which I found completely fascinating. So tell
#
me a bit about one your experience of sort of were there blinkers falling off at different points
#
in time? And then what are these four categories and so on? Yeah, maybe I'll read out that paragraph.
#
And then I'll answer your question. Okay. So it says, after I resigned from the committee
#
of administrators, I wrote to a friend that there are four categories of cricketing superstars in
#
India. Category one, crooks who consort with and pimp for bigger non cricket playing crooks. Category
#
two, those who are willing and keen to practice conflict of interest explicitly. Category three,
#
those who will try to be on the right side of the law but stay absolutely silent on those in
#
categories one and two. Category four, those who are themselves clean and also question the crooks
#
in categories one and two. I also offered examples of which cricketers I thought fit into categories
#
one, two respectively. As for category four, I said that in India, only one cricketing great
#
has remotely any chance of qualifying for inclusion. This was Vishen Bedi. Now, yeah, I mean,
#
Suresh was right. And I also quote another friend, C. Venkatesh, a Telugu cricket writer who thought
#
the same thing. Yes, I mean, obviously you lose your romanticism when you see these guys up front.
#
It may be the same if you were to see footballers up front, certainly in the English Premier League
#
and other kinds of sporting icons as well. It also may be, I mean, I remember I've spoken about
#
G. R. Rishwanath in this book a little bit. But let me talk, just mention how my rose-tinted approach
#
to cricketing greatness. We have also come from an experience I had with another great Kannada
#
sportsman, Prakash Padukone. As a college boy, I was watching him play the semi-finals of the Asian
#
badminton championship in the Calcutta stadium in Delhi. The umpire was an Indian. He said before
#
the days of neutral umpires, he was playing as a Thai player. And the second game, 13, 14 or
#
something, Prakash hit a shuttle out. The umpire called it him and gave him the point. And he knew
#
it was a wrong decision, but he did quarrel with the umpire. He got the shuttle and deliberately
#
served it well outside so that he would give the point back to the Thai player. I mean, that is
#
kind of, you know, maybe if you see people like seeing Bedi and Dore and seeing Vishwanath and
#
Prakash as a boy, maybe naive and credulous about the character of some of these people.
#
You know, and it's just as you say, it's incentives. Maybe there's so much money at stake.
#
We have to be the right side of all these people. And I mean, equally people who I admired and was
#
close to, so the scales have fallen. You know, I don't think that the friendships I had with
#
maybe only Vishwanath Bedi is the one exception whom I would, the great cricketer I'd probably
#
happily meet outside the game. You know, a whole legion of cricketers just, you know,
#
sighed in disappointment as they heard that if any of them listened to my podcast.
#
I'll move on now to another of the sort of larger questions I wanted to ask, which is, you know,
#
one of the themes that runs through this book is the loyalties that you form for all the teams
#
that you play for, you know, whether it's your club in Bangalore or, you know, Mysore, which later
#
became Karnataka and India and all of that. And, you know, this is something sporting loyalties
#
is something that I've been thinking about for a while. Even Orwell, of course, wrote that famous
#
essay on it where he spoke about this possible kind of toxicity. And, you know, there are various
#
points where you've referred to this kind of patriotism slash nationalism. You know, you've
#
spoken about how everything was so personal, like how devastated you were in 1974 when you were 16
#
and India made 42 not out. You've spoken about, you know, when Bangladesh beat Park in 1999,
#
Sheikh Asina called it, quote unquote, the greatest day since liberation. That's what sort of the
#
sport meant for the nation. But there is a sad side to it. And you've also, you know, there's
#
this beautiful quote from your book, which I'll read out, quote, the saddest moment of 50 years
#
of live cricket watching remains a World Cup quarterfinal of 1996, also played in Bangalore,
#
when I was the only person in my stand and possibly in the entire stadium who applauded
#
Javed Miandhar when he walked off the ground for the last time as an international player,
#
stop quote. Now I can understand why we are wired to kind of form these allegiances because
#
we are wired to think in tribal terms and form our community and divide the world into us versus the
#
other. And I get that. But I also get that that can, you know, taint the way we look at the world,
#
it might bias the way we sometimes look at opposing players and the kind of performances
#
is that they are sort of coming up with and you know, in one sense, I like for example,
#
the English Premier League or the Indian Premier League because I don't have any specific loyalties
#
towards any team. It's like every year I look at how a team is playing and I decide and I can watch
#
a match without being emotionally invested. No, I want this person to win and oh shit, you know,
#
what a miss field and all of that. So there is this trade off where there is this warm sense of
#
community and belonging and you know, when you form an allegiance like that, but there is a toxic
#
element to it, which a lot of nationalism can drift into and B there is also the element that
#
then you can become sort of less, you know, you can be biased towards the abilities of your own
#
players and maybe the abilities of others can be less visible to you. What are your feelings about
#
this? So to go back to Orwell's essay, which is about sporting nationalism, it was sparked by,
#
I think, a Russian football team store in England. And of course, that's where he coined the phrase
#
sport is organized, sport is nothing but war minus shooting. So sporting nationalism can be toxic,
#
but sporting loyalties below the level of the nation are not in my view as toxic, which is why
#
the older I get, if you see, yes, Canada, yes, but India, not really, you know, it's like,
#
you know, I think because that's a local identity, just as I believe,
#
outside of cricket, I'm a great believer in this disaggregated form of patriotism.
#
You know, I believe every state should have a flag. Karnataka actually has the flag,
#
which is for flown by auto rickshaw drivers in particular on first November. I believe every
#
state must have a flag. Indeed, every city can have a flag. I remember going to the Belgian
#
town of the age to give a talk many years ago, there were five flags in the city hall,
#
the town, the county, the province, the country and the European Union. I mean, that's that,
#
that is so I believe in that sense, it's only India versus Pakistan brings out the ugliest in
#
the Indian and the Pakistani side. But I think love of Karnataka love of BCC. Of course, that
#
does reflect you in certain ways. For example, I talk in my book about how we players of FUCC
#
always believe that we didn't get a fair chance in selection for the state team. It was always
#
swastika BCC. So yes, it has some, you know, sour feelings that come in. But I think it the most
#
toxic form of sporting nationalism is when you want your country to win at sport all the time.
#
And that's why my epigraph to the book is from from Fingleton who says, the longer I live,
#
the less nationalistic I become the outcome of a match is interesting. But not on the scales of
#
time, a very great moment. What is important is whether a political contest gives to posterity,
#
a challenge that is accepted or one or years in classical technique and innings or a bowling
#
effort that makes the game richer. So that the devotee can say years afterwards with joy in his
#
voice, I saw that performance. So I think in that sense, other forms of loyalty, sub regional
#
loyalties to your club, or to your district, or aesthetic loyalties, in my case, to test
#
cricket over IPL, or to spin bowling over over classical matchmanship, I think those can be
#
enriching, liberating, exciting. But if they're different, different from sporting nationalism.
#
I'll come back to the IPL later, because I have a set of questions on that. And there, I think I
#
disagree a little bit with you. But before that continuing, you know, the other aspect I wanted
#
to ask you about, and in a sense is kind of related to this, is about essentialisms. For example,
#
you know, people will always speak about the Bombay School of batsmanship, and, you know,
#
chart a line from Merchant to Gavaskar to Tendulkar, and so on, and maybe Rahane today,
#
because the same kind of doggedness or whatever, though nowhere in the same class. And, you know,
#
there are some quotes from your book, which sort of tend to go down that line when it comes to
#
Bangalore, like at one point, you quote Greg Chappell saying, and this is after the India tour,
#
where we beat West Indies, which was a phenomenal win, and Dravid made those incredible half
#
centuries, which are just should be in the pantheon, but I've forgotten, but he was talking
#
about Dravid and Kumle. And Chappell said quote, no team has had two more dogged, resilient and
#
proud competitors. And for them, the team always came first, there must be something in the water
#
of Bangalore, which must have warmed your heart. And elsewhere, you sort of talk about, and you
#
know, this is probably part of your answer about whether there is something to this essentialism.
#
And the answer could be that, of course, you know, because culture is leading to, you know,
#
the kind of players that come up. And at one point you write quote, where you're writing about
#
changing Bangalore, and you write quote, these shades of difference reflected the changing
#
sociology of the city. The Bangalore that Vishy and Chandra played for was that of the Mawali
#
Tiffin Rooms and the unencroached upon Caban Park, a town of tiled bungalows and green barbits
#
calling. MG Road then had more cinema houses than it had cars. The Bangalore that Dravid and Kumle
#
played in was that of epsilon and infosys of glass and concrete and no birds at all, of buses and
#
motorbikes and SUVs all piled up in horrendous traffic jams. Stop quote. And later on, of course,
#
you talk about how the changing world, even though there is so much similar in different ways about
#
a Vishwanath and Dravid, but you talk about how quote, there was a gaiety to Vishy's bearing,
#
there is a gravity to Dravid's conduct. Stop quote. Tell me a little bit about this that,
#
you know, on the one hand, we are told, don't generalize, don't give into this kind of
#
essentialism. But on the other hand, there does seem to be a lot of truth to it, doesn't it?
#
Yeah, I mean, yeah, but this is, you know, this is a work of literature. This is not a work of
#
scholarship. I would never write remotely like this in a work in one of my historical works. I
#
would not say Indians are like this color because I like this. I was kind of obviously not. I was
#
kind of indulging myself thought about having fun. Yeah, of course. I mean, there is there is
#
but it is true that I mean, I just said a humorous story. I mean, I kind of go with the local
#
loyalty, which is not in the book when the batch fixing scandal broke out. You remember. So my
#
first response was there are no South Indians in it. That other was implicated. So I said there
#
are no at least there are no Kennedy has enough silly and pathetic of me to myself to kind of
#
rationalize match fixing in this kind of, you know, terms of local parochialism. But it's part of
#
and I believe, you know, as I said, again, to go back to what I said earlier, I mean, one nation,
#
one leader, one party, one ideology, one religion, one language is problem, usually problematic,
#
but nesting overlapping forms of identity are fine to be an intricate to a much, much more enabling
#
enriching, much less divisive, much less toxic to use your phrase or or else phrase. So that's it.
#
I mean, when you speak of a Kennedy or when you speak of resident of Bangalore, you're not
#
a dividing you're including everyone that city Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi, Jen, upper caste,
#
upper caste, low caste, male, female, I mean, Dravid is not a Kennedy, is right now. So in that sense,
#
what it is, it is a flight of fancy. It's a literally extravagance that in a book of this
#
kind, I think can be permitted. No, no, I loved it. I'm not, I'm not complaining about it. Though,
#
if people on Twitter got as far down this episode, which I don't think they will as hearing your
#
lines about, oh, there's no Kennedy guy involved in match fixing. They would probably find a way
#
to jump on you for that. And you know that what you just said about overlapping identities is
#
something that, you know, I also feel so strongly about. And, but that, and it strikes me that
#
there is a subtlety to that view. And then, you know, the moment I thought that in my head,
#
I thought, look, look at the subtitle of the book. This is a more subtle game after all. So it took
#
me back to that opening question about whether a game can shape its watchers in some way. And my,
#
my next sort of area I want to explore is about the IPL. And in fact, it's a, it's a good segue
#
into it talking about sort of, and here I'll say, I agree with a lot of your views on it and also
#
sort of disagree with them. And I'll say them as well. And you know, one of the interesting
#
things is of course, you kind of foresaw the IPL where you wrote in column before the IPL came
#
about where you said that, I'll quote you where you said, I quote, I think that the success in
#
this respect of the premier hockey league calls for emulation by other sports, especially that
#
South Asian sport par excellence cricket. Some years ago, the novelist Mukul Kesevan suggested
#
that test in one day matches between nations, a staple of international cricket be supplemented
#
by an intercity tournament. The time has come to revive that suggestion. Kesevan had a global
#
tournament in mind, but we might begin with South Asia alone and begin on a modest scale with a
#
week of 2020 matches played alternately in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka between teams
#
representing the cities of these countries, a stop quote. And then you go on to talk about how
#
Sachin Kandulkar could have played for Karachi and Sehwag could have played for Multan and
#
Inzamam for Delhi and all of that, which sound even more outlandish today than I suppose they
#
would have at that period of time. Now I sort of have a few thoughts and I'll kind of straight
#
them. One is I think that like I am a test cricket tragic like you and Keshava, but I am also a lover
#
of the IPL. And part of the reason for that is that I don't think there's a dichotomy. I think
#
these are in fact two completely different sports with different demands. And I think there are two
#
kinds of sort of anchoring effects in play, which I want to talk about. And the first kind of
#
anchoring effect is that test kit came first. And therefore we become romantically attached to test
#
cricket and all its values and all of that. And we compare everything to that where the values that
#
we love in test cricket, the long drawn out dramas, the display of hidden characters are,
#
you know, you require different values for T20, which we don't notice immediately, which in my
#
mind are equally subtle, but we don't notice them. And the thought experiment that I, you know, when
#
I make this argument, the thought experiment that I ask people to go down to is imagine a football
#
originated as a six hour game or, or, you know, so on and so forth, any of those smaller sports,
#
which we think of as 90 minutes. So we think that is a perfect length because that is a length,
#
which evolved first. And I suspect if T20 cricket had evolved first, you, one might have thought
#
that, you know, test cricket is ludicrous. It doesn't make any sense just as, you know,
#
a two day football match would seem to us. And it would be played out very differently
#
and would have qualities that the shorter format won't. So I think one, there is that anchoring
#
effect of test cricket upon the way we view the shorter games. The second anchoring effect that
#
comes into play, I think here is that because of the way the IPL started, because of the dubious
#
characters who started it, the cronyism and the corruption and the early allegations of match
#
fixing and all of that. And the fact that it was an example of something that I deplore a sort of
#
a top-down imposition instead of something that came bottom up from the ecosystem. And there was
#
such rich local ecosystems in Karnataka and Bombay and Delhi, that, you know, there's an instant
#
disdain for it. But, you know, if we look past that, and normally I say about public policy,
#
that we should not look at intention and we should look at outcome. And when I say that the
#
intention is good and the outcome is bad, in this case, the intention of the powers that be might
#
not have been that great. But I think the outcome has been fantastic. And I'll point out a couple of
#
ways in which I feel that way. And then you can respond. One is a pure economics of it that back
#
in the day, only a handful of people could really expect to make a living of the game. And that's if
#
you played cricket for India. And now that pool of players who can actually make money of the game
#
has widened enormously and thus provided an incentive for many more people to stay in cricket
#
while they might otherwise have sort of gone abroad and left the game or, you know, done further
#
studies and all of that. And I think that's great. It's just providing a much better livelihood for
#
so many more people associated with the game. The other aspect of it, which I think has helped
#
us to get as well. I mean, one economic way in which it has helped us to get is that viewership
#
was dwindling and to some extent, I think T20 cricket and I'd say T20 and IPL are kind of
#
separate, not the same thing, but you know, the IPL is of course a dominant driver that one in
#
some senses, T20 cricket subsidizes test cricket in a commercial sense. And two, the other aspect
#
of it is, and this is both a good side and a bad side that because young people in India today,
#
as you pointed out, are incentivized to play the IPL because of the instant fame and the riches,
#
what they practice in the nets for is to be IPL stars. They are no longer practicing test skills.
#
They are practicing ODI T20 skills. And this means that batsmen have a far wider array of
#
aggressive strokes. Bowlers have also evolved and I hold firmly to the view that bowlers still win
#
matches, even in IPL, like the top two teams of this year, Bombay and Delhi were the two teams
#
with the best bowling sites. And you know, at one point in the middle of the IPL, when KL Rahul and
#
Mayank Agarwal were top of the run scores, run charts, their team Kings 11 Punjab was right at
#
the bottom. So bowlers still win your games, but skills of batsmen's bowlers and fielders have just
#
gone off the charts. The trade-off is that certain skills, which are specific to test cricket,
#
like how to play the moving ball and headingly, how to play James Anderson, as you said,
#
the only contemporary bowler you respect, those have diminished, but those sort of occasions come
#
about so rarely that, you know, one can bemoan them, but say that there's been a big net positive.
#
And I think part of what I submit that you might be doing is that you're letting the influence of
#
how the IPL came to being with all the cronyism and the corruption and all the unsavory elements
#
on which I agree with you completely affect the other things that have happened, because I think
#
it's just a sport with enormous internal drama, beautiful intricacies, you know, and it's a
#
different sport. I mean, comparing test cricket and the T20 cricket is like comparing badminton
#
and tennis, that there is a superficial similarity that people are hitting balls over the net or
#
something over the net with a racket, but otherwise they are so completely different. So, you know,
#
so I know I'm being very provocative here, but what's your response? You beautifully put your
#
case for particularly that it's a different kind of game regarding different skills,
#
a new set of skills, both bowling and batting and fielding and so on.
#
And that's certainly so it's not merely as I may have implied or insinuated in my book,
#
it's not merely a dumbed down or cruder version of test cricket, but a different kind of game
#
altogether, as you said, badminton to tennis. I'm not convinced that it is generating all that much
#
income. I mean, runny coffee players are not paid. I mean, the IPLs don't get paid. I just look at
#
distribution. Is it going down the line? Probably not. I mean, so it's led to more corruption,
#
silencing of state associations by this hash fee kind of thing. So the argument that it is helping
#
the game, I think we are winning because for different reasons, we are winning more overseas
#
because there's more money generally economically, we are much more powerful, our better players are
#
better trained. We are a billion people to Australia has 20 million and they have other
#
competing sports and so on. So I don't think I don't think the I mean, even tell me one
#
really good, the only test test together produced by 2020 cricket is really David Waller.
#
It's not as if boomerang learned his skills, becomes a great bowler playing 2020. No, I mean,
#
all already have a colleague or whatever. So I'm not sure that from either skills point of view
#
are really enriching players so much. It's been so beneficial, maybe to a modest extent,
#
maybe aesthetically, you're right that I make too strong a case on behalf of history.
#
But aesthetics, you know, the aesthetics are not just me about the game. I can't bear IPL comment.
#
I saw how either you can't watch it inside. So I love to put it on, you know, I actually,
#
I have never gone for a match, even to have a free pass in the first year or two, I occasionally
#
watched the odd snippet. For example, if I had gone out now, because if I was in a restaurant,
#
and I saw one of the team wanted to die. So I remember, I was having dinner with
#
in Bangalore with some friends and I disappeared because I saw more on the TV. And I saw him,
#
you know, one day, I think he was of course, I just don't know, he may still have been,
#
I, but I don't, I suppose he was also CSK even then. And he beat him in the air, don't in the air,
#
and got him caught at short mid-racket. And I said, Wow, what a great dismissal. I mean,
#
that's the one moment of the IPL I remember watching on a television over 12 years. Right.
#
So, but in my case, I mean, in fairness to why I don't watch it is also a personal context. And
#
that is, I'm not 62. My love of cricket, my obsession with cricket has been conjoined with
#
my love of Indian classical music. When I was young, my time was not divided. If I two hours in
#
the evening, I would watch cricket. If I had to read cricket or talk cricket. Now I have two hours
#
in the evening, I'd much rather listen to Ulash Kasalkar or Nikhil Banerjee or Sanjay Surabhaniam
#
or MS Subbalakshmi or TN Krishna or Kishori Amankar. Then watch some Dhoom Dham, Dhoom
#
Dham with incredibly vulgar screaming and all these idiotic Indian commentators. Right. So,
#
what is that also? What is that? I mentioned also in my book that they, in right at the end,
#
that I watched Sangha Kara win a T20 match for World Championship for Sri Lanka. That really I
#
enjoyed. So I could see some of the aesthetics, qualities even in the smaller game. But it may
#
also be that I'm too old to cultivate a new interest and a new passion. I mean, for me,
#
every evening I listen to Indian classical music, every single evening without fail.
#
Sometimes it's an hour, sometimes it's two hours. And that gives me, though it's heretical to say
#
so, it may even give me more pleasure than even a test match nowadays. But I can see the point
#
you're making. I've not followed it enough, closely enough the way you have. And other people I respect,
#
just getting knowledge or respect would make similar points. That the armory of the bowler,
#
the slower ball, the disguise, the use of the crease, the inventiveness of the batsman,
#
and also the captaincy, you know, which bowler to bring on for which over when and how to sequence
#
that. There's a different kind of art. You know, it's not like on a sieving track, you'll give Anderson
#
eight overs straight away. That's the end of it, right? All right. On a dusty track, you'll pick
#
three spinners and Kumle and Venkatapati Raju and Ashwin will do your job. So the captaincy also,
#
to add to what you said, the captaincy involved in field placing. But different batsmen, how to
#
place a field, in which over, you know, the field for Kohli in the 11th over will be different from
#
the field for Kohli in the 17th over. The field for Kohli to the same bowler in the 11th over
#
will be different than the field to Rohit Sharma, as will be the balls ball. So these are, of course,
#
there's a lot of strategy involved in this game, like baseball, because it's like baseball,
#
depending on what kind of batsmen you're facing. So I can appreciate that. And, but maybe I'm too
#
old to get so deep into it. If it is indeed a totally different kind of game, it's badminton
#
to test cricket's tennis. You know, I'm too old to make that kind of emotional and intellectual
#
investment to get so deep into it. I'd rather stay with what I like, which is just cricket.
#
Yeah, absolutely. Before I go on to my last kind of couple of questions, just quick responses.
#
One, I heard Sanghakara's name, and I remembered another delightful anecdote from your book, where
#
you talk about how Sanghakara at one point turned to you and says one thing he loves about India is
#
old monk. And that's so nice. That's like another concrete little thing, which is like it's not a
#
drink, right? It's a cultural marker of sorts, which kind of unites us almost like cricket. And
#
I found that delightful. The second thought that came to mind was that all these years I have
#
watched it with the volume on mute. This year, for the first time, I found occasion not to do so
#
because they had a separate channel called Select Dugout, where they had my favorite commentator
#
right now, Graham Swan. He just, I just loved his commentary. Absolutely fantastic. So you had
#
Swan and Scott Styrus and Brian Lara, surprisingly good commentators, surprising, surprising reserve
#
and insight. Hiraav, as it were, which has come to him with the years. So I really love that.
#
That's a recommendation next year, if you should be looking at a channel called Dugout. So it's
#
called the Select Dugout. So Star Sports 1, 2, 3 will show the English and Hindi commentaries,
#
but Star Sports Select showed this commentary. So maybe in March when it comes around, I think
#
March or April. The other point I wanted to make is sort of a dual point. So both a disagreement
#
and a non-disagreement because these are different categories. One, when you speak about nobody
#
coming from IPL and becoming a test star. One, I don't see why that should be a metric at all,
#
that somebody from IPL should become good in another sport, as it were. But two, even within
#
that metric, I would say that, you know, Bumrah was discovered by John Wright before he had played a
#
Ranji match. I think he played a, you know, one of the limited overs games for his side and he was
#
so unconventional and one doesn't know if he would have come through the system. But because of the
#
incentives, because within the artificial world of the IPL, it wasn't a monopsony, there were
#
multiple buyers. Sides were incentivized to set up their own sort of scouts and everything. And
#
John Wright was the chief scout for Bombay. He not only found Bumrah, he found the Pandya brothers.
#
I think, you know, someone like Hardik Pandya is sort of stereotyped as someone who just goes out
#
and talks and hits. I think he's a wonderful batsman and even in the test format and hopefully
#
he'll prove me right. And these won't be words that will embarrass me a few years down the line.
#
And even Steve Smith, we first noticed him when he was like a leg spinning all rounder in the IPL.
#
And from then he went on to become a test grade, which he might well have anyway. But I'll sort
#
of move on to my last two questions now and not sort of litigate the matter of the IPL any further.
#
You know, you've described yourself as a cricket tragic, which to some extent I feel I am, though
#
I do also have this appreciation for this different sport, you know, and, you know,
#
when you write about this book, one, I feel great joy because my own memories come flooding back to
#
me through the conduit of the feelings that you're describing and, you know, the first match you've
#
seen and this happened and, you know, all of that. But there is also, it feels in a way like a lament
#
of something lost. And is there a larger lament within that, that the same way that test cricket
#
was a sport for its time, where time moved in a leisurely way, people had so many things to do.
#
Everyone is not looking into their smartphones. People are united by that love of cricket where,
#
you know, 40 people in a bus can suddenly turn towards that one transistor radio that is
#
blaring. Is there, you know, when you think about everything that has happened and it almost seems
#
that the change in the last 10, 15 years specifically is seismic, but you've got a longer span of
#
looking at this than I have, plus you've been a historian. So you've gone much further back in time
#
and now you've come here. Is your lament deeper than that? Is it not just cricket? Are you also
#
an India tragic in a sense? Are you also bemoaning values that have changed a way of life that has
#
gone? You know, can you tell me a little bit more about your feelings? I might take issue with
#
the use of the word lament. All right. Obviously it's got two chapters in the BCCI where I said
#
the BCCI stinks. Right. But, you know, in my book, I talk about how Kolhi replaces my boyhood hero
#
G. R. Vishwanath in the all time 11. And this conversation you persuaded me that
#
Bumrah has a much better case than Zahir or Srinath to partner Kapil Dev with a new ball in that 11.
#
So I appreciate that. That's why if it was all about lament and nostalgia, I wouldn't be watching
#
youngsters at the FUCC, you know, year after year after year. So, but it is because it's a memoir,
#
it goes back a long time. The older you get, you see your youthful interests and
#
enthusiasms and obsessions in a certain warm glow, you know, warm, sentimental glow. So they were,
#
the nastiness gets ironed out and there was also nastiness. I mean, ironed out,
#
also nastiness. I mean, I don't talk in my book about the intrigue in selection in Stevens College,
#
our captains were chosen, our university. So it was not as if it was all wonderful then. Right.
#
So they were, but I grew up a test game. So I love it. I would still, I'm looking forward. I didn't
#
watch the IPL, which happened recently at all. I didn't follow it. I don't know who won. Till
#
you told me that Delhi and Bombay were in the final. I had no clue. I look forward to start
#
bowling to Pujara, which I've talked about. I'll get up and watch that. Is it a mirror for what is
#
happening elsewhere in society? Again, it's like, I'm particularly, till a year and a half ago,
#
I was not pessimistic. I'll tell you why. About India, broadly, about broadly. Because it is,
#
it has been true that ethical standards in public life have gone down. So they are no
#
Nehru's and Rajaji's and Ambedkar's anymore. Absolutely not. They are no, I mean, the
#
outstanding civil servants we had, we don't, but there was innovation and sheer genius in fields,
#
more daring, more character in fields like entrepreneurship, research, civil society activism
#
that was absent when I was young. When I was young in the seventies and eighties,
#
Indians were quiescent. We depended on the Mabab Sarkar. We didn't have the kind of extraordinarily
#
efflorescence you have in entrepreneurship, in civil society activism, in creativity, in film,
#
in writing, in script writing, in pop music, in art. Extraordinary things young Indians are doing
#
all over India of all kinds of cultural backgrounds and very few of them sense demons and thankfully
#
so. Right. So in that sense, I was not a bitter, nostalgic old man. The last 18 months, particularly
#
after the reelection of Lenin Ramodi and what has followed, that is, first of all, the majority
#
of terrorism represented by particularly Amit Shah coming to government and then what happened in
#
Kashmir in the CIA, the capitulation of the Supreme Court, the intimidation of the press,
#
our learning standing even in that neighborhood where Bangladesh, a country we had created,
#
we have needlessly alienated in such a thoughtless way. And the decline of our economy from which
#
we are not going to recover the contempt for science, the contempt for expertise, this love
#
jihad nonsense that is the latest form of trick that is brought before us to distract us from the
#
real problems our country is facing. So till 18 months ago, I was not an India tragic, but now I
#
really do despair for my country and the state of the Congress party. I mean, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul
#
Gandhi are the chief enablers of Modi and Shah. Modi and Shah are the chief destroyers and damages
#
of the Indian Republic and his secular fabric who are enabled by that despicable family that
#
controls the Congress party. So today, maybe today in a larger sense, the things will change. I mean,
#
I know that as a historian, nothing is permanent. There are no permanent winners and losers. But
#
what has happened to the last 18 months before the pandemic started with our politics, our economics,
#
our institutions, our press, and our courts has certainly made me despairing about it.
#
You know, I share those sentiments 100% of that we even discussed that in the Republic Day episode
#
earlier this year. But if anything, there's less cause for hope. And I often find myself withdrawing
#
more into the personal and trying not to think about politics, because what can one do anyway
#
to sort of shift back to something that gives us joy, but not cricket. My final question is really
#
a request to you to do a service to both me and my listeners and share recommend some classical
#
music for us to listen to. What do you listen to every evening? Who are the artists you keep
#
going back to? And specifically, you know, what are the compositions or songs or whatever that,
#
you know, give you a lot of joy, because I'd love to try out some of that.
#
You know, I mean, I confess the confession, which is also a statement of fact. I'm an enthusiastic
#
amateur listener of Indian classical music with the emphasis on the amateur. Okay. I am a keen
#
and enthusiastic follower of cricket with some but a cricketer who as someone who has played with
#
future and past educators himself. So I know much more about the techniques and aesthetics of cricket
#
than I do about music. So I have an enthusiastic amateur listener. It would not be appropriate for
#
me to recommend per se, except to say to add to what I've said, every evening, I listen to music.
#
All right, or a long flight, I only listen to music. So when I'm taking a 14 hour flight to
#
Chicago, for example, which I don't anymore, I would listen to Nikhil Banerjee or Bismillah Khan
#
or Ali Akbar Khan, because vocal music would make me more much more emotionally involved. And I find
#
the most best cure for jet lag is Indian classical music instrumental. I listen to a lot on YouTube.
#
I have my own collection. A friend recently very graciously put 70 cassettes of mine recorded in
#
the 70s and 1980s of national programs on all India radio on mp3. So they're on my system. So I listen
#
to them through the day. I can't write with music. I have friends who can write with music. I can
#
read with music, do research with music. And to me, again, it would not be appropriate for me to
#
recommend pieces of music per se because of my imperfect knowledge. By the way, again, well,
#
I know I have friends who are profoundly knowledgeable. So I have a friend who's a
#
retired civil servant called Keshav Desi Raju, who's just written a magnificent book on MS
#
Subbalakshmi that's coming out next month, the first serious musical biography. So I often call
#
him. So three days ago, what happened was I was listening to TM Krishna on YouTube and there was
#
a Kalana song he sang. And he said before singing it, it's my, this song is based on a poem composed
#
by D. V. Gundappa. Now there's no reason for you to know who D. V. Gundappa was, but some listeners
#
in Bangalore in Lom that there's a D. V. Gundappa road in Basangudi. A few of them in Lom, it's
#
named after a very distinguished liberal Kaledi intellectual, probably a preeminent follower of
#
Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Gundappa founded the Gokhale Institute in Bangalore. I knew this,
#
but I didn't know that Gundappa was a composer of poetry that was then set to music. So I called
#
my friend Keshav and he told me this is in Bihar. Gundappa composed something else, which MS is also
#
sung in Bihar. He gave me the link and I went then to the MS link. So the kind of joy you get
#
from music and from learning from people who are more knowledgeable. Again, I'm very privileged.
#
I'll just make one last name. If you're interested, I can persuade him. There's a great scholar of
#
Hindustani and Carnatic music called S. Gopal Krishna, who tweets under the handle Gopal years,
#
Gopal G E A R S Gopal years. Gopal sends three days a week. He sends a curated piece of music
#
to 500 or 1000 people to listen to. Some days it's Hindustani, some days it's Carnatic,
#
with a paragraph of explanation. Today is the 98th birthday anniversary of Bhimshan Joshi.
#
My first exposure to Bhimshan Joshi was in a concert in Pune. I remember he sang with
#
Staten Khamaj. So I'm going to give three different renditions of Khamaj for you to
#
listen to this morning. All right. So Gopal year G O P L E R S. So please follow Gopal years. He
#
has the most refined and settled taste in music. You will, and please need case of Desi Raju's book
#
and MS Subbulakshmi when it comes out. And if you're a fan of Hindustani music, read a wonderful
#
book called The Lost World of Hindustani Music by Kumar Mukherjee, which was published some years
#
ago by again, a great scholar and connoisseur of music. It's an utterly beautiful book. Also read
#
the writings on music of Sheeladhar, which have been collected under the titles Ragh and Josh,
#
published by Permanent Black, my own publisher in Ghaniket. So it would be impertinent and
#
pompous of me given my imperfect knowledge of music to recommend a particular piece of music,
#
except this to say that it gives me really more joy even than watching this thing to our Shastri
#
SME. Yeah, no, I was not asking you in the spirit of expert recommendations, but just in sharing a
#
little bit of yourself, at which point I must thank you for this wonderful book, because you
#
have shared so much of yourself in it. And I think part of the richness for the book and the delight
#
in that I got from reading the book comes from that melding of the personal and the social and
#
the sporting and all of that. So, and I think this is a generosity, which is not often remarked upon.
#
So thank you so much for that. And thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you.
#
Thank you. Lovely. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to your nearest
#
bookstore online or offline and pick up Ramachandra Guha's delightful new book,
#
The Commonwealth of Cricket, a lifelong love affair with the most subtle and sophisticated
#
game known to humankind. And yes, I know you're thinking what a long subtitle but consider that
#
the author loves test cricket. You can follow Ram on Twitter at Ram underscore Guha. You can follow
#
me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at
#
sceneunseen.in. You can pick up some Scene and the Unseen swag at sceneunseen.in slash stuff.
#
And you can enroll for my writing and podcasting courses right away. The art of clear writing is
#
at indiaankar.com slash clear writing. The art of podcasting is at sceneunseen.in slash learn.
#
Thank you for learning. Oh, wait a minute. Don't I normally say thank you for listening?
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen? If so, would you like to support the
#
production of the show? You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute
#
any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.
