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Given what cricket means for so many Indians, it's tempting to draw parallels between the
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story of cricket and the story of India.
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In some ways, cricket reflects how Indian society has changed over the last few decades.
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We started out uncertain of our place in the world, trying to find our feet, hobbled by
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an inferiority complex, looking for pride in small constellations, but eventually opening
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up to the world and asserting ourselves.
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But this comparison only goes so far.
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Our cricket has flourished to a point where India dominates this game, especially in a
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In some ways, it also embodies the best of what this country can be.
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It is inclusive of players from the remotest parts and showcases a healthy way to love
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I contrast that with the state of the nation today.
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Where our economy is in a precarious place, our society is facing so many different kinds
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of ruptures, our politics has become so polarizing and toxic.
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George Orwell once spoke of sport as war minus a shooting.
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He was alluding to the ugly tribal instincts that sport can bring out.
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But cricket, it seems to me, has evolved to a place where it can sometimes take us beyond
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If that's so, then that's one more thing to love about Indian cricket.
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And there's a lot to love about it.
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen.
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Our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science.
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Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Ayaz Memon, cricket journalist for 42 years now, and indeed such a legend
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of cricket journalism that his Twitter handle, at Cricketwala, is basically how he is known.
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Ayaz is the editor of a superb new anthology called Indian Innings, the Journey of Indian
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The book has selections from over 60 writers spanning the decades since independence and
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captures many of the fine milestones and characters of the game.
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In some ways, it's not just about the journey of cricket, but also the journey of cricket
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I'm honored to have a couple of pieces in this anthology, and the rest of the writers
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constitute a who's who of Indian cricket writing.
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It's a fabulous book to sit back with and get a sense of the rich history of this fine
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game, which, as Ashish Nandi once said, is quote, an Indian game invented by the English.
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But I didn't just talk to Ayaz about cricket.
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He has also been a major figure of Indian journalism as the editor of Midday in the
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90s and later an editor with the Times of India and DNA.
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He's been a stalwart in the industry.
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So we spoke about cricket and journalism, about India, about this and that.
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My podcasts tend to be like a test match.
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But before we begin, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Do you want to read more?
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I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
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This means that I read more books, but I also read more long form articles and essays.
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There's a world of knowledge available through the internet.
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But the problem we all face is how do we navigate this knowledge?
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How do we know what to read?
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How do we put the right incentives in place?
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Well, I discovered one way.
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A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com,
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which aims to help people up level themselves by reading more.
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A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
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Every day for six months, they sent me a long form article to read.
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The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
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This helped me build a habit of reading.
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At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
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So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQCompounds and check out
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New batches start every month.
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They also have a great program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up to date with
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Future Stack batches start every Saturday.
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Also check out their Social Capital Compound, which helps you master social media.
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What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2,500 rupees, 2,500 if you use the discount
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So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen.
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Ayaz, welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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Thank you so much, Amit.
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Thank you for having me.
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When one speaks to you, there's so much to talk about, because you've covered Indian
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cricket for more than 40 years now.
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And plus, beyond all of that, I don't just want to talk to you about cricket because obviously
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you've been a prominent journalist, you've been editor of Midday and all of that.
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And I'd be interested in hearing about your thoughts on the evolution of our journalism
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But before that, take me back to your childhood.
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You were born in the mid fifties.
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So tell me about what growing up there was like, because one often hears this thing about
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And as an eighties kid, I also know this to be true, though I was born in the seventies,
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but kind of my memories are from the eighties, where that old cliche about India is kind
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of true in the sense that you just had cricket in Bollywood.
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There was no other way to entertain yourself.
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And if you were growing up, you couldn't help but be attracted to one of those things.
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And you are, of course, a legend of cricket journalism, but more than that, also a cricket
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lover, as is apparent in every word that you speak.
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So how did this love affair start?
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Well, I mean, look, you're right, cricket and cinema were the abiding passions.
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But in my house, there was no cinema because my father was quite opposed to movies.
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He was a lawyer and my mother told me subsequently, after my father died, that he actually was
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very interested in cinema up to a point.
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And then whatever happened, he just switched off cinema.
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I think his favorites used to be Kundanlal Sehgal and all that generation.
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But cricket was an obsession even with him.
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And since I was a late, late child, I was born after 17 years.
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So the way I was pampered was my mother, my father was a lawyer, so he would be at work
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through the week and come home rather late.
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So my mother would sneak off to the cinema with her friends in as much as was possible
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in the very conservative society and tag me along.
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So I saw some movies in radio talkies near Crawford Market, and some of them were really
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the real tearjerkers, as you call them.
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And then you would see my mother's weeping, her friends are weeping, and I would wonder
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as a child what the hell is happening.
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But the other thing which was happening in my life was that I was getting a cricket bat
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or a cricket ball as a gift from my father.
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And then I think in many ways, the turning point for me was getting a copy of Wisden.
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We used to have a house in Lonavala, my father used to take us there and meet him at the
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He would come by the Deccan Queen, which is an iconic train service as we know.
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And one day he walked out of the compartment and he had this… it looked like a brick
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or a couple of bricks that he was holding in his hand, he said, hey, this is for you.
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And I was maybe seven or something like that, and I said, this is just too big for me to
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And I went back, we went back home and I started reading those pages and that's where I got
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my first feel of reading about cricket, you know.
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And because we had a small little porch in front of the little garden, in his pajamas
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my father would bowl to me and I would be batting all the other way around.
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And that's when I started getting initiated into cricket.
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And he was such an avid follower that there was a match between Australia and some other
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country and I remember it was England I think, 62, 63, he would wake up early in the morning
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to catch the commentary on Radio Australia.
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And I started waking up and listening to the commentary.
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And that's when this kind of appreciation and also this love for cricket started growing.
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And then once I got that copy of Wisden, I started exploring it further because you can't
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finish Wisden in one quick read.
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You have to keep diving into it and you find something new and something more marvelous
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and something more remarkable.
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And I think one thing which absolutely fascinated me, coupled me for a while, was my father
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posed three questions to me, I remember this very distinctly when we were in Vanavala.
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He said, you're okay, so now you're fond of cricket and all that, so whose batting average
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Who's taken 19 wickets in a test match?
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And then there was the third question, he said, who made a triple century and never
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played a match again, a test match again?
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So the first two I found rather easily in many ways because you went to the highest
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averages, you found Don Bradman 99.94 and Jim Laker 19 wickets in a test match.
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And I got completely bamboozled by the third one.
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Which is Andrew Sandham.
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Which is Andrew Sandham.
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And I went back and forth and I said, triple century and not played again.
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And then, you know, by a process of elimination, you found out who made the triple centuries.
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And Andrew Sandham was a guy who in 1929-30, he played a timeless test match, this came
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in a timeless test, he actually made a half century also in that match.
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And never played again because he was 39-40 by that time.
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So, you know, just discovering Andrew Sandham's name was such a high for me that I couldn't
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get over it for many, many days.
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It was almost like, you know, I had played a game of chess with or he had played a game
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of chess with me and I had checkmated him.
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I found the answer, I went and told him and of course he was delighted.
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But these were the early years and I think the turning point was watching India beat
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Australia at the Brabham stadium, Bobby Simpson's team versus Nawab of Pathodi's India.
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And somebody, some relative of mine had some tickets for the Islam Jim Khanna stands.
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I didn't see the first two days, we saw the last three days of the match and it was a
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The match went into, you know, I mean, it was like edge of the seat excitement, narrowly
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India won, Chandu Bode, Indrajit Singh, the wicket keeper who I got to know very well
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later, both of them, Bode and there was a, Chandu Bode I think made 33 and took India
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to victory and there, there was an eruption when India hit the winning runs, when Bode
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and you know, people jumped over, there was not too much security then, everybody jumped
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onto the ground and ran towards the CCI pavilion and then after a while, everybody's shouting
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slogans and you know, waiting for the team to greet their heroes and then Pathodi comes
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out on the balcony along with Chandrasekhar and Bode and some of the others and that was
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the most decisive moment for me, I think, you know, I just got completely hooked to
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You know, just thinking back on my own childhood, for example, like if you ask a young person
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today when did you fall in love with cricket, their memory will be visual.
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They would have probably seen something on television, some great innings, some World
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Cup final and that is a moment and all of that and for us in the pre-TV days, those
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visuals kind of weren't there, like I remember when I was a kid, my dad had once given me
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this book, not the Wizard and Cricketers, Almanac as you mentioned, which I had the
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great pride of writing for in the early 2000s, so that was like something that you looked
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up to in the childhood actually happening but this Wizard and Book of Test Cricket,
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which was published in 1977 and had every scorecard until then and all the records and
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everything and I remember going through it and I practically knew every scorecard by
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heart and of course, there weren't so many tests played until then and what was so delightful
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about that was that we were making stories in our heads about all these characters.
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Like you know, you brought up Andrew Sandham, I remembered Ari Foster who made 287 on debut,
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I never made 100 again and I realised that many of these memories from my childhood are
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very vivid for me, like as a growing up fan, I knew every triple century, right?
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And whenever somebody would reach a sort of a triple hundred, you would kind of start
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counting that person down that oh okay, 310 is Edrick, 311 is Simpson, then 334, 336 is
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Hammond, 334 of course Bradman and so on and right up to adulthood, like many Indians have
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scored more than 236 not out today but that is still sort of an iconic figure because
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that for many, many years, there was a high score by an Indian which of course, Gavaskar
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You know, past Bradman.
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You know, 30th century.
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So do you also feel that because one of the things that people say about memory is that
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when you kind of get on in years, as to some extent both of us are, what you remember really
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vividly are the bookends, a lot of the middle becomes kind of mushy and you kind of forget
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that but you remember those early childhood memories very vividly and you remember what
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just happened yesterday but a lot of stuff in between is kind of just a blur and I remember
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that struck me with a tinge of sadness because my dad before he passed away earlier this
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year, I think last year I sat down with him and I said, you know, I just took a recorder
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and I said, okay, I have all this audio equipment, let me talk to you about your memories and
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he remembered his childhood and his youth incredibly vividly and then at one point and
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he was suffering from Parkinson's as we later found and at one point he turned to me and
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he said that, I don't remember you as a child, I don't remember anything of the years you
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grew up, so tell me a little bit about that, which is just an aside I thought I'll throw
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out there because I'm very fascinated by the way that memory works and the fact that you
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and I can remember, you know, I'm sure entire scorecards from our childhood but perhaps
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not something that we covered in the middle of our journalistic years, is that sort of
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true or do you remember?
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No, I mean, it's true, so there are two things that I can say that has happened, I'm not
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a psychoanalyst in that sense, so I can only talk about myself, one is that when I started
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following cricket, there was not enough visual experience to go by, there was no television
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in my house till at least the late 70s actually if I remember and that was also black and
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white to camera and there was not too many pictures in newspapers, the magazine sports
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week at least in Mumbai or Bombay started in 1968, there was sports and pastime, sport
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and pastime coming from Chennai, which one didn't get regularly, we were not subscribing
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to it and Chennai was a long way away from Bombay in those days, so you dived into these
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books or newspaper reports and you actually created a visual experience for yourself,
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so if you read about Sir Garfield Sobers hitting Malcolm Nash for six sixes and over, now you
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can see it on YouTube, but when it actually happened, one could only imagine it and visualize
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as you imagine it and therefore those memories actually struck, were quite vivid for me,
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some of them may have been exaggerated, a little flawed, but they stuck and therefore
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also the scorecards and the descriptions around it stuck, so Tiger Patawdi batting on one
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leg in Australia in 1967, already with one eye, already with one eye, back in one leg
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because he was injured and just the description and what you read and what you heard on radio
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had very powerful impact and now what is because there's such a profusion of action that one
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can see and it comes to you from all sources, it can come to you on your mobile phone, it's
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obviously there on your television, it's there in the archival material, if you want to access
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it, you can see just about anything, so you can seek out what you have missed and it is
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there and try and match it, but there is also so much of it that what you've actually seen
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you tend to lose sight of or you tend to forget, you know it's been 13 years since the IPL
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has been played, if you ask me which knock or innings that I remember, the only one which
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I remember is the first one which I saw was Brendan McCallum making 158 in the first match
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when the tournament just took off, but if you ask me some of the other terrific knocks
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played by AB de Villiers or Virat Kohli or Rohit Sharma, I'm hazy, I don't know, test
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matches I would be far more you know is far stronger the impact, I remember distinctly
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Sachin Tendulkar's first innings, you know in Karachi, but that was also because it was
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such a momentous event, you know a 16 year old getting into the Indian team, first rival
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is Pakistan, the match is at Karachi and you know he doesn't make too many runs, then of
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course as the series progresses, he played in the last test, he gets hit on the face
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by Bakar Yunus, stands up and hits the boundary, then we go to Peshawar and then he's hitting
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those sixes of Abdul Qadir, by the time that tour ends, Tendulkar is a household name across
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the world, so those memories are very distinct, but there are so many others, I can't remember
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too much of the other players, Tendulkar I can remember, because it seemed to me just
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so much more significant in that particular series, and likewise you know I mean Gavaskar's
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last innings of his test career, 96 at Bangalore, it's almost as if I can remember every delivery,
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you know speaking broadly for the manner in which he played on that minefield of a pitch,
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you know when Tausif Ahmed was bowling to him and the ball was breaking off the pitch
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and bouncing, and this guy would just kind of you know move outside the line of the ball,
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move to the offside, let the ball pass, if you look at the scorecard, I think there are
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a fair number of buys there, because the wicket keeper couldn't judge the bounce or the spin
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as well as Gavaskar could, of course he was also obscured by Gavaskar, but I'm just saying
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that the mastery of Gavaskar in that innings is something that I can't, you know it doesn't
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get erased, it's not got erased from my mind, or Kapil Dev's catch in the World Cup, or
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his 175 which you know I was privileged to see live.
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We'll kind of talk about all of that, and these are again seminal moments and in Sachin's
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case there's a backstory because you had actually seen him before that, I think you'd mentioned
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once that Dilip Venksarkar had called you and said come with me and see this boy.
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Yes, Dilip Venksarkar was the captain of India and you know our office was in Tardeo, the
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sports week office, and Dilip used to live in those days I think he had I think moved
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to Worli, you know in sports field building, and he said he called up and said let's go
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and watch Sachin Tendulkar bat, I had some work, I didn't go along with him, but I followed
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him and we met at CCI and by that time Sachin was I think he had notched up another hundred
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So Dilip was most excited to see him, also I think in the Bombay cricket environment
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they were all watching this young boy very intently, not just Dilip but they were watching
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Dungarpur you know, who rates amongst the most amazing, fascinating characters I've
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seen and had the experience of knowing in Indian cricket, so he was there, he was you
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know he was just kind of, you couldn't put him down, he was just bouncing all over the
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place in CCI watching Tendulkar bat and he would come and you know he would go from person
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to person and say did you see that shot, you know did you see, now that they put a fielder
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on the boundary, so he's not hitting the fours, he's pushing for ones and twos, see how much
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cricket intelligence he has, so you know Raj Singh Dungarpur was also president of CCI and
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he gave him the membership when he was not even eligible, he was underage in that sense
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but he was absolutely obsessed by Sachin, so watching Sachin at that age was in many
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ways an exposure to a genius in the making and also in many ways an insight into what
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was happening in Indian cricket around that same time, how the spread of cricket was happening
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not just in Bombay but you know there are two eras which I say one is the pre-Sachin
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era and the post-Sachin era, in the pre-Sachin era to which all of us belonged, parents would
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say school jao pado, ye vo whatever sports is fine this that you will see how it goes
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but don't waste your time too much, first get a job and then in the post-Sachin era
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now you go to Shivaji Park or any of the maidans, young mums and dads go and tell the coach
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to make him Tendulkar, make him Sachin, they are not interested in whether they finish
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12th with distinction or graduation but if they can if you can become a Sachin or now
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a Virat Kohli or a Dhoni that is enough for them which is a major shift, Tendulkar was
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you know in a as you said a seminal moment in Indian cricket and Indian life you know
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you just started reimagining especially where sport is concerned and cricket if you look
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at the average of your age of cricketers, the English always used to have fairly experienced
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guys getting into the test team, they played some 8, 10, 7 years of county cricket and
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they come in, the Pakistanis used to have the youngest you know teenagers would break
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into the team, the Aussies would blood their cricketers fairly young, the Indians were
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because there was a whole process, schools cricket, college cricket then you get into
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universities cricket if you do well there then you get into Ranji cricket, so 20, 21,
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22 was usually the age when the Indian cricketers would get into the national team or why for
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a place in the national team, Tendulkar created a paradigm shift, now and with the IPL coming
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in you know there are 16, 17, 18 year old guys getting, if you are 24, 25 and if you
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have not made it to the Indian team today it's tough you know, it's tough maybe your
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sell by date has gone in many ways.
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I think there was a lament a couple of years back from Shreyas Iyer saying hey I'm 24
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time is passing by, I need to get back to the Indian team.
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I mean exactly, you know one can sense what he is feeling because it's not just about
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Shreyas Iyer, there are swarms of cricketers coming from all over the country, what were
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the bastions of other sports earlier, hockey for instance in Punjab is no longer you know
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the bastion for hockey, it's also you know Kerala is no longer the bastion for football,
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you know cricket is just taken over, so you might feel that it's a bit of a lopsided situation
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in where sports is considered in India but that's how it is.
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Yeah and it's interesting that it's lopsided in terms of playing, it's not lopsided in
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terms of watching per se, that people are watching many more sports with enthusiasm
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than they did once in a while which I think to some extent is also reflected in the sports
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pages and the kind of coverage that happens but you know you can watch a lot of Premier
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League but there's no quality football really happening in India which can make you aspire
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to that so I'd actually say that there were three eras like there's a pre-Sachin era and
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the Sachin era is really the post liberalisation era also in a sense wherein the game goes
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to the small towns and that sort of that dominance of Delhi Mumbai is kind of broken and you
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know it just goes into an entirely different sort of demographic as it were and the third
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era for me is really IPL because I think it just changed the incentive so much in terms
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of the ecosystem being so much richer, the incentives, you know even in the post Sachin
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era if a parent wanted her child to be Sachin they would realise that it's a nice dream
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to have but the odds are thoroughly stacked against it and if the kid doesn't make it
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to the national team, kuch nahi hone wala but today that's not the case, today your
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kid doesn't have to be in the top ten in the country, top hundred in the country means
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Yes and it just opened up so many options for young kids because there are more teams.
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Also what made a big difference, you talked about the liberalisation coming in that era,
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also cable television, that's what really took it into every house, every nook and corner
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of this country and you know cricket is played over a longer period of time than every other
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sport, maybe golf which runs over a few days but otherwise test cricket over five days,
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one day cricket is a one day match you know, even T20 is three and a half hours, four hours
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which is more, so there's more television time and while cricket is a team sport actually
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the focus is on individuals, so when the batsman is there in the middle, he's at the crease,
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the camera is focused entirely on him when the ball is about to be bowled, when the fielder
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feels the ball it is that one player that you're focusing on, if he takes a catch then the
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celebrations and all that, in many ways it's a one on one rivalry between the batsman and
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the bowler, so it just gives so much more importance to the individual in a team game.
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Also not just to the individual person but to the individual moment, like a three hour
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game of cricket is not one event, it is a series of all these small events like depending
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on how many balls there are.
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There are discrete events, look at it this way Amit, if I'm a bowler I can bowl over
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the wicket, round the wicket, over the wicket, I have to just inform the umpire, I can keep
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changing my line, the captain can or the bowler can keep changing the field, so every ball
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is an independent event in itself you know, and it's very staccato, unlike say football
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or hockey or some of the other team sports where the flow is not easily stopped but you
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can deliberately stop it.
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Yeah, I mean every moment in a football field is in a sense determined by the moment before,
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where everybody was, what was happening, all the momentum and direction and everything,
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whereas that might be psychologically true in a cricketing sense but otherwise every
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ball is a separate event.
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Which is why there's so much importance to tactics and strategy because in football and
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hockey or rugby all the tactics are done prior to, you know you have changes in tactics but
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the blueprint is prepared much in advance.
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In cricket nowadays, in T20 perhaps that is being done more than ever before but yet it
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is how the game unfolds that you know you can improvise, you can implement changes and
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that's why the role of the captain becomes so important because the captain is an interventionist,
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it's not what the manager and coach has told you earlier but if you know you want to change
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the field in consultation with the bowler then you can do it immediately.
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Yeah, the captains can change the flow of the game in a way that they can't in any
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other sport but see you know this is what happened, two Indians start a conversation,
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it is about something but it always comes down to cricket, we were talking about you
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so I'm going to sort of, of course we will keep coming back to cricket but to get back
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to the biographical bit you've already kind of spoken about how you discovered, you know
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you got the wisdom creators, Almanac you've spoken elsewhere about how you used to buy
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second hand cricket books from the footpath at Andloom house in the fort area in Mumbai,
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I think that's part of your introduction.
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Play fair cricket annual was my favourite because wisdom was still pretty expensive.
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Is there a moment where beyond a cricket book you discovered that there is something called
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Yes, you know one went from the book and said you know you start, you are at an age when
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you start exploring and because cricket was gripping my mind and how do I find something
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that is happening every day, keep myself updated, that's when you turn to the newspapers and
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we used to get two or three newspapers in the house where amongst the first names that
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I read from sports was K N Prabhu of the times of India, there was also Ron Hendricks who
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was the Indian Express I think in those days, he didn't write too much on cricket, he was
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more for the other sports but he had a good turn of phrase which I started enjoying.
#
Prabhu was very lyrical and you know he would blend a lot of nostalgia with match reports
#
and you know very distinctive flavour to his writing and when I got to know him personally
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many years later, he just about completely fit the image I had in my mind of what kind
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of a person he would be, how he would look and how he would be as a companion, I shared
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the room with him on several occasions during test matches and then there was much later
#
Khaled Ansari, 68 when he started Sportsweek magazine, Khaled Ansari was all fire and
#
brimstone you know all very, his editorials would be all taking the pants off authorities
#
and federation heads and you know whatever else but it was good fun to read and it kind
#
of enticed me into this whole thing about sports writing and sports journalism.
#
So I started reading the newspapers very, I became a very voracious reader and obviously
#
when you are at that age and you have a passion for sports, you start reading from the back
#
page onwards but remember in the 60s and 70s right up to the 80s, 90s perhaps, sports was
#
like a country cousin in the newsroom, you had one and half pages though was you know
#
just too much space to see the pages now and I remember when I joined DNA, when we started
#
DNA, we had a 6 page, 8 page supplement which was unthinkable in 2005 I think that was.
#
So otherwise sports was one page, one and a half page at best and then it became two
#
pages, two and a half pages, three pages but that's a function also of the economic growth
#
of the country when you know post liberalisation most of these things happened.
#
But my liking for sports writing started very early, I think in about 68, 69, 70 was the
#
time and 71 was the turning point in the lives of so many people who grew up in that era,
#
India winning against the West Indies and India winning against England and that win
#
series I think in many ways just made me a complete cricket nut.
#
That was, I mean I was very fond of cricket but then it became an obsession in 1970, 71.
#
You know one of the things I liked about your anthology is not just that for any lover of
#
Indian cricket it's obviously Manor from the Heavens because there's so much great material
#
here but it's also an anthology of cricket writing, like these people you've just named,
#
you've got a couple of pieces from Prabhu about 71, you've got a piece by Khalid Ansari
#
about 74 I think and I picked up this lovely line from Prabhu because in 71 in one of the
#
reports that you've reproduced in your book he writes about how a lot of critics have
#
been proved wrong by that first test win because they had said that Sardesai and I think Durrani
#
and Venkat should not have been selected but they have been and for these critics he writes
#
these two sentences quote, the new literates of cricket however are rarely right in such
#
matters their petty prejudices have been exposed by the manner in which these players have
#
performed stop quote and I was like dude if K.N. Prabhu lived in the time of Twitter how
#
many people would he respond to?
#
That perhaps is two harshest sentences I've read from K.N. Prabhu but you know he had
#
a very strong impact on you know cricket writing was by and large in the English newspapers.
#
The regional newspapers became stronger later and there have been some very very fine writers
#
like Bal Karmarkar I know from Maharashtra Times and he was also very avid cricket follower
#
and cricket writer he went on to also become I think managing editor of the paper so he
#
moved away a little from sports but regional papers joined in later because the space that
#
was available for sports was far more meager in regional papers more were available in
#
English newspapers because most of the advertising came to English newspapers so they had more
#
space so if Times of India in the 1970s 80s was 10-12 pages the regional papers would
#
be 6-8 pages and therefore there was a restriction on how much space you could give.
#
So yeah I mean K.N. Prabhu I think these people brought home to people like me readers like
#
me K.N. Prabhu was in the West Indies K.N. Prabhu was in England so he would also talk
#
about you know clouds hovering over lords or oval and you start getting a sense of what
#
England could be you know and not knowing that you would ever get to England when you
#
are 10, 11, 12 you have no idea but you start enjoying that you know the imagery that he
#
creates and that's part of the fascination for cricket writing which grips or at least
#
gripped me when I was young that it took you into distant lands and brought you you know
#
color and tapestry and flavor of those lands it's a lot more now you know cricket writers
#
today have to do a lot more work they bring you color stories they bring you profiles
#
of people who may have no relation at all with the game but they are emblematic in the
#
sense of where you are which country you are touring so for instance you might meet you
#
might read about a chapati maker in Trinidad you know who will throw in a stray line about
#
an Indian cricketer that becomes reason enough to do a story so all that is far more now
#
because there's more space available and obviously there's more consumption available but in
#
the old days you had to live with what you got and these guys were bringing home some
#
fantastic you know for an impressionable mind creating this fantastic story that one could
#
absorb and put into the hard disk so I remember that when I went to England for the first
#
time that was night for the 1983 World Cup apart from reading and whatever else I had
#
done with of K N Prabhu I had met him by then I was a journalist I was in you know in awe
#
of him but I spent a lot of time with him trying to understand what touring meant what
#
it what was this you know when he met Sir Garfield Sobers in person or Rohan Kanhai
#
who was also one of my favorites what were they like as people and grounds that he went
#
to Queen's Park Oval or Lords and so when I went to England I was looking for things
#
that K N Prabhu had also seen had I told me not that I found all of it you know so but
#
it was a great way of it was a kind of segue into a whole cricket world which I had only
#
dreamt about and then it's now coming up coming to fruition in my own life and that
#
was a source of great delight I mean when I went to England I was 27 almost 28 for the
#
World Cup but I almost felt like you know Alice in Wonderland no but also you know I
#
mean I knew the grounds Lords grace gates but to enter that and see I mean I had some
#
great experiences with grace gates and you know so for instance when I went and not not
#
all experiences were great you know when we went to England when I say we are fellow journalists
#
also we were refused accreditation for matches at Lords so you know because MCC was a distinct
#
body and the others were with the TCCB Test and County Cricket Board so we got passes
#
for all the other matches and we were refused he said no unless India is playing here which
#
may be in the final and ha ha ha not likely so no pass as it happened India reached the
#
final so prior to the match I went to the I went to grace gates you know chest puffed
#
out and the stewards at the grace gates are real stick in the muds you know very stiff
#
half a lip and where are you going I said I have to go and get my accreditation so why
#
haven't you got your accreditation as it is we had not qualified India had not qualified
#
so now they've qualified India was the West Indies and I need an accreditation so this
#
guy turns around to this other colleague in the you know steward at the grace gate and
#
says oh now we've got Gandhi coming to Lords because that was the time Gandhi the movie
#
also had you know made waves globally so I mean that's how it was that's that's how
#
pompous it was you know and of course then India went on to win the World Cup and now
#
I think I don't I don't think anybody questions Indian journalist going to Lords because India's
#
so strong in the sport today that if you don't have a game with India at Lords for an X number
#
of years then obviously their finances are dented so India is a much coveted team or
#
a much coveted country to come and play in Lords or all or wherever else which wasn't
#
necessarily the case earlier yeah exactly I mean it's like Mohammed at the mountain
#
it's the roles have kind of reversed but before we come to 83 and of course I'll you know
#
dredge into your memories on that a couple of questions strike me from what you were
#
just talking about and one of them is this that there's a situation that I remember
#
happening in the pre-television days which we've alluded to earlier that you're not
#
actually visually seeing something play out so when I think of 71 for example we've all
#
read so much about Sardesai and how he batted and he was really as important as Gavaskar
#
in many ways you know a remarkable series but I can't picture him in my mind's head
#
because I've never really seen him per se you spoke about Rohan Kanhai being one of
#
your heroes and I don't know if you actually saw him either back then or not so on the
#
one hand we are having to construct all of this in our heads which is one reason they
#
might be stronger in our memories on the other hand there is the media being produced about
#
this you know the writing about this is not that much there's a small sample size and
#
the people who are writing these reports their incentives are to dramatize everything because
#
every cricket writer wants to write an epic cricket report and whenever something epic
#
actually happens they want to make it even more epic than that and that's a temptation
#
I remember that I gave way to when I was a young writer in my twenties it's like you
#
hear about Wally Hammond writing about Amar Singh and how the ball came off the cracks
#
of Doon you know that immortal court and at one level you know it's memorable everybody
#
remembers it but at another level I'm just thinking no it didn't all of our fast bowlers
#
forget Bumrah you know the fifth net bowler for Mumbai Indians probably can bowl that
#
exact ball which drove Wally Hammond to say whatever he said and this then begs the question
#
that when you're growing up in those times how reliable are these memories because part
#
of these memories are your own construction and partly they are based on what people who
#
have the incentive to dramatize unnecessarily have made it up to be and eventually of course
#
we watch television and we watch Gavaskar make 96 and we know that you know we've seen
#
it with our own eyes so I'm kind of asking you at one level about the fan in you but
#
also about the journalist in you.
#
So I mean this is a complex question and I think it's a very interesting question I think
#
this is my surmise that before television before one could actually access matches visually
#
and make your own judgment you relied on somebody else's opinion or his reading of a situation
#
and in the case of sports because you know there's so much glory and there's so much
#
achievement associated with it there was always this thing for people who witnessed it to
#
pump it up or also be skating about it without quite understanding why they need to be so
#
both worked you know one could be you know I mean just to give you an example and it's
#
all very situational when Douglas Jardine implemented body line as a tactic all hell
#
broke loose but Clive Lloyd's West Indian team with four fast bowlers did exactly that
#
without except for the field restriction there was no not much change in fact these four
#
guys were all lethal you know and even when helmets were not as much in use as they are
#
now Gavaskar for instance never wore the helmet so a lot of what we see in the pre-television
#
era is and when we read is all very situational it is dramatized you know Neville Cardis one
#
of the greatest writers many say that he just completely exaggerated he it was his imagination
#
more than what actually happened what I think also is that matches were sparse and scarce
#
independent India's first series was to Australia 1947 the next series when we went to Australia
#
was when in 1967 20 years later so 20 years later if I was K N Prabhu who went on that
#
tour and watching India play Australia the whole situation is full of so many dimensions
#
that you end up either seeing it with a completely exaggerated point of view or you can be so
#
prosaic that it makes no sense to your readers so you have to somehow strike this balance
#
I can't go and say that you know decent you know all good length deliveries patted gently
#
back down the pitch and you know everything is fine no that would not work at all so the
#
journalist in K N Prabhu or if I was there I would say how do I sharpen things up or
#
how do I make it exciting for the reader back home because he has no other way of knowing
#
what is happening and therefore I think a lot of writing that has happened prior to
#
television becoming all pervasive is of a certain flavor so you'll find in a lot of
#
stuff even like a very polished writer like K N Prabhu if India has done well in a certain
#
match his opening sentence will be rejoice we've done it you know or something like that
#
to carry that sentiment of the achievements of a team back to people who have absolutely
#
no access as to what is happening and also one must understand the mindset of or the
#
national psyche of the people back then the way people see themselves as Indians today
#
is vastly different from how they saw themselves in 71 or even 80 and certainly of 47 I must
#
tell you this in 1947 India went to Australia in one of the county matches not in a test
#
match don batman got his hundredth century and it was of an Indian bowler who lived in
#
Baroda and when I was in sports week and I was editing sports week there would be a
#
letter every third day postcard coming that you know so and so has not got enough recognition
#
for being the bowler of which Don Bradman scored his hundredth hundred from the cricketer
#
himself so you can imagine that the sense of pride was he made his hundredth hundred
#
not that you know I got his wicket I didn't allow him to make the hundredth hundred and
#
that is also how writers then saw it if I was a writer in 1947 accompanying the Indian
#
team and what first of all I would be completely beguiled by the presence of Don Bradman in
#
the middle because Don Bradman was you know Don Bradman and then to see him bat and then
#
to make him achieve this landmark and you have to just gush and not worry about whether
#
it came against your own team you know which is there to compete and therefore I think
#
the whole situational thing matters in where you are you know sport is epochal it's to
#
do with it's not ordinary you know especially at the elite level what these guys are supposed
#
to do is something extraordinary and whatever is extraordinary will invite a lot more imagination
#
attached to it then what is everyday humdrum life that we all leave we all lead so if Kapil
#
Dev hits four sixes of Eddie Hemmings to avoid the follow-on you can't say he hit four sixes
#
and India avoided the follow-on you know you have to have two three paras which describe
#
it in such terms that it grips the imagination of the leader if it doesn't do that then it's
#
a problem but the writing changes from a journalism point of view if I'm also watching it as
#
a viewer if I'm watching it and if I'm read a report which is complete exaggeration then
#
I'll say what the hell is this guy talking about here I watched the match it wasn't it
#
wasn't like this you know so that's been the shift in your how do you adapt even your writing
#
skills and your journalism in the in the visual era era as we as we say now of course it's
#
not just watching a match with two cameras or four cameras now there are 28 cameras there
#
are multiple slo-mos they are taking it down to the you know they are splitting it into
#
it is fragmented so much that what is it that the writer can add which is already not being
#
discussed by the slo-mos and the experts on television is really the challenge now for
#
journalists what do they do as writers you know is there a quick do I just go and get
#
a quote from quote each from five experts who are there or five other former players who are there
#
or do I just get a fan's reaction from the stands what do I do how do I construct a story it's
#
become a that's become the big challenge when I went on my first tour it was Pakistan I crossed
#
over on foot with a with my luggage and one manual typewriter and I had taken loads three
#
one tour so I took loads of sports magazines and film magazines so time pass karna hai what
#
do you do in between test matches and you know or during test matches or five days in a place
#
days before smartphones you can't browse twitter and do video calls so all my film magazines got
#
confiscated by the by the customs that they wouldn't allow film magazines from India to get
#
into and political magazines sports magazines jo aap leke jao but those are things that these
#
are experiential stories that one can they become far more commonplace now on a cricket tour what
#
else happens outside the the matches itself has also gained a lot of currency which wasn't there
#
earlier you focused on the cricket and you got off you know and you know you did your tour diary
#
which was not in so much you know there was not much gravel in it now there's a lot more that one
#
can do but where the actual match is concerned since the viewers seeing everything in acute
#
detail then what do you do that's the challenge now for the journalists today so that's what my
#
next question was about but before that an observation to again point out how much I agree with
#
that dilemma of a cricket writer that you you've had a session where there are like three runs in
#
eight overs what do you even write it's very boring bowler bowls batsman blocks and the writer
#
feels imperative to make it something more and typically it is always something more but it is
#
always something more at a mental level you don't know what the internal drama is that is there on
#
the cricket field and often the writer will replicate their internal cricket drama while
#
writing about what's happening on the field which may or may not match up with what actually happened
#
it's like I've had a film director tell me once that boss every time I read a critic writing about
#
a film I'm like like what has this person seen that's not what I made you know the second thing
#
is about the shift in writing itself in the sense that I remember that you know when I joined
#
wisdom which later bought quick info in the early 2000s it was understood that the matches that we
#
are reporting on are being watched on television right information is now a commodity if you're
#
writing from England in 1971 information is valuable yes you know you have to describe
#
everything you have to try to paint that picture in the readers mind and all of that but in 2001
#
you know just 30 years later it's all there on the TV screen so as writers and I remember you know
#
looking at match reports in the British newspapers like the Guardian and the Observer and all that
#
and the match report the next day would never describe what happened yes it would go into other
#
areas it would be a little bit of commentary a little color when we used to create our packages
#
and quick info we'd have these color pieces where you know whoever was at the ground would go out
#
and yes report on something interesting and you'd have your commentary and you would have all of
#
that and that would in a sense change the writing and change the imperative for the journalist in
#
the sense that you're no longer describing what happened everybody knows what happened what happened
#
you have you got to go deeper and as you pointed out in these current times where it's not just a
#
28 camera angles it's the 280 statistical angles in terms of how finely diced stats have become
#
you know even in football for example like one stat which is really important for me when I watch
#
football is what is known as XG which is expected goals so it's not how many goals you actually
#
scored but how many goals you would have been expected to score the way you play and over the
#
long run it evens out and that's for me a much better measure of how well a team played than
#
actual goals scored and even in cricket where that kind of probabilistic thinking was kind of absent
#
over the decades I find that more and more young writers are doing very interesting work in terms
#
of just understanding the game and looking at the statistical analysis but that dilemma remains like
#
you pointed out that when all these stats and these numbers are there when all these experts are
#
there on TV who have played the game themselves giving their Gyan what is a cricket writer to do
#
ask a two-part question in terms of the evolution of your writing has there been one and you know
#
how would you describe it and in general cricket writing what do you think so look the clear option
#
available to writers including me you know when television became invasive was you can't do
#
ball-by-ball description or ordinary description which everybody's seeing so what do you do what
#
does one do there are color pieces which can be very you know you need the power expression you
#
need to be a skillful or skill writer to do that to hold attention because color pieces are not
#
easy or not readily accepted unless they are done in masterly fashion you know at least match
#
reports people will say to fill the gaps in their own understanding of what has happened
#
okay information change you know information is available but color pieces to for people to
#
read requires a lot more it requires color it requires an understanding of the language of
#
the personality of how you probe how you elicit something from the person you are profiling for
#
instance or a controversy that you're dealing what dimensions you can get you know into that so all
#
that requires skill and the third or another clear option was get skilled in analysis you know get a
#
more analytical or start getting that analytical bent of mind maybe approach a few experts who
#
you have access to immediately available at the ground and who either feed your analysis
#
make it stronger or offer another dimension which you then leave for the reader to decide
#
that this is what it looks like but this is what a b or c feel or two players who contradict each
#
other so just makes it a little more exciting for the for the reader and say wow i didn't know this
#
you know okay yeah it's like this sometimes you use clever tactics you know throw names which
#
impress the reader or tell the reader yes this guy's weight carries weight if gavaskar you quote
#
or tendulkar you know people say wow you know there must be something to it but how do you weave
#
that in then becomes a skill into your story so i think that's what is happening as you as we all
#
know now there is everything that is available to the viewer and the listener in real time
#
and more than just that it's diced up into nano you know bits of information that you might need
#
then there are the experts who are all former players most of them who are also giving their
#
gyan so what is what is left for you to do actually quite a lot okay so let me explain cricket has
#
become so big in india i feel that if you want to be a cricket writer today you better skill yourself
#
into forensics because you never know some you know bob ulmer died in the west indies of a
#
heart attack and you know all hell broke loose as if he's somebody somebody murdered him and the
#
reportage all changed completely from world cup cricket to every other thing except cricket
#
you better know how to read balance sheets because bcc has money the ecosystem that of
#
the ip l what does it mean in terms of money profits profitability losses valuations that
#
are going up of teams etc etc those are hard cricket stories which don't come from players
#
necessarily you have to go out and seek them so you're not you cannot remain a conventional
#
old style cricket writer now that is getting limited in value you must understand mental health
#
today for any sports so therefore also for cricket you had ben stokes the best all-rounder in the
#
world perhaps the best cricketer in the world virtually taking a whole year off now there is
#
enough scope to do so many stories about mental health using ben stokes as a peg and so on and
#
then there is the third or or one more dimension which is where all our lives are data led there's
#
so much data available you know virat coli has played 48 balls of this bowler and he's made
#
62 runs but he's also got out five times you know that kind of data collation and extrapolation
#
from that data can also lead to stories but it requires again conditioning your journalistic
#
practices or your mindset towards those things to remain relevant so what is happening is now for
#
the challenge for professional writers cricket writers is to remain relevant because information
#
is coming from all quarters you know everybody has got information even those who are not in
#
media you could be on twitter and an avid cricket follower and you hit on a great angle which you
#
might see you might do on a thread which runs into seven eight threads and might have more
#
relevance than any cricket writer what any cricket writer has written so you know as a if your
#
audience is exposed to so much then how do you get they get currency why should people come and
#
read you so you have to develop some some attributes not just longevity in service some attributes
#
which tell a reader that you know i must go and find out what he has also written on this subject
#
let me first find out if he has and if he has what has he done and therefore you know that's how i
#
think it is working now because otherwise there's a big threat that relevancy of or the relevance
#
of writers will just vanish i agree with you that it's actually really exciting and i think one way
#
just thinking aloud at summit up is that a cricket writer today should not aspire to be goddess she
#
should aspire to be clr james absolutely it's a fantastic analogy you're not just covering the
#
sport you're not covering what happened on the field 11 men versus 11 men or 11 women versus 11
#
women but you're covering everything around it yes you know the sociology of it the the psychology
#
of it and the politics of and the politics of it increasingly in these modern times which one
#
wonders whether one will be able to write about cricket after a while yes yeah and the kinds of
#
personalities you know i think that's also the mental aspect of sport is the biggest issue
#
that has emerged over the last maybe 25-30 years and getting bigger and bigger you know i used to
#
read when i was in sports week in my early years so there would be tennis world a world of tennis
#
one of these magazines from which used to come from the u.s and i remember that was the mckenroe
#
connors bjog bog era and then you know there would be so much about the mental aspect of tennis and
#
i used to see what i mean you have sport is sport you go out there you know your technique your
#
skills that is what matters but i you know when i think back how wrong i was because ultimately
#
everything else is secondary to your mental to the mental aspect you know we talk of great
#
caribbean flair and you know the way they played and you know there was never a worry in their
#
mind the way they would go out and play but actually that's that's a stereotype because there
#
was a mental aspect to the game the aspirations and the ambitions may have been different their
#
sense of leaving an impact of their own identity may have differed from ours as clr james expresses
#
so wonderfully and beyond the boundary you know it's an expression of west indian caribbean
#
thought and life and also racial politics and everything else it's a magnum opus when you look
#
at it you know west indies cricket how it fits into clr james's theory you know as a marxist
#
philosopher is absolutely riveting you may disagree but it's riveting you know to think
#
about it in those dimensions in india we never thought about it like that you know we've started
#
to think now in india i think we're still very personality obsessed rather than the sport and its
#
ramifications and in national life we're getting there we're talking more and more about it but i
#
think that that is a very important dimension that needs to be looked at more aggressively
#
where cricket writing is concerned now i think because it is coming from everywhere including
#
the non-formal sector i think there's a lot of cacophony obviously there will be there will be
#
a lot of mediocrity but there'll also be some brilliant stuff coming unexpectedly you don't
#
necessarily have to look at it only from the 15 names you know it can come from anywhere and you
#
know one has to appreciate so if you all if you enjoy cricket writing and reading about cricket
#
obviously you have to make the effort to find out where this is going to come from it's a it's a
#
clutter it's you know it's very random it's disorganized it's chaotic but it is there and
#
i think overall it enriches cricket writing no and i think that you know just from what i have kind
#
of seen in the last 22 years i think the the fact that those barriers to entry have gone that you
#
don't have gatekeepers of taste and style and form standing in the way that anybody can write
#
anything and then let water find its own level you know i think that's incredible because i think
#
what often happens especially in mainstream media is that you have people who have a set vision
#
of what something is like that coverage should be like this this is what i want a cricket report
#
should to be this is a form do this don't do that don't do that do this you know and i think all of
#
that acts as a tremendous constraint especially when that mainstream media becomes out of touch
#
especially when your kind of gatekeepers are not particularly competent as can often be the case
#
that you know just having the ability to go out there like i you know in my writing class i had
#
one of my participants in the latest cohort is a cricket writer somewhere for some website
#
i forget the name though obviously i wouldn't mention it even if i hadn't forgotten it
#
but he spoke about how the pressure there is always to follow whatever is the latest thing
#
that happened you know that Virat Kohli got a bruise on his elbow you have 40 stories on that
#
and then in the evening something else would have happened and you have 40 stories on that
#
and you're constantly going from immediate story to story all of it is shallow and he was complaining
#
about how he doesn't get the time to kind of sit back and do his own writing and all of that which
#
is again a dilemma coming from a cricket writer who would probably be a fan of CLRGMS who probably
#
wants to do that kind of writing but within mainstream media that space isn't there because
#
one there is this desperation to keep the eyeballs going because you're in that game where you're
#
increasingly becoming irrelevant anyway and that's just not there so that's that's part of the
#
problem with mainstream media irrespective of correct sector you know i mean it could be sports
#
it could be politics it could be business so there's a herd instinct at play there so if it
#
is Kohli you know everybody will write about Kohli that day you know and then it's only a
#
matter of debating whose first three paras read better than the others and that's you got the
#
rest of the story it's like what Chuck Prince of Citibank said about the financial boom that
#
happened before the crash in 2008 and he said when the music's playing everyone has to dance
#
correct yeah that's true but i think you know so the consumption of content for want of a better
#
word or consumption of media has changed dramatically and therefore and this also changed
#
dramatically because the pipelines feeding media or information to the to the world at large have
#
also changed it has been a massive change today it can come from any quarter mainstream media i
#
think is hamstrung it's becoming predictable and in many ways it is becoming not gratifying enough
#
you know for what i am looking for i'm speaking generally that it may not gratify me and it's like
#
when you switch on television sets today you switch on one you don't need to switch on the
#
other you know exactly what is happening on the other channels the rare channel which doesn't do
#
what everybody else is doing you'll go and switch that on because you want something else to be you
#
know fed into your you know you want to consume that otherwise i'm not gaining anything ultimately
#
we all start making these calculations in our own minds what am i getting out of it here
#
i'll shut them all off which is what i've done i don't watch news and i'll go to a channel which
#
at least tells me something which is not so predictable and therefore i start coveting
#
that whether that channel makes money or not is not the issue and there'll be a there'll be a herd
#
the herd instinct can get so large that it can engulf an entire nation on certain issues
#
so that doesn't make it right you know for seekers you will have to look at things
#
which gratify you which give you that little delight which give you comfort which give you
#
entertainment which give you satisfaction you know all of those in the consumption of media
#
and likewise then we can say whether it's in sports or politics or business writing or
#
business journalism all of these will have to cater to the demand now there is one way of
#
looking at how mass media operates is look we only do what the public is demanding
#
right so that's not a unfair thought but it also means that you are not venturing into
#
areas where which will explore what else do people want or do they still want the same thing people
#
switch on the television even out of habit i'll be cooking eating whatever else the tv is on
#
or the radio but is it interesting enough for the consumer or is it just everybody latching
#
onto a band getting onto the bandwagon and doing the same productive same predictable stuff for
#
years is really something as a professional practitioner of journalism or running a media
#
house that you have to think about now i'm saying this very it's very simplistic but when you run
#
organizations there's business the business angle there is balance sheet i must be in the black i
#
must not be in the red and therefore whatever makes me get into profitability i will do all
#
those things they also come into play i'm not one to pass judgment you may do things which are
#
really frankly very poor journalism and make a lot of money it's possible you know you can put
#
on on the front page of newspapers like in england you know some papers some tabloids put pictures of
#
men or women in various stages of unrest and people pick it up now again i'm not passing judgment
#
but if you want to do that that's fine but there are other things also that can be done
#
can be done so you have to take a call i think what is happening is in the consumption of media
#
people have started taking a call and especially in areas uh like sports you know it's not enough
#
to say i belong to the leading newspaper and therefore i'm the best it doesn't it's not
#
operating like that at all that has changed in the old days maybe you could say there would be
#
if if it has to be contested that you're the best or not there would be one other option
#
now there are plenty full of options you could say i'm i'm working for this newspaper we've got
#
the best cricket writer no you don't we've got so and so and it will be restricted to maybe two or
#
three but now it's an endless kind of variety you can choose from you know i used to teach a podcasting
#
course as well and there i kind of spoke about how podcasting is so different from radio in the
#
sense that radio because of all kinds of financial incentives and imperatives especially in india
#
where license fm licenses cost so much and there are restraints on what you can do and cannot do
#
radio necessarily will be a mile broad and an inch deep you know whereas with a podcast you have
#
different podcasters exploring all kinds of different niches and you never know what clicks
#
and the interesting thing there is not that they are catering to niches the interesting thing there
#
for me is that those niches come into being because somebody made that exploration in the first place
#
otherwise nobody would even have known that a niche existed you know if there is a niche today for
#
people who listen to five hour podcast episodes for example you know you've got to thank dan
#
carlin and hardcore history and if you're in india maybe me but the point is that if any of us were
#
to pitch this idea to a radio station or a mainstream house and say hey i'll do a something
#
like this and they would laugh us out of the room because it's not a safe option the assumption is
#
we are catering to short attention span beast minute and whatever and they're not even going
#
to try that and that and that's why it's it's kind of a delightful time where those means of
#
production are now available to all and i don't think this has even been explored to the extent
#
that it can be where you know you of course got newsletters and blogs and all of that happening
#
yeah but i think there's a lot more scope for independent voices so we live in a multimedia
#
environment and it's growing by by the day i think technology is driving our lives yeah and
#
especially in the consumption of media and you know we talked about what for journalists to remain
#
relevant some of the other things that come to my mind just to hug back a little is uh you know you
#
can have great access to performers and therefore you get an exclusivity that's a huge advantage if
#
you can manage that the other is conventionally in in the media or in journalism is called scoops you
#
get privileged information so one is of course having access to a Dhoni you know Dhoni is a
#
recluse if you have access to him and you get Dhoni to speak to you even if he's talking about
#
his dog or his dogs or his cars there is a story people are waiting to read it you know and if you
#
get privileged information you get scoops why did Virat kuli suddenly announce his retirement from
#
t20 captaincy now you know the reasons have come but if you have privileged information as to what
#
was the trigger what really transpired then maybe you know not maybe you will certainly have a lot
#
of you know people reading you and wanting to read you further and that need not be put in
#
purple prose you don't need purple prose for this kind of information so this is one dimension also
#
which has got a lot of which gets a lot of weightage today in media whichever way it comes from
#
so there are you know while i do say that yes is getting tougher and tougher but if you get
#
the old stereotype of a cricket writer being somebody who's carrying renan you know the
#
thesaurus with him and coming up with these wonderful turns of phrase and great three paras
#
leading into the main story those three paras could be all fluff and then you get down to the story
#
i think that thing has kind of passed you know it's become passe and now you have to look at
#
other areas you also have to be conscious of the fact that attention span of people is very very
#
low so what do you do to hold attention you know and then there is the it's a very interesting
#
situation if attention span is low that means people are spending two three minutes four
#
minute reads like you see on many websites three minute read four minute read it comes to you
#
you know and then there are there is a proliferation of the long reads you know you've got five seven
#
minute for podcasts and you also got like the seen and the unseen which are extensive extended
#
podcasts which also people follow very diligently so all kinds of things are happening today in the
#
media it's a very exciting space to be in but you have to be also you know clear that you'll be
#
sometimes swimming against the tide till you find your bearings again sometimes you'll you'll clear
#
distances without any hindrance and then again you'll run into a problem this is something that
#
is going to happen for the rest of our lives as i see it yeah you'll run against the tide till you
#
succeed and then everyone will copy you and when copying you won't work and by the way that short
#
attention span as i must again say it's it's a misconception but it's a misconception in an
#
interesting way in the sense that i would not divide people into categories of people with short
#
attention spans and people with long attention spans i would simply say that we all contain
#
multitudes right so there are times many times where i have a short attention span but there
#
are times where i want to really dig in deep i'm open to the immersive experience when i have that
#
long attention span and it really depends on the incentives you give me to shift from oneself to
#
the other and i think the more good content and the more rewarding content there is out there
#
it can really help like i'm sure there might be someone who loves history but thinks he
#
has a short attention span and then listens to say dan carlin's hardcore history where every
#
episode is five hours and then they are changed forever you can kind of shift between them before
#
we get back to tracing your personal journey and this is a digressive show so it's a feature not a
#
bug that we move all around the place but before we get back to your personal journey a general
#
question on journalism which is that it's my sense and i know you agree with me and you've just kind
#
of elaborated on a number of other criticisms of mainstream media today but it's my sense that over
#
the last 20 years the way in which as consumers we discover media filter media consume media has
#
changed completely and mainstream organizations haven't figured this out at all now you've been
#
someone who's been the editorial head of mainstream organizations editor of midday an editor at times
#
of india if you were in one of those organizations today like what i see in those organizations is
#
that there is this desperate thirst to find the latest twitter trend and do a story on it
#
find what republic tv is screaming about and do a story on it and it's just become that race to the
#
bottom that race to cater to what is immediate now we know that there is more happening there in terms
#
of how we are consuming things right so if you were running one of those companies today if toi
#
was to say make you the editor which would be a great idea and say okay ayaz build the times of
#
india for the year 2035 and start now you know what are the things that you would do what comes
#
to mind so i would you know first of all i would look at hiring people who are you know less
#
conditioned to just thinking along very structured patterns because that has really been hit for a
#
six you know i think partly the problem is of the for instance a newspaper the cycle of the paper
#
is a problem today news is consumed 24 by 7 into 365 so a paper which is put to bed at 12 11 11 30
#
12 midnight around that time and comes next morning to your house at 6 37 in six and a half
#
hours a lot has happened which you're not going to find available while when you switch on your
#
cell phone you'll have these alerts which are already there on your phone saying you know news
#
breaks and stuff like that and you always get this feeling or the sense that i'm a little cheated
#
you know i haven't got the up why am i reading the newspaper if i'm going to get no information
#
as to what has happened in the last six six and a half seven hours so the need for instant
#
gratification and consumption of news has completely redefined how one consumes news
#
and therefore newspapers in that sense are not fulfilling that need where newspapers can fulfill
#
what need can they fulfill they can be far more explanatory they can be far more analytical
#
very fit more features driven i think very good interviews with you know relevant people
#
but where the instant news is concerned i think they are it's gone you know it's history including
#
even television you know you had a point 9 p.m show is not as fulfilling as a twitter update
#
twitter update which comes to me i mean twitter is your fastest source of news as of now
#
and therefore you always will feel that everything else is behind times so if i have to look at a
#
creating a a media setup heading into 2035 say first of all it has to be multimedia it can't
#
be one and how it one dovetails into the other how you know they kind of intertwine and then
#
they end up they blend all kinds of functions and reach reach the final consumer or the consumer
#
finally is really the challenge and how do you reach out using a mix of social media plus
#
old old format media radio and television not everybody has all these attributes available
#
in the media organization those which are only dependent on newspapers i think are going to be
#
less and less relevant as time goes by i mean you know i mean i spend a lot of time in alibag
#
where i don't get the newspaper by the time the newspaper comes to my house at 9 30 10 i don't
#
want it i've already read all the newspapers on my mobile or on my laptop in mumbai when i'm sitting
#
even i'm in mumbai i i do get the newspapers at home the good thing about newspapers still is
#
that if you're getting them delivered at your house you don't stop them because you don't even
#
know when the guy delivered it it's there it's fine and there's also a certain sense of you know
#
psychological dependency that everything is right with the world my newspaper has come to me at 60d
#
but going ahead i think that media organizations will have to seriously look at how they reach the
#
the formats not one format the formats in which they reach the consumer because all of us are
#
consuming multimedia the experience is multimedia you know you might watch the match if you're
#
watching a cricket match you might watch the pre-launch session on tv you have to step out
#
you'll keep updating yourself on what's happening on the score on the cell phone you suddenly find
#
there's an alert that somebody has reached a century or taken a hat-trick you'll immediately
#
search on your cell phone if there is a highlights package which is 30 seconds or 40 seconds which
#
tells you what has happened so you don't want to be behind in terms of knowledge and information
#
than anybody else also we are social animals you reach your destination you meet your colleague or
#
your friend or girlfriend or whatever and there has to be some conversation you know if some
#
political leader has been arrested you know immediately that becomes a opening of a conversation
#
or a dialogue i say you can't be you know i don't know about this at all it can happen it happens
#
all the time but you don't want to be in that situation in today's day and age the way we
#
consume media we want to be on top of the situation so for that i think news organizations or media
#
houses will have to be i mean electric yield into gathering information and disseminating it
#
it has to be almost a you know simultaneous process it comes in and it goes out the swiftness the
#
speed and the rapidity and exercising those controls you know if you're a media organization
#
if i'm an independent as they call an independent journalist who's on twitter look we are talking
#
here an accident takes place on the road where your apartment is located and somebody with a
#
cell phone is the first to capture it on camera and put it on twitter by the time the news
#
organization reporters come it'll be three hours two hours one hour we don't know the news is already
#
maybe like four different narratives about it doctored videos from bangladesh purporting to be
#
this location and if you want the credibility of your organization or the brand value of
#
organization to carry your the gravitas of your news gathering through then you have to be
#
i think speed is now becoming of the essence the sort of counterpoint to this is like of course i
#
i think this might be one of those cases where i think was it nai paul who famously said or
#
churchill who famously said that whatever you say of india the opposite is also true and here i
#
would say that that yeah i you know speed being of the essence is of course there because information
#
is a commodity if you aren't giving it immediately then it's kind of redundant the person already
#
knows but the other way is that there also i think needs to be a terav in our coverage
#
i produce this other show called brave new world hosted by vasanth where he chatted with jonathan
#
height and jonathan had made a great observation there he said that listen you might think that
#
we are in a world where all the information from all all of human history is there at our disposal
#
right but the truth is that most people are consuming at this very moment what was produced
#
in the last three days yes the entirety of our consumption is something that was produced
#
in the last three days and therefore what we have are people who are all the time buffeted by
#
information but always shallow always ignorant you know and and which is why your book by the
#
way such a fine service because yeah i've just been through that 50 or 75 year yeah and it's
#
and it's fascinating and i and i want people to pick up your book not to kind of scheme through
#
it while they're doing five other things but sit back quietly and read it and immerse themselves
#
in it which i think they will because i think there's a hunger for that too so i've tried to
#
create a narrative which is fine what you're saying is right but i think both things happen
#
simultaneously for instance you know i love to read the wisdom almanac it comes once a year
#
and i make sure that i get it and i read it like from cover to cover you know and it's a
#
periodical it comes but it doesn't mean i stop consuming cricket coverage otherwise or any other
#
coverage so both things work simultaneously but in in saying that i savor wisdom cricket almanac
#
i don't want to be left behind on my current current you know information those gaps to be met
#
you know i can't say it really doesn't matter if i don't get that information because i can wait
#
a year later and find out what really happened so it wisdom will give you a great perspective
#
on everything that has happened in the preceding year but if i'm not you know with it while things
#
are unfolding and you know news as they say newspapers is history on the run you know and
#
it keeps getting revised all the time a lot of stories get junked we don't even know what
#
happens to those stories you know some what is today's scoop might be in the dustbin tomorrow
#
because the effective follow-up has shown that it was rubbish or there's not been any follow-up
#
or actually it was a trifling we just played up these things happen but if i'm not in that loop
#
then i might feel a little left behind or a lot left behind by a lot so it also depends on the
#
temperament the age group the the the social milieu that you're in all of that matters the
#
consumption of media is not straight-laced you know it's very very very kaleidoscopic
#
you know all kinds of people look for different things from what they want from the world what
#
they expect from the media and the delightful thing is an expanding kaleidoscope like the
#
problem with media houses now is that the future is unknown unknowns it's not even known unknowns
#
that you know that there's a problem you know what the problem is so you put a team you solve it but
#
here you don't even know what it's going to look like tomorrow and just for those of my readers who
#
might not have heard of the wizard and cricketers almanac i'll quickly explain what it is back in
#
the day there's this you know revered british company called wisdom which used to which still
#
brings out something called the wizard and cricketers almanac which comes uh every year
#
which basically has all the scorecards of the year and all the info of the year and you can read that
#
on you know december 31st and by the end of it you'll know everything that happened that year
#
it's a fat book all cricket writers aspire to writing for it i finally did in uh i i wrote
#
for a couple of those editions and then my byline this is an amusing story our mutual friend anand
#
vasu i think complained to me once that he wrote for them a year after me and they were just going
#
by alphabetical order an indian writer with a so instead of putting on a piece that he wrote they
#
accidentally put my byline somehow and i never even knew okay so so poor anand was really upset
#
that yeah wisdom in the bible yeah you don't find a mention in the bible that's terrible yeah so i
#
can imagine a shock and horror when he got the copy and also you know wisdom is still it's got a
#
very lofty you know it's like the mcc of cricket journalism in a sense but also what has changed
#
in cricket writing especially but in sports writing by and large is that the internet gives
#
you access to information that you know at the click of a mouse while early earlier i mean when
#
i started writing on cricket i used to maintain a scorecard in the press box you know and somebody
#
would hit a four then you'd put you'd write down the number four and then you'd describe elegant
#
cover drive by so and so so and so that when you wrote your story you remembered it you know
#
nowadays nobody takes notes it's all available on you might take notes sparingly just to keep
#
yourself you know filled in as to when you write your story what all you should focus on you don't
#
have to scurry around looking for making associations with the past because it's all available at the
#
click of a mouse you know if i have to somebody with veeru sevags it's a triple hundred in
#
the first triple hundred that he's made in 2005 against pakistan and the first indian to do it
#
ever now where do i run around trying to find out who all have made triple hundreds how many
#
balls how many fours is all available so there is a certain ease of gathering information which
#
has happened but it also creates its own complication because there's so much of it
#
that you have to be really smart in how you select the information also i remember one of the things
#
that troubled me when i started touring around cricket first with wisdon and then with the
#
crickin four and again to complete that almanac story wisdon came to india in 2001 with a magazine
#
called wisdon cricket monthly which i joined we started a website called wisdon.com which bought
#
crickin four and subsequently crickin four was bought by espn and then another wisdon dot like
#
wisdon.com which was out of the picture then made a comeback later and it's a very complicated
#
story but one of the things i remember traveling to test matches all over the place is that in the
#
press box and this really disturbed me when i first saw this in the press box nobody would
#
watch the cricket yeah because they know that if the information will be available anyway
#
information is not to be given so i'm watching every ball right i'm soaking it in also partly
#
because i'm a new writer at that time and it's really exciting for me but nobody would watch the
#
cricket and i would be like boss what kind of press box is this you know and you know once i
#
once in muhali i noticed one guy sitting behind me very intently watching every ball taking notes
#
constantly typing things and i was damn impressed and then the next day i think he was either
#
arrested or thrown out of the press box because he was actually working for a bookie syndicate
#
oh and he was because the image on tv comes a couple of split seconds you know so you're
#
feeding the information to the bookies he was quickly feeding the information you know in a
#
split second hitting whatever button he has to hit so it was really amusing and i remember i was
#
very pissed off because i had had to fight like a maniac to get my press pass for that particular
#
test match in those days these you know krikken 4 was a new kid on the blog and these guys would
#
keep troubling us yeah and what is krikken 4 they would see yeah so i had to run around for a whole
#
day to get a press pass and this guy this firang guy got just got it immediately very easily
#
yeah and then he's doing this thing but he was watching every ball
#
so there are best practices and there are not such good practices of you know covering an event i've
#
seen people doze off in the press box and like doze off doze off and snore and wake up two hours
#
later not having watched the match for that period and then of course they're writing their stories
#
and running around trying to get information and you know ultimately if it's stringing together
#
eight ten paras or fifteen paras that's not the challenge anybody with even basic skills can do
#
it you know but it's how you watch the match and what you there's a sense of enjoyment or even
#
sometimes non-enjoyment which might come through in you know but the writing should be enjoyable
#
i think it makes a difference over the years yes like the you know i might watch a match intently
#
and you might not and we could write reports which are very similar but over the years the
#
person who's watching the match intently will just have greater insight i mean you know i mean this
#
is my 43rd year wow in journalism and in sports writing so it's not that i've watched every match
#
with the same intensity it can happen sometimes there's such a dull passage of play and you know
#
you walk out of the press box there's some guys talking and you get into a debate on some other
#
subject you know and then it's been half an hour 45 minutes you go back and then you pick up the
#
threads and but interesting you mention about this guy somebody sitting there and taking notes so
#
one of my it's not about a bookie one of my earliest my earliest experience of being on
#
tour was in pakistan so we were in the press box at various grounds rahore karachi faisalabad
#
part of the jing bang which was you know and there must have been maybe about eight nine
#
journalists from india not 80 90 as it is today india pakistan would be 80 90 journalists otherwise
#
and there would be a guy constantly in the press box who was meeting all of us every day and
#
being you know more like friendlier than one would expect and then suddenly this buzz went around
#
went around in the amongst us amongst the indian journalists nobody seemed to know who he was
#
no pakistani journalist knew who he was he didn't know most of the pakistani journalists we knew
#
which papers nobody knew who the hell he was then somebody said he's keeping a watch
#
on all the indian journalists so that became then we started kind of distancing ourselves
#
you know from him but he used to be there every match and finally one one fine day we found that
#
he'd stopped coming one match so where has he gone we all got a little perplexed where the hell has
#
he gone so he found out from the guys who are in charge of the press box now listen this guy used
#
to be there over here he's not no longer to be seen he's saying how he never had a pass
#
he used to always say i'm an indian journalist and come along into the press box and then now
#
you know whether he was from the intelligence or not i have no idea but i'm saying these kind of
#
crazy things happen in press boxes maybe he was just a guy who see in those days there were very
#
little security it wasn't as sanitized and sterilized you know the environment as it is now
#
so people used to hop in and out of press boxes and we thought he's one of the pakistani journalists
#
then he found that he's not a pakistani journalist then is he an ISI or some other agent some
#
you know intelligence fellow but he wasn't that he was some vagabond who was getting in
#
best seat in the town best seat in the in the match come and sit in the press box tell everybody
#
he's part of the indian journalist team and whenever he was with us say he's with the pakistanis
#
something like that mr nutwarlal must have must have kind of honed his skills gate crashing
#
weddings and this is sort of it's not funny here the number of people who used to gate crash
#
nowadays it's far more organized of course in the in the other countries like england and australia
#
it was far more regimented you couldn't just you know the system of ticketing system for the press
#
box also was but even the west indies i went there in 1989 you'll find all kinds of people
#
you know the west indies in that in that sense is much like india you know who you know who's the
#
guy who can let you in and stuff like that i remember when i went to pakistan in 2006
#
and i was covering the tour for the guardian but also filing pieces for crick and foe but also
#
writing pieces for the wall street journal i did a couple of op-eds from there i think
#
and i remember at one point i went to on an off day from the cricket i went to interview an economist
#
and i went to his you know flashy bungalow and all that and at one point during the conversation he
#
said that i must tell you amit you know you called me up earlier and all of that but i must tell you
#
that my phone is tapped so i said really your phone is tapped and he said i must tell you
#
another thing amit your phone is also tapped and i was like what are you talking about and he's
#
saying all of you bloody indian journalists they are listening to every word you say which is
#
incredibly likely another so i met a gentleman called murli there who was the hindu correspondent
#
in i think either is in islamabad i think yeah and murli told me an interesting thing he said
#
that there with regard to journalists the two countries have a policy of exact reciprocation
#
in the sense that if a pakistani journalist in new delhi has his fridge stolen the next day the
#
indian journalist in islamabad will have his fridge stolen so it's the exact reciprocity and
#
that's official even at the diplomatic level one undersecretary is sacked here the next day
#
there's the undersecretary who sent back from whichever either country so it's a tit for tat
#
spy versus spy situation from mad comics quite delightful even the india pakistan dynamic is
#
something we must discuss as we go on to talking about cricket but before that we'll get back to
#
talking about your personal journey and before that we'll take a quick commercial break all right
#
long before i was a podcaster i was a writer in fact chances are that many of you first heard
#
of me because of my blog india uncut which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became
#
somewhat popular at the time i love the freedom the form gave me and i feel i was shaped by it
#
in many ways i exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different
#
things because i wrote about many different things well that phase in my life ended for
#
various reasons and now it is time to revive it only now i'm doing it through a newsletter
#
i have started the india uncut newsletter at india uncut dot subtract dot com where i will
#
write regularly about whatever catches my fancy i'll write about some of the themes i cover in
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this podcast and about much else so please do head on over to india uncut dot subtract dot com
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email inbox you don't need to go anywhere so subscribe now for free the india uncut newsletter
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at india uncut dot subtract dot com thank you welcome back to the scene and the unseen i'm chatting
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with ayaz memen about his life about his journey about his wonderful new book indian innings and
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in a sense you know i'd be perfectly happy to call this episode ayaz innings i won't do that
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because that sounds weird but let's go back to your personal life you've discussed your sort of
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early love for cricket you know watch the match at the brabon you remember all the names you
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remember the scorecard you know 71 is a big deal you're reading k n prabhu and you know all those
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inspiring reports come from there at this point in time how do you see yourself like what what
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is your conception of yourself ki main ye banunga and how does that path wear towards cricket writing
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so i mean if you're growing up in the 60s and 70s there were not too many options academically
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when you look at what things are today you have to be ba become bsc if you're doing graduation
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if you had the stamina and the financial stamina also you would go on to do your masters
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outside of that the vocational courses were engineering medicine and so on limited you
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couldn't have also juxtapositions of curriculum you know you couldn't do bsc with also literature
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it was not possible my father was a lawyer and there was a big demand in my kind of family group
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and all when i was growing up as it used to be in those in in homes in those days
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and that kind of created this situation whatever happens i don't want to be a lawyer
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you know so when i was in school i thought i'll be an engineer that was my hope and dream to be an engineer
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that was your rebellion to be yeah that was my rebellion when i look back it was such a
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you know it was some such a stupid decision so i got into science in in school also i took science
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last two years senior cambridge was the it was the school finishing program got into college
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and i took science and i realized that to be an engineer you had to know trigonometry you had to
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know higher physics which was like you know facing malcolm marsh's bouncers as it turned out and i
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was not equipped at all to do engineering and whatever else so i switched and i did economics
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and i i studied economics i passed with honors just about and then subsequently and by that time
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my father had passed away so then i got into law you know ironically i got into law i did my law
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from government law college but by that time i was consumed by by sport and cricket and i was also
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interested in journalism so while i was studying i was doing i think my first or second year of law
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yeah first year i joined a journalism class in zevias college of journalism evening classes we
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used to have six thirty to eight thirty or something that and while i was there there was an ex
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basketball player from western railway and i think he was also in the india reserves
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javed akhtar who had also joined the zevias class zevias college and he was working with sports week
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so he said we've got a vacancy why don't you join now i said i have you know i'm doing law and he's
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like okay you don't like it six months later if you're going for your exams and all don't do it
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so in 1979 is when i got into sports week in my you know that was my first brush with journalism
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so to speak getting into the newsroom and the first assignment which i got was to go and watch
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the jubilee match india versus england which was a memorable match in many ways vishanath was the
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captain not gavaskar and mike brayley and you know vishanath everybody remembers calling back bob
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taylor you know catch which the empire upheld catch behind and vishanath consulted kirmani
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kirmani said no and bob taylor was called back and bob taylor and botham had a long partnership
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and then of course botham bowled us out twice both innings he just he was he was the best all
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around in the world then and england won the match but my job was to do what what was what
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was popularly known as side stories somebody else was doing the match report for midday
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midday was a very new newspaper then it had started in 1979 there was a lot of excitement in the
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small meager newsroom that midday had in those days a small paper but lots of fun and then there
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was sports week magazine which was also from the same stable so i was doing side lights and side
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stories and but i got a place in the press box which is right behind the bowler's arm and you
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know i had never seen a cricket match from that vantage situation and i immediately got a job
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offer from from them i had got a job offer and i realized i'm being paid to watch cricket and
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what could be better so you know law law the ambitions for pursuing a law degree went out of
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the window for a while i did resume it later and completed my graduation but i said this is like
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you know this is this is the best thing that can happen to me and i was being paid 350 rupees but
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that really didn't matter because i was there sitting behind the bowler's arm and you know you
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see if you're sitting in the press box there's dilip sardesai who comes in or bapu nadkarni or
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some of these old timers and if you were lucky in a domestic match which we also you know we would
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go and attend you would gavaskar would come up and sit in what was the committee box or the selector's
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box the players box was below the dressing room and those days it was not as secure the environment
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so you could you know you could hop across and say i want to speak to so and so player and maybe
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you would get a chance that you could do it so that kind of association with the game and the
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access just just won me over and i said whatever it is this is what i'm going to do you're getting
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getting paid to do what your love is such an incredible privilege you use the phrase when
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you were talking about how you studied economics so you said you quote just about passed with
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honors which sounds to me much like you know a batsman saying i barely managed to reach my 200
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what is just about pass with honors but here's sort of my next question that today if i want
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to be a cricket writer say i'm 20 years old i want to be a cricket writer i have all the models in
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the world to emulate to figure out who are my stylistic heroes what are the best practices in
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journalism and blah blah blah i have this whole smorgasbord of influences which i can pick from
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in your case that would not have been the case in the sense okay you're reading prabhu and you're
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reading hendrix and you're reading a handful of people but it is a handful of people how did you
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then form your conception of what good writing is like what do you want to write like like what
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do you tell yourself when you look back on your early self was there a period of time before you
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found your own voice so to say or it just came naturally how did your values sort of evolve in
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that period of time so i think what helped me uh i did find my voice after a little while you know
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i mean as happens with everybody you try and be more you imagine what you are and you try and be
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that well that may not be your true voice so to speak and it comes with a little experience and
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comes with a little discipline as a writer you get into a certain drill uh in terms of information
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gathering and then of course how you articulate and express it that takes a little while unless
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you're a born natural that's a different matter but what helped me i think when i look back is
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i read a lot about cricket and i was generally very interested in books and uh you know while
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i read a lot of fiction and etc while growing up in my teenage years early 20s i also read a lot
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of cricket from the cardist books to beyond the boundary and so many authors including my
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cricketing years ajit vadekar tiger's tale pataudi sunny days when it first came out 1976 i think
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these were all books that i consumed just and it just made me so much more familiar with uh with
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players and you know their points of view and their lives and stuff i was also a very avid follower
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of cricket in the british council library i would go every week maybe twice a week or thrice a week
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just to read the british newspapers during their cricket season their summer the english summer
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because that you know the british papers would have a half page story or a match report and some
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of the better known writers one had got come to know of would be there the county scores i would
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devour them you know rather than wait for play for cricket annual with the the you know the
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consolidated scores and all to come i would be always visiting british council and therefore i
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developed a certain liking for certain kinds of writers you know alan ross was one of those
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writers i really enjoyed reading jack fingleton i love jack fingleton jack fingleton was fabulous
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uh there was rey robinson whose style was very interesting because he was not lyrical like a
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prabhu or a cardus but he was he was very business like but very factual and he you know the expression
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was also very sound and he you know as they as they say he would each para you could was leading
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into something more and when you read the whole piece it gave you a very good comprehensive
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picture there was no meandering you know so he was somebody who i really enjoyed reading when
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obviously he gave a lot more about australian cricket because he was an Aussie so that's how
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i started even before i became a journalist i was i had a fair collection of books or in my house
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and i used to feel that cardus is when you're young is he's your almost everybody's ambition
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in the english language you know cardus he understands his own book cardus that would be a
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that would be a jive that fellow journalists would say you know when you wrote a piece and
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they'd come next way and next day and dissect your report and say
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you know that would be a kind of in the in the press box but cardus was not the only one and as
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you know as as one keeps growing i think there's if i have to and this is an advice i still keep
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giving myself but if i was a young writer starting today i would say that the more you read the better
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you become so irrespective of whether you found your voice you also want to know what other voices
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are saying and that is only possible if you keep reading but if you blank yourself out
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saying you know i know my voice and i know two other writers and that's all i'm interested in
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i think you actually restrict yourself and then may not necessarily grow in terms of enriching
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your own understanding of the game or a situation or of a player but also in what you send out
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subsequently to your readers or you know those who follow you or your newspaper so i think
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constant and continuous reading is an absolute essential in my opinion and you'll find that
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along the way if you're reasonably you know smart get take feedback are not ego driven somebody
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gives you sensible advice you don't say haha then you can you hone your skills along the way
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there are some things that become obsolete you know some expressions that become obsolete
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i read a very interesting thing on twitter the other day somebody raised the issues should we
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use the in sport and it tagged me along shouldn't the word suicidal stroke be banned given the way
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mental health has become an issue should we be actually saying this is part of the game
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it's an interesting thought so i don't know i haven't i haven't kind of put my mind to it
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but i'm saying that if you if you're not stimulated by what else is happening around you
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then you will not necessarily grow to full potential i think that's what is important
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for every in any field i would imagine that's true you know whether you're writing on sport or
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medicine or politics or business or entertainment the more you read especially the more you read
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of people who've who set a certain benchmark it just makes that it makes the whole process
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that much more interesting a number of things to react to first of all i i love ray robinson as
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well and in fact for readers who want to get a sampler of all these writers ramchandra guha had
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this lovely collection out called i think the picketer book of cricket writing a few years ago
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which had pieces by fingleton robinson cardus all of these guys and what you said about the way
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robinson used paragraphs reminds me of a metaphor that one of the participants in one of my courses
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use when we were chatting about the use of paragraphs and you know to elaborate upon
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the way i was explaining them he said that he could think of paragraphs like bogies in a train
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so yes yes you have the engine driving it forward but each bogie plays a role and they're all
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connected absolutely that's kind of what it is and regarding what you said about reading more it's
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almost uncanny because one that is the advice i constantly keep drumming into in fact if you're
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listening to this and you're interested in improving your writing the one way to do it is
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just read read read i get questions about how do i improve my vocabulary my grammar how do i learn
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how to structure a piece how do i find my voice the answer to everything is read and i can't agree
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more with what you said about finding your voice because i think it's analogous in some ways to how
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babies learn to speak how do you learn to speak you'll listen to all the voices around you and
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eventually you speak in your own way and eventually you'll use words in your own way but everything
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that you have you pick up from around you and that's how you learn so there's just no substitute
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for reading voraciously and i even say that be indiscriminate about reading i don't have patience
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with people who say that some books are worth reading and other books are rubbish i think any
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book that grabs your attention that keeps your attention is doing something right and you will
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imbibe it by osmosis now i want to ask you a question picking up on something that you said
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in this context but i want to take it to another context where you spoke about have the humility
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to take advice and feedback from others and i say this to my writing students with the metaphor of
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virat koli where i say that listen virat koli's public image is what that he's a brash arrogant
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young man but nobody who achieves that level of excellence does that without having extreme
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humility when they are practicing their craft that when he is spending those thousands of hours in
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the nets he's not focusing on what he's doing right he's focusing on what he's doing wrong
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is there an issue with the footwork is there an issue with the balance you spend thousands of
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hours your coach will tell you this other people will tell you this of course in cricket unlike in
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writing you get immediate feedback on whether you're doing something right or wrong in writing
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you can do the wrong thing for years and delude yourself into thinking it's okay but in cricket
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you get that immediate feedback so my question to you is this that my thesis is that to excel in
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anything and and you'd be able to answer this in the context of cricket at least in that particular
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domain where you are excelling you have to have extreme humility you can be arrogant in another
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domain but in that particular domain you've got to be extremely humble unless you shut your mind
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out you know for instance uh i mean what may happen and i've seen it happen so i won't pull
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my punches here so you get access to the press box a world cup or a test match and you're 24
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25 23 whatever it is and you say that i am you tell yourself i'm watching this match it's maybe
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a world cup final and what more do i need to achieve so to speak in terms of an experience
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this is it and you shut yourself out from other influences and you just to give you an example
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you may stop reading because you say why should i read i'm watching and whatever i've read is
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good enough to see me through because and i'm going to speak to players and get quotes and
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stories my editor will tell me angle say whatever i'll get advice i'm speaking to colleagues
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i think that's narrowing rather than broadening your horizon and i would go venture further i'd
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say apart from cricket books which is your stock in trade that is something that you must read
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or books on sport but in fact you must read beyond sports also you know to enrich your own
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understanding not just of the sport but also of life you know the the power of expression of some
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writers who are not writing on sport may be so influential that it will influence your sports
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writing to get better so i think that is something that needs to be done and that only comes through
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humility and humility is as you mentioned that you when virat coli takes the field he can't be you
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know looking down not looking the opponent squarely in the eye and saying i'm very very humble soul
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and therefore he has to act cocky on the field and that's also his personality but he is actually
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very smart and very in many in you know he handles his own professional life as a cricketer with a
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great degree of humility otherwise he's brought about a paradigm shift in the in the aspect of
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fitness the indian team has never been more athletic and that's because the captain has set the
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benchmark i remember we were in uh i was in colombo 2015 he had just become captain dhoni had given
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up the captaincy and you know so they lost the first test against srilanka won the next one in
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colombo and there was a little luncheon arranged by shastri was the coach and he said captain
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will meet so seven eight of us went there for lunch and virat here we were called at about 12 30
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and virat didn't turn up till about 115 130 so i asked ravi i said what the hell is happening
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where is he so he said no he's in the gym so i said okay but where are the others he said if
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he's in the gym how can the others be out nice so he had set that example because and very early
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in his captaincy you know role as a captain that we need to all get fit it's not that he held them
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back physically but if you set an example and the others follow then you know it just makes a
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difference to the team so it doesn't mean that see look when you look at sport or in cricket there
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are more failures and successes even for the greatest of players if tendulkar has played
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you know 200 matches or whatever it is and so many more innings it's not that he scored 100
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every time he made a he's made 51 test hundreds but the number of times he has not made 100 or
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even a 50 is far greater than the number of times he made 50 plus scores you know so it's a question
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of consistency over a period of time which sets you apart from the you know average joe as a
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cricketer who's there the special players is what you do how you how often you do it that marks you
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out as special and that to reach that status you also you have to be consistently improving and
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learning this is a and sport can be very cruel very punishing because you are aging so there is
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a age in which you start at which you start at which you peak and then there's a plateau and
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then it is downhill and how do you arrest that downhill from being you know rapid your reflexes
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go you may be jaded you may be mentally fatigued that's when you dig into your reserves and come
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up and there are lessons that you learned early in life that you bring into play and there's a lot
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that happens even with i i take that as an example even for writing i'm still writing
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articles and columns i'm doing other stuff i'm not you know i i feel that there's still some more to
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to learn but i also go back to my earliest what are the drills you learn to get an interesting
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insight into a player or a story and how do you do it so i keep asking myself is there a way i can
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do it better and i think that's important because otherwise it's like been there done that you know
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and then there can it can lead to actually being bored you can just hang on to a job rather than
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enjoy it what you said about that arc of a sports person's life that you know you're very good you're
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very talented you work hard but at some point you peak and then it's all downhill and it strikes me
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that you know unlike our careers necessarily where we can hopefully keep getting better
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a sports person's career always ends in tragedy where they are not what they used to be and that
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can at at one level become difficult to deal with and how you respond to that can really vary on a
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lot of factors so in your time dealing with you know so many cricketers who are personal friends
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so many cricketers who've kind of gone through through these ups and downs some of these rounds
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may have been sudden some of them may have been gradual but they always then have to mentally
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recalibrate who they are and what they can do in their place in the world in their place of in the
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place of cricket in their lives so amit i think retirement or when you're approaching the end is
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a it can be quite a terrifying period for the you know they're performing artists in a sense
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imagine if you're a trapeze artist and you know your shelf life is for a trapeze artist maybe
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seven eight nine years you know in a cricketer's career it may be you can stretch it to 20 years
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but still there has to be an end and you actually in the peak of your prime you're in the prime of
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your life if you're 38 37 40 at you know at best say and then what do you do the thought of not
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doing what you've done for 20 years can create a lot of you know turmoil within the person and
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therefore a lot of people delay their retirement till they are dumped or they start flopping and
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then there's a lot of remorse and regret associated with it which is either publicly expressed or not
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but they go through you know i mean some of them can go through very torrid times personally in
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their own lives there's also this whole it's a it's a cliche but it's there you know quit when
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you're at the top but it's easier said than done when you're at the top why do you quit why should
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you you know and especially in the old days where there wasn't much financial reward or financial
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security the financial security is there now the insecurity is about what do i do with myself
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after i've quit and a lot of it is the conditioning you're used to fame you're used to popularity
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you're used to adulation all that going is not very different from film stars in that sense at
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least for cricketers in the indian or the subcontinent you know the kind of larger than life persona they
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they occupy so that is something that also i think is uh is deserving of attention when you know
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mentoring has become so big now how to handle money how to handle fame and how to handle
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retirement as it approaches is something that needs to be aggressively taught i think especially
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when in a country like india where there's so much competition you know i know we all know of
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players now who are especially in the ipl the big problem ipl has got many pluses to it as we know
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there are there's some downsides that it brings you into the limelight suddenly you have two bad
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seasons and you're out of out of sight you know you may lose your place in the india team what
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hurts even more is you lost your place in the ipl team you've been dumped by a franchise your
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money earnings has also gone your place in the national team has gone and you're left with nothing
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to clutch to clutch onto you know hang on to so these are areas that i think that they are
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it's not all as rosy as it appears from the outside one has to be cognizant of what they go
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through it for writers it's not certainly not the case you know we've got a lifetime that one can
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practice your your craft or your vocation there's no retirement age now there is you can lose a job
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but you don't need to stop writing or being a commentator or doing a podcast or whatever so
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in that sense it's a far more extended lifestyle the only thing which people like us need to guard
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against is you know sense of deja vu one more match you know so you know i'm reminded by what
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you said of this anecdote i think it's about bradman and i forget the exact the gist of it is this
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that in the 1970s he bradman is asked that if you played these western indian quicks what would your
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average against them would be and he said it would be about 60 or 70 and they said oh okay that low
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and bradman said what do you expect i'm 80 years old yeah absolutely whatever that is but you know
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just reminding just about bradman so you know this the the sense of invincibility in sport is such a
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myth yeah you know the greatest are not invincible bradman made zero in his last test innings had he
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made four he would have finished with a hundred of average of hundred so even the great bradman now
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there's all kinds of stories that he was he got so emotional that there were tears that welled up in
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his eye and therefore he lost sight of eric holly's leg break or googly or whatever it was and got
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bowled it's also to me a sign of mortality you know that every sports person whoever it may be
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whether it's a tiger woods or a garfield sobers or don bradman or peli or you know peli can miss
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the easiest of goals it can happen and i vaguely remember in bradman's case when holly's bowled him
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for zero one of his ex teammates in the commentary box i think probably fingerton two of his teammates
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were in the commentary box and they turned to each other and they laughed in delight and that also
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leads to the question that if that happens what have you achieved really you know which is another
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kind of question no but the film star metaphor breaks down here because srk can still play a
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teenager in his 50s but cricketers can also more difficult for a sports person compared i mean i
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did mention about performing artists but if it's amitabh bachchan or shahrukh khan these are the
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big salman or whoever but you can have multiple retakes you can have 50 retakes till you get it
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right you can go and watch the video monitor and say look i can do it differently i can do it better
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and probably do it better but for a sports person you miss a penalty you're gone unless your wg
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gray sir has that famous story about how an umpire gave him out and he stayed there and they come see
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you raise your finger and they come see me bat yeah so here's another question that you know like
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you pointed out if someone was to say to either you or me that hey guys uh like the cliche goes
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quit when they ask by instead of why not or you know quit when you're at the top as as you just
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said we would just laugh of course it will buzz off yeah it will buzz off my top is yet to come
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too even if i feel my powers are declining as long as i'm enjoying writing i'm going to keep
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writing i think that there is this pressure that is sometimes put on sports people where we focus
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on their legacy more than they themselves do like the word legacy itself i don't even know what it
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means or why anyone should give a damn about it i imagine somebody starts playing a sport it's
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because they love it of course you know and they should play till they love it and even if they are
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on a decline like maybe roger federer today and he says no i love it i want to play i don't care
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if i'm not winning two grand slams a year i want to play we should respect that you know but that's
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easier than uh easier in individual sport than in a team sport you know because team sport you're
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selected roger federer can decide he wants to play and maybe lose in the first round and keep
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playing you know that's fine but in a team sport somebody else is selecting you and the impact
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you have or the influence you have on the team or not you may have a debilitating influence on the
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team so then you're chucked out so i think that you know different sports will have different
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yardsticks but you're right at the you can't decide on your legacy at the start of your career
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because you'll get so consumed by that you know and weighed down that you might have nothing to
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show for it forget about legacy you know i mean there are players who came meteoric rise and then
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gone so there's no legacy that has been left behind barring the first couple of years legacy
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comes with the body of work that is voluminous and its impact it's not just about averages alone
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in the in the case of cricket it can averages can mean mean a heck of a lot but also in the impact
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i mean uh virendra sevags in my opinion virendra sevags legacy is fabulous his average may not be
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in the 50s he's 49 something just about touching 50 but with a few more not outs he'll have been
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50 plus but the impact he had on international cricket apart from indian cricket the the way he
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would win matches the fear he would create in opposing bowlers is something that you know
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it's a fabulous legacy and he was such an it was such a conundrum to see a virendra sevag kind of
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an opener in indian cricket you know normally you would associate these buccaneering types with an
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Aussie or maybe a west indian not even an englishman maybe a matcap pakistani batsman you know i mean
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i sometimes think about the best opening pair in the history of indian cricket would be gavaskar
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and sevag but a complete contrast yeah in approach both great in their own ways but look at
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you know and also you can't deny that sevag has left behind a magnificent legacy now it may never
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be achievable by somebody else unless you've got a similar mindset in a hard disk which works like
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sevags did you know it just boggled you know how he played boggles the mind even now absolutely
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uh outstanding let's continue talking about your career at this point you've become a cricket
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journalist do you see yourself being at this point someone who will write about cricket all his life
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because what it seems to me from that vantage point of say the early 80s you know before 83
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before 83 happens from that vantage point when you're looking ahead you don't know what's
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happened so it must seem like more of the same more of the same all your life and eventually
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of course what happened we know is that 83 happened and then liberalization happened and
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then the game exploded and ipl happened and essentially you know you've basically covered
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cricket through the most exciting decades and you know we are both so fortunate to have been doing
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what we kind of did but at that time what was your conception were you thinking that i've started in
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journalism with cricket writing i also want to do other things were there other kinds of journalism
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which inspired you uh you know tell me a bit so look to be honest i thought i wouldn't last in
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journalism i thought i would actually kind of get back maybe to law a the money wasn't good i was
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married i had become a father i was a young father by 80 you know by end 82 83 i went to the world
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cup in 1983 and i you know i i said this is my last last assignment maybe i'll do something else
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maybe i'll join up as a junior lawyer somewhere my father's you know goodwill was there i could
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have got into a law firm and worked my way up by that time he was you know he had passed away in
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1973 so i couldn't join him but people he knew i went to the world cup i thought to cover a big
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event there was a kind of an ambition or dream so i said but i've i went there and i you know india
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won the in the world cup and you know it just kind of changed my mind completely i said the
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excitement and the thrill of seeing india win that world cup when i came back i said
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forget about law this is what i'm going to stick with and i stuck with it for 10 years non-stop
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and i was on the road virtually you know every time india went on any tour i was there
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or tour even domestically i was there and to the extent that i when i look back i think sometimes
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that i didn't see my son grow up you know you're always on the road and then in 93 i got an offer
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which very strange it was kind of sprung on me by the the owners of midday tarik ansari he said
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i wanted to edit the paper so i said you know i remember this very distinctly because the office
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was in tardio we walked down towards bhatia hospital there was a kamath stall kamath restaurant
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across the road and over medu vada and chutney he said will you take this you know why don't you
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become the editor i said i'm doing sports i'm quite happy you say no but you know think about
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it so i said okay give me six months i had planned it was within the organization it'd been worked
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out that i will go to wimbledon in 93 and there was a tour to sri lanka coming up so i wanted to
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do those two tours he said fine let's wait so in the meanwhile he also sent you know i went to new
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york and did a stint in new york post which was also tabloid for about two or three three weeks
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i was there just to see how newsroom functions and all are happening which actually quite excited me
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so when i came back i did the wimbledon i did the sri lanka tour and then i became the editor of
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midday and uh it was a big shift for me it took me that much time to you know i had i had a great
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life i was on much envied life if you can you know even within the newsroom i mean whoever may have
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been the editor the cricket correspondents or cricket writers life was the the toast of the newsroom
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and i had to give that up and then when you're editor then there are you know you become
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accountable for everybody else here you were accountable to your department by that time i
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was also the sports editor and the editor of sports week magazine so to give all that up and
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take on this assignment in 93 sports we had shut down but it was it was a challenge which at
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i think finally it it captured my imagination and then i said let's do it that's where i switched
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and took up i became editor of midday but once a year i would take a tour on my my leave would be
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even if it was a short tour it meant just going and doing two matches i would keep up with with
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cricket one what did you learn at new york post you know what did they do differently that impressed
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you and that you said that you want to incorporate it as editor and also what specifically about the
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job of an editor because a lot of people who will start off with the kind of work that you
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enjoyed doing you're traveling everywhere you're covering cricket it's a dream life
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we'll also say they don't want to manage people and it's a completely different skill set
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obviously as a sports editor and all you had some experience at that but one it's a different
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skill set managing people and two it's a different skill set editing an actual general newspaper
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where you have to assign priorities decide what gets covered all of that so did you just dive
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into it without thinking about it much or did you spend some time thinking about it and
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craft a kind of editorial philosophy for yourself that these are the kind of things i will focus on
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what was that like so you know there are two questions in the one is that what did i learn
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in new york post i thought in new york post though it's a very short stint and it was just to help me
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i come to terms with tabloid journalism that was the purpose of my going there was in terms of
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layout screaming headlines which capture your attention you know most of the papers at least
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in the afternoon the mid-day was an afternoon paper is sold on the stands it's not necessarily
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home delivered it used to be office delivered but the stand sales were the most so it had to be very
#
appealing for a passerby to say hey i want this copy and then the the mix of stories you know how
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much crime becomes a big thing for tabloids so how do you play up the crime stories and therefore
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what should be the drill of the reporters and the access into getting information about crime those
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stories those were things that you know i went on beat reporting with the reporters just to find out
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how they go about doing it you know and i found that they were very aggressive in in new york though
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it's a is and it's a big city much like mumbai or bigger than mumbai in terms of news coverage
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but it was very exciting just being out there with the beat reporter and the kindly the the way they
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approached and you know went after news there was an aggression which i didn't find existed in
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in indian newsrooms give me an example so if there's a drug bust you know in in new york city then
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they would send two reporters one to the place of the crime one to the you know and and so swiftly
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into where the police station wherever the case is going to be investigated and they were far
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more advanced in their you know how information was transmitted i mean telephone access in india
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even in 93 was not so easy while for the new for the u.s for the americans it was far easier but
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they would have on one crime story maybe three four guys they would pull out somebody from here and
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send them for this is a big story let's put all our arsenal in this and play it up because this
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is going to be a big story a front page story while in india i think we were still a little
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structured these are your crime reporters these are your civic reporters yes they were all of that
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but if it if a story broke uh then you know you put all your might towards that because ultimately
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tabloids sold on your front page story and maybe page three and then the features and then the
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sports i think the the single biggest impression on me was a very aggressive pursuit of two or
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three stories rather than getting 30 stories because even for midday which is very popular
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for its crossword and its comics and entertainment section and glamour columns and all that
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if you chase 30 stories you might end up with not even three or three of any
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great you know worth so that was one of the things which i learned and when i came back
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i tried to implement that in in and i think also my predecessors had left a very good newsroom
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you know there's a lot of young talent you know nikhil laxman prem panikar who preceded me
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menal bagel these all they all became household names they were nikhil was a very well known
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sharda ogra was sharda ogra prajbal hegde hemal we had hemal hemal ash in midday actually we had an
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all women's sports team yeah you know legendary legendary and including the photographer savita
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kiril oskar yeah who worked with me later at wisden yeah right and she was the one who i
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you know when i became the editor i sent to yorkshire when sachin went there to cover his
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stay there because she was a writer as well as a photographer the energy i think what i enjoyed
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most in midday and that was an advantage that they were all it was a very young team barring some
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you know some of the news editor some of those who were
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got from uh from other newspapers and brought there but the by and large the the army of people
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who were there at the desk and the reporters they were all very young all looking to get ahead
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and enjoying their work getting stories obviously a lot of them would move on you know like sharda
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you know but they were really good at their job so in that sense it became a little easier for me i
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didn't have to strain too much one had to be a little disciplined because i was so used to
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being on my own jaunts and to get restricted to a cabin and pacing the newsroom was a bit of a
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challenge in the first maybe four five six months but i started enjoying it there's a dimension to
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running a newspaper which you know when you're in that kind of a position of an editor
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your locus standard changes and everything kind of comes to you and then flows from you in many
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ways it can't be so centralized there are department heads and you have to work well with them which is
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what i always believe in i think you know delegation of responsibility is very important provided you
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know what you're doing for the next day's edition or the next week's or how you're planning and
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budgeting so all that comes into play and i think it just widened my horizon in my perspective
#
not just about journalism but about life because you come to know and come across so many different
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kinds of people in terms of writing how different was it like for example one of the things that i
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do in one of the webinars i teach is i'll take examples from tabloids from mainstream newspapers
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from a magazine like the new yorker or i'll take a guardian long read and from a literary novel
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and i'll take examples from each of these to point out how the imperatives are different and
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therefore the writing is different well the tabloid example i think i use is from daily mail in
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england where you know they pack in a lot of info in the headline and and the core assumption for
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that is that the reader can stop reading at any point in time extreme short attention span like
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i would typically read midday when i'm in a local train commuting somewhere in the mid 90s and one
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hand is holding the bar above my head and the other hand as a midday and therefore you have a
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very fast rhythm short one sentence per hours everything is information you don't have the
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space to go deep or give context or whatever and i'm of course giving sort of an extreme example
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and therefore the imperatives of writing for a tabloid are very different even from the
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imperatives of writing for a broadsheet newspaper like you cannot be neville cardus in an afternoon
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paper for example so tell me a little bit more about this so you have to yeah so you have to
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customize you know you have to customize your writing skills for suiting a tabloid and i think
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what plays a huge role in tabloids and this is again a commuter paper midday you know most
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tabloids end up being even in big cities like london or new york these are all commuted
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papers because they're easy to read even on a train or in a bus so sharp headlines which
#
provoke which excite which intrigue you know you can have lead-ins and you know maybe a intro to
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it which is two lines which more or less tells you a story or it keeps or it tickles your palate so
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much that you say i will read it a little later if not right now but you will read it and then
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there is a whole other uh what i call condiments that come in which are you know the crossword
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that we had was almost like a no-brainer cost word but the idea was was a deliberate attempt
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that you make it so easy that everybody enjoys it it's not the london times or the times of india
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cryptic crossword which two out of hundred may manage and everybody is frustrated and say i will
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not attempt it that's a different profile of leadership and if you have a large mass of readers
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then you can attempt all of that there are comics for relief there's it's a in a way it's snacky
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but i must say in the context of midday it became a very powerful influence in city life
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it did you know so it was number two to to i and they were we would slap ourselves on the back or
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thumb ourselves on the back and say wow we are competing with toi numbers were of course of
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huge disparity but in terms of influence in terms of people talking about midday we had the diary
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page the standards set by bhram contractor who was there earlier before he started afternoon
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dispatch and courier was a delectable very high standard of writing the diary because he had his
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own way of doing it so to keep that going we had to get very skillful writers i think prem panikar
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did it for a long while when nikhil was the editor and then we had you know several other people who
#
came so the diary became an important aspect and facet of this paper which gave you snippets into
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life in the city which otherwise don't come in news reports you know a little bit of spies
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about society the whole packaging of it how do you capture how do you make midday a microcosm of
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mumbai's life was really the attempt and that i found very very you know exciting with my
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rose tinted glasses on i would say that that almost felt for me like a golden age of midday
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in the sense that i think what a tabloid should do best is take that sideways look your mainstream
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newspaper is covering all the main shit that happens in the tabloid that yeah okay you got to
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you know attract eyeballs you you do the sensational headlines and all of that but you
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also take those little sideways glimpses that a mainstream paper can't and you guys did that
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very well what do you feel now when you look at you know midday and other other similar papers
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not to single out one yeah i think i think most papers have i mean i sounds harsh to say it but
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the world which comes to mind is tepid so even while midday was a what we used to call the
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complete family newspaper and a city you know city-based comprehensive package fun entertainment
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excitement but there was also sometimes not sometimes but the attempt was to find an edge
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to our reporting also so there would be a lot of investigative stuff the kidney sales racket you
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know which which was it was broken by midday uh we had i think amongst we were the first paper
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if i remember correctly following up on the bomb blast case mumbai bomb blast case and the trial
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which was the tata court proceedings which are going on which some of the mainstream or the
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mainstream newspapers were a little hesitant to and then of course competition right then everybody
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starts covering and then it gets amplified which is what was needed so midday was in
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fairly very ballsy for its time you know so a little cheeky it was provocative it was it was
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you know and everybody wanted to be featured in midday from mumbai's movers and shakers everybody
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wanted to be seen in midday or featured in midday in some way the weekend paper would be sunday
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midday where we would actually have a lot of long reads and columns and you know stuff that you can
#
read at leisure and that would be delivered in the morning so i was there for as editor for seven
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and a half years and in many ways those were the best years of my journalism along with whatever
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i've done in sport and cricket take me to the next step of your journey what happens next where do
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you where do you go after that so 2000 is when i 2001 is uh you know 2000 is when i quit and i
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actually uh i had come to know mark masquerainess by then you know world tell was it was his company
#
and he was managing sachin and he had this great desire to start to make india actually he saw it
#
he was a visionary in many ways he was a big talking yankee but he was also a visionary and
#
he saw india is becoming the hub of international cricket in a really big way at that point in time
#
so he wanted to start in you know 2000 was the time when everybody was talking dot com
#
so he wanted a dot cricket website dot com and a cricket magazine he got in touch with me we
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talked about it for almost six eight nine months before i said yes to him because leaving midday
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was not easy but i i just felt that maybe i need a slightly different challenge and you know new
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medium to to explore which is the dot com so i quit in march of 2000 or thereabouts and we started
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this uh total cricket dot com and cricket talk and just as we started the match fixing scam broke
#
and uh mark had his uh venture capitalist and whoever else who pulled back from supporting
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the website the magazine continued for six eight months by the end of the year it it looked to me
#
that you know it's it's not making headway and i was being pursued at that point in time by times
#
of india you know you join us and join us so they made it you know wear two hats you become the
#
editor of bombay times which is not the bombay times as it is seen now or as it is now because
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at that point in time they wanted it to be an extended or a more expanded version of midday
#
a city glamour and all that but more city and stuff and also be national sports editor and that
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hat attracted me i said you know wearing two hats is great so you know so i said yes and i joined
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to i in november 2000 and i was there for about four five years and then i left because by that
#
time bombay times had become a complete entertainment supplement rather than a city
#
supplement and i was you know then i was doing only sports and then dna was being plotted and they
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approached me a dna okay would you like to join and you know you'll be heading they had they had
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planned a collegium system of editors which which was quite interesting at that point in time and
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they wanted me to do the whole city thing plus sports and also then they added the sunday pit
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to start with and i found that was exciting enough so i moved to dna which lasted another good five
#
years but i you know the i don't think the paper went exactly the way it was planned or where it
#
was headed and uh yeah 2009 end i opted out and i had the choice to work with another newspaper
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again or another or strike out on my own and i said if not now to never over you know i was
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54 i said let me just try and see what what happens from here let's see what happens
#
and yeah it's been about 12 years since i've been writing doing stuff i've done commentary for star
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sports for sony i've done a lot of television i'm doing a lot i've done a lot of work on the
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digital space and i continue doing a lot of work in text awesome what a journey and you know for
#
my listeners who are into cricket and into cricket journalism but may not have heard of cricket talk
#
a quick little bit of context cricket talk you know you edited it like you said it came out for
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a few months but one of the impressive things you did there as we were discussing over lunch
#
a little while back is you put together an outstanding team so you had young writers like
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akshay sabhai rahul bhattacharya and you got sambit baal to do the website for it sambit had just
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left gentleman which was like india's version of his choir and a bloody good magazine while
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sambit was editing it but he moved on from there joined you to sort of run the website
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and then you parted ways you went to times and he went on to take wizard.com where one of the
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remarkable things i think he did as an editor which was important for cricket journalism in india was
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just got a lot of young writers and bright he was a magnet for good young writers you know people
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like rahul bhattacharya dili prem chandran s rajesh joined around the same time as me
#
and a whole bunch of others siddhati vaidyanath and sid we came later and i think that just kind
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of had an early butterfly effect in the sense of what you know using the new medium figuring out
#
what was possible and many of these writers went on to you know though i didn't stay in cricket
#
writing beyond that decade but many of the other guys are just absolutely top class writers today
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and later of course sharda joined him and jayaditya joined him and it was just a great team
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now i think sambit has been outstanding as an editor for cricket info and also i think for the
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fact that he he steered cricket info to a position of eminence not just because it's a repository of
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all the data that you want in cricket but also for the quality of its writing and as you mentioned
#
that he was like a magnet attracting young talent i think largely because of his temperament he's
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got a great temperament i think he's hugely secure as an editor so he's not worried about
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am i writing somebody else writing better than me and therefore what will happen i think he's
#
interested i think in that sense he's a visionary so he's promoted a lot of very talented youngsters
#
to become formidable names siddharth maunga for instance yeah who worked briefly with me in in dna
#
and joined and he's you know gone places so and at a global level you know and i think sambit himself
#
he was very passionate sambit and i go back to independent when i was sports editor of independent
#
briefly this is 1989 1989 1990 when he was a he was on the civic beat so he was a bmc reporter
#
and he was very young much younger than me uh 23 24 and and at that point in time i didn't i had
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no clue at all that he was a so passionate about cricket and then of course he joined
#
gentleman and gentleman at a very young age so i mean he is inheritor of a legacy in journalism
#
you know for his his family from odisha was into media so some values he's imbibed very early i
#
would imagine i've never met apart from his brother i've met uh not many other people but i think the
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very strong values of liberal freedom independence these are very strong values in him and also
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looking at reporters and writers in a very humane way and creating opportunities for everybody to
#
grow that's my surmise not that we've had great discussions on this but seeing the trajectory of
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his own career i think he's done an absolutely fabulous job and he himself has grown tremendously
#
as a writer not just an editor but also as a writer you know and somebody and what i think
#
has perhaps helped him the most is his immediate understanding that technology is going to drive
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journalism or writing going ahead so he's been amongst the first i remember or amongst people i
#
know who immersed himself into understanding where technology is going and you know use that as
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expanding the horizons of influence of clickin for and for his writers and for himself you know and
#
besides being a lovely man what i realize about what a good editor he was is in retrospect having
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worked with him for many years you know one of the things that i've learned looking back
#
is that a good editor first and foremost must be an enabler of good people he had a he had a bunch
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of talented young writers with him but he didn't try to force a particular way of writing or a
#
style or any of that on them he allowed them space to make their mistakes and to grow like i
#
remember at the time that i began with him i was a typical flamboyant young writer i want to show
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i want to show off my skills a fancy turn of phrase all of that and you learn with experience
#
and rather than whip me into submission he allowed me to play some of my shots to you know to
#
smoothen that out and in that sense a very nurturing editor in a way that perhaps kind
#
of goes unseen but to kind of get back to your sort of story the last 12 years you've been on
#
your own now one of the things i realized after i did my last sort of full-time job which was at
#
crick and fro after that i was a consulting editor with them for a couple of years but
#
i was kind of out of there for by 2009 and after that i kind of realized that i can never do a job
#
again because once you have the freedom of working for yourself which is such a great
#
privilege if you can manage it i realize that i can't go to the office, i can't register,
#
sign and all of that crap you know what are the pros and cons for you what was
#
sort of the solo life for you as it were so initially i must confess that it was a little
#
difficult you know i like while i made that choice consciously i felt the pangs you know i was
#
missing newsroom because i just spent a long time in newsrooms about 30 years so it became a little
#
initially a little difficult then i found that i had more elbow room i had more you know i was
#
more convenienced by my time being my own of course you have to manage the time well
#
and you have to get enough assignments that can sometimes become a bit of a problem and then
#
after you've got the assignments you have to ensure that the money cups keeps coming in otherwise
#
that becomes a bigger problem so the the flow of income can become a little the pattern can be
#
irregular but they're not there will be defaulters but as yet i would i would say that by and large
#
i haven't been kind of shafted you know i haven't been you know troubled too much so in that sense
#
if your livelihood is looked after your professional assignments give you the reach and the exposure
#
that you've enjoyed ultimately that's what you know there's a certain you know vanity if you might
#
call it that i'm reaching out and so many people are reading it and sometimes you get the feedback
#
if that is met then you don't you start missing the newsroom less and less except for the old
#
style companionship of being in a new you know in times of india the newsroom would be
#
would be 150 200 people the floor even in dna when we started 200 people so you don't have that many
#
people around you now you know you're probably alone or if you're in a commentary stint maybe
#
you've got seven eight ten people so there is a sense of you know that it's a you know in a way
#
it gets a little lonely but you have to come to terms with it and then you start enjoying it
#
you find that you are able to spend a little more time outside because if you're in an office then
#
you're spending yes you got 200 people but you get sucked into all kinds of things which may actually
#
be adding not much value to your life apart from you know just being together so that i think has
#
been something and also see i'm not 25 26 where you need that kind of you know very busy life
#
busy life involved with everybody else at this stage of my life i'm quite happy being on my own
#
and doing the stuff that i want to do and if i keep getting decent assignments i'm what more can one
#
ask you know i had wheat sanghvi on my show a few weeks ago and one of the things that he pointed
#
out was that once you become an editor it's very seductive you want to be an editor forever because
#
of everything that kind of goes with it and i would imagine that all the offers that came to you would
#
be at approximately that level that will will you be an editor and it you know did it get tempting
#
at sometimes were there times where you just sat back and said kya yaar i'm doing this trivial
#
thing myself some secretary would have done it for me absolutely that is the biggest see there
#
are two things you know veer is right and i'll tell you what the pangs are really without kind
#
of mincing words there's a sense of absence of power so when you're an editor whatever the scale
#
of the organization you know it's like you're the centrifugal force everything flows in and out from
#
the editor's cabin the power at least of how the newsroom runs there'll be various people working
#
towards it but so that absence of power can can take you know it can you can feel it you can
#
is a captain of a team cricket team you remove that person from the captaincy it takes a long
#
while for that player to get readjusted to being just an ordinary member so that absence you feel
#
and yeah but but beyond so the other paraphernalia that comes along with it it's not just the power
#
but it's also the conveniences you have a sec key you will do all kinds of things for you now
#
here if i have to book an air ticket i have to do it myself you know if i have to get
#
five phone calls back to back i have to keep doing it myself with somebody i could have just
#
told my secretary you know these are this is time just make sure you give me the calls
#
so all those conveniences also become a bit of a problem when they are gone but hey this is you
#
know it's now new age and you have to adjust and now in fact post-pandemic i think more and more
#
people are beginning to realize that you have to you know people have become actually more
#
independent because they're sitting and working from home and therefore they have to extend that
#
sense now rather than clamoring or craving for i mean ultimately all sense of power at the end of
#
it is delusionary it is there well it is there once it goes and we don't even know how much
#
power what people said behind your back and whether everybody did what you thought is also
#
a sense of it's a delusion you know it could be so i think you have to reconcile reconciliation in
#
life is one of the great things you know you have to reconcile to so many things so you have to
#
reconcile to also the fact that there is a time where you know you you climb up and you reach a
#
certain level and there will be a time when you don't have that and it doesn't mean that what you've
#
lost is something that will debilitate you to an extent where you do you lose your identity completely
#
a couple of other thoughts strike me one is that at the level of you know being an editor you've
#
got managerial responsibility you are sort of multitasking or juggling various balls and you
#
know cal newport wrote this book called deep work where he talks about deep work and shallow work
#
and deep work is typically when you really need to get into the zone and you need to write
#
and every time you're distracted it takes you 15 minutes or 20 minutes to get back into a state
#
of deep work so if we open ourselves up to distractions like from our smartphone or whatever
#
we can perennially be in a state of shallow work and never really get deep now his point is that
#
for a manager that is okay because you are doing shallow work anyway you're coordinating things
#
you're looking at timelines you're talking to one department head what are the stories for today
#
what do we run with blah blah blood is perfectly fine but when you're working for yourself
#
ideally the balance shifts a little bit you want to do more writing you want to do more reading
#
you want to focus more on that so one how was that shift for you and two how would you then
#
give your day structure like what i have found hardest working for myself is just meeting
#
internal deadlines like if somebody else gives me a deadline i can meet it i will panic you know as
#
douglas adams once said deadlines i love deadlines especially the sound they make is a go whooshing
#
by uh so so i can panic but the deadline helps but when i have to be internally driven i find
#
it really hard to structure my day to get work done how are those for you how did you manage
#
so i have the same problem i mean the internal you know deadline kind of pattern how do you
#
put it in place is really the challenge and then i think this has also to do with personality types
#
there are some people who will i've got a deadline to meet let me just get it out of the way
#
and it's out of the way you know while i'll mull over things and i'll
#
at the end of the day one is conscious of deadlines and in newspapers you'll find that most and you've
#
been a writer all your life also so you the deadline is when it's almost you know on the
#
precipice now i have to deliver so you might mull over as much as you want but if you're a
#
professional journalist there is a deadline you have to meet and give it you know so i think
#
that you internalize it and you if if it is somebody who's giving you a four hour deadline
#
saying i'm i want this piece because i have to put it out by two o'clock in the afternoon you have to
#
finish it by 12 and you're told at eight in the morning you will strive and put it together and
#
do it but if somebody says i want 2000 words and you know give it to me in three days i doubt that
#
somebody will do it on i can't do it on the first day unlikely on the second day also i may make a
#
few notes and keep it or i might mull over it in the mind and inevitably it will be done on the
#
third day so managing those internal deadlines is an issue especially when you are also doing
#
also doing sundry other things because you're alone so in my case and i'm sure it's true of
#
many people who are writers now still is that you're juggling with two or three assignments
#
and therefore you're working out in your mind all the time which is priority deadline which is i can
#
hedge a little bit and how do i meet all three and that you know that is something that you have to
#
crack you know so and even amongst editors so i think what you're talking about the editors
#
those category of that category of editors are those who are writers who've been managers also
#
but who are also writers there are also lots of production editors today in newspapers you know
#
who don't write their job still remains managerial suppose they might become a consulting editor
#
somewhere but it's not about writing so i think the different it's a different yardstick which
#
would apply for them rather than for people like us who are still writers fair point now i think
#
we come to the part of the show where we should talk about the journey of Indian cricket which
#
is what your book is about yes much of which you have witnessed in your storied career so let's
#
go back to your 1983 experience because that is a truly seminal that's when the world begins to
#
change forever basically not to be too hyperbolic about it so tell me a bit about that because
#
what i find interesting there is that there is this world event and there are six indian
#
journalists there and you are one of those six indian journalists and because you are on a
#
budget you are also you know taking great care so you miss the first india west indies match
#
because you have to travel for it i missed the first for two reasons one is that i was you know
#
short on money i mean i didn't have money to splurge or even spend not extravagantly but more
#
than is necessary but i also missed it because i thought india is going to get licked by west
#
indies in the first match so old triford jana train fair night i have to stay there for the
#
match and you know hotel i was in ymca in london and i said let me go to the oval where england
#
and new zealand were playing and this looks like an interesting match and you know because new
#
zealand at two earlier world cups had finished in the semi-finals and they had a young player
#
called martin crowe who i had come you know kind of come to like just reading about his exploits
#
as a junior when he had started out playing in english county so i said let me go and watch
#
martin crowe and england versus new zealand rather than go to you know predictable result
#
so there i went but while this match was on the the oval match new zealand england we got
#
information coming in radio and other that india was really putting up a stiff fight against
#
west indies that match spilled over into the next day because of rain and india won the next
#
morning but of course by then it was too late to go to old triford but the only thing which i
#
realized as a professional thing not because of the world cup is that is you know you can't
#
fudge on your professional assignment you're there to do a certain job it's like taking your
#
eyes off the ball you'll find your stumps going for a walk so i should have been that was my
#
biggest i should have been with india instead of being self-indulgent and going to watch new
#
zealand versus england but that was the start of a terrific campaign so i missed the first match
#
and then i didn't miss a ball of every match that india played after that so after that you saw a
#
match which i can only envy that you actually watched it which is of course that famous
#
trundbridge wells match where bbc went on strike for one day and that was the day that one of the
#
greatest innings of all time was played when kapil dev made 175 tell me a bit about what that
#
whole experience was like going to the game watching that innings so the first thing about
#
that i must tell you is that i reached a little late you know again trying to save money so
#
i was staying in a place in serbeton in sare with a friend of somebody who i knew from bombay he was
#
an engineer and you know where i could save on room rent and then i took an off-peak ticket to
#
tunbridge wells because that would be half the fare so i reached maybe about 20 minutes 25 minutes
#
after start of play running up to the ground as i entered the ground the the indian dressing room
#
was right on on the right and it had a little porch and i saw gundapa vishwanath standing there
#
he was not in the team obviously but he was there and i said hi to him and i sidled up i mean in
#
those days nobody stopped you so i sidled up to him and i said how's it going so he says no no
#
nothing to worry about so i said what is he what is he talking about nothing to worry about and
#
i my i went to the scoreboard and it was like four wickets had gone you know 11 or 12 for four
#
i said what the hell is happening you know then i stood there with him for the next maybe seven
#
it became 17 for five kapil dev was already in the middle india's top order had been knocked off
#
it was a devilish pitch you know the ball seeming around a lot and i stood there till about
#
for about half an hour till i found that things were settling a bit and kapil started
#
playing his strokes and then i went to the what was the the press box was a shamiana
#
where and the crowd you know it was a packed ground maybe five six thousand people
#
most of them old-age pensioners you know small county and picnic you know like a picnic for them
#
and you know just it became so dramatic once he started going that he was peppering the
#
the ground with boundaries and sixes and you know suddenly he was 175 not out india had made 262
#
something like that and went on to win the match and it became a i mean the feeling that
#
something extraordinary has happened was immediately felt now obviously one was winning
#
the match from a near impossible situation but suddenly one felt or at least this is the
#
impression i still carry in my mind is you know some transformation has taken place this is not
#
the same team the team had been a little up and down till then and we're on the verge of being
#
you know gavaskar had missed out on a couple of matches there was whether he's dropped and
#
the stories we were chasing is has gavaskar been dropped you know he didn't play a couple of
#
matches then he came back so you know and then there was always this thing gavaskar versus kapil
#
dev kya ho raha hai pata nahi hai nobody thought india was in this world cup to win it but after
#
that tunbridge wells match things transformed and six of us also the journalists who were there we
#
got a little more excited about founding finding out what else you know what next and then we went
#
to gemsford beat australia then old trafford where we beat england that to me was a terrific match
#
it was a fantastic match to watch and experience because england were favorites to be in the final
#
along with west indies and you know all kinds of desi's who were there based in based in england
#
there's a lot of not just banter but also a lot of you know tutu memai going on between the people
#
kapil dev eats botham for breakfast would be was the placard very famous placard kapil dev
#
eats botham for breakfast and then india beat england in that match and then was the final and
#
again you know as the story of my world cup i woke up a little late in serbeton which was like an hour
#
or so away and i said shit you know it's the final of the match and i counted my money i said i'm
#
taking a cabin going and that was a big mistake i made because you try and come by a cab in london
#
it takes far longer than tube and you know connections and whatever and apart from costing
#
you an arm and a leg so when i landed up running past grace gates and there's a roar and a very
#
west indian roar you could make out it's a west indian roar so i you know the press boxes were
#
i think three stories up and there's an elevator which i couldn't wait for i just asked the guy
#
what happened the gavaskar is out you know so i'm running up and richie beno is coming down i think
#
he was moving between some assignment radio to television or whatever i had met him earlier
#
in one of the grounds and he was of course richie beno and he said i'm still offering you odds you
#
know 60 to 1 60 to 1 on india when 66 to 160 at the start of the tournament he said i'm still
#
offering you that please tell me you put some money on it i didn't put any money i said 10 pounds
#
i've already paid 40 some quid for taxi and then bust so i went on i went up and sat in the press
#
box and of course we all know what happened in that match the the press box in those days was
#
at long leg at one side not behind the bowler's arm so we had a complete view of the ground but
#
not the the vertical view so to speak yeah but the match as it transpired you know it just
#
i i don't think that till the last week it fell the west indian supporters were convinced that
#
they were going to lose you can see that now when you look at the footage there's michael holding
#
who gets out and there's some supporters who run to the ground one of them is like almost
#
cajoling him you come back how could he lose this match you know lose to india and then there was
#
the shamiana for prudential where i went and couple of course i think the first time i saw
#
couple a little tipsy he must have had a champagne maybe a couple of glasses of champagne before i
#
reached there but very few west indian players they were pissed off as hell i saw clive loyd
#
and desmond haines two guys i can remember maybe michael holding three of them but not the other
#
certainly not with rituals i didn't see him because his wicket was the turning point but it was
#
the greatest experience of my life as a sports writer and a cricket writer seeing india win the
#
world cup at that point in time i was 27 and i said boss yeah you know this high i will never
#
get if i do law or whatever else you know so forget about law let's you know let's get into
#
journalism so i came back and i met my boss who was sharad kotnes who was the editor of
#
the editor of sports week magazine and i told him i'm going to quit after this world cup so
#
he said and he was you know what is your thought now i said i'm going to work
#
as a journalist but i need more money you know i can't survive on the money you're paying me
#
800 bucks or whatever it was then 1983 so he gave me a raise immediately which kind of convinced me
#
that i made the right my right decision because you know 1200 1300 bucks in those days meant a
#
lot i was not even sure if i would make that that much in law practice maybe subsequently
#
but at that point in time it at least it paid for my bike's petrol and looked after me and my wife
#
and my very young son reasonably well so i said fine it kind of strikes me like i keep talking
#
in different contexts about the importance of probabilistic thinking and i feel that enough
#
people don't do it when they look at cricket and the thing is we now look back at 83 and with the
#
benefit of hindsight everything that has already happened seemed inevitable so now it seems like
#
1983 was destiny india was destined to win it the way i look at it is different the way i look at
#
it is that richie benoist odds to you of 60 to one might even have been the correct ones who knows
#
absolutely but it turned out to be the one in 61 times that india actually wins so extremely sort
#
of lucky in that sense like once when i was writing a column on poker for economic times one of
#
my pieces had the headline unlikely is inevitable you know the law of truly large numbers says that
#
if you have enough number of iterations unlikely things are likely to happen it's just the way it
#
is and the way i kind of visual ask people to visualize probability is that you flip a coin
#
and imagine that immediately the world splits into two parallel universes and then one of
#
them is heads and the other one is tails and so on infinitely down the line and in that one
#
parallel universe we win but in many more parallel universes honestly west indies wins yes in some
#
england wins i don't think zimbabwe wins in any but otherwise you have it kind of spread out on
#
who wins now that leads me to thinking is that that moment is incredibly seminal because of what
#
follows like number one dalmia bindra and nkp salve are pissed off that they didn't get enough
#
tickets they were treated badly and they're like what the hell we won the world cup
#
right and therefore that shifts and the next world cup is in india and then liberalization happens
#
and commerce dictates the rest of what happens and eventually over a period of time india becomes
#
the center of world cricket as it is today and all of it started with that one little thing and had
#
we not won that had we not been in that parallel universe where india actually wins the damn thing
#
you know all of this may not have happened you've kind of put it very briefly but i can
#
tell you i can expand it a little i mean india wouldn't have been the power it is in cricket
#
today but for the atc victory and let me explain why uh one is obviously the impact it had on the
#
indian psyche you know and suddenly you felt like champions and that's a major boost in the feel
#
good factor for the country you know i mean sport is soft power as we know and that really and
#
cricket is such a passion so it happened but also what happened was dalmia and salve and bindra
#
being denied those extra passes and you know they just kind of bruised their ego so badly
#
so what happened subsequently to shift the world cup from england to the subcontinent was not easy
#
they had to tie up with pakistan cricket board so nkp salve and air marshal retired noor khan
#
who was the pcb chief or bpcc as it was called then board of bccp you know they connived they
#
worked out friendship with each other because it wasn't possible to hold all they were not enough
#
stadia in india for a world cup these were the objections raised by the the lobby of england
#
and australia new zealand even the west indies which used to traditionally align with
#
that block so india pakistan sri lanka and the associate countries they had to win over
#
and without pakistan's help it wouldn't have been possible so the governments had to be involved
#
so rajiv gandhi and zia ul haq had to be involved and they had to restrict the number of overs
#
from 60 to 50 because of you know the twilight situation in india
#
and that the objection was from you know the tccb and mcc and whoever else the world cup that
#
world cup organizers prudential that how can you have a 60 over tournament reduced to 50 overs
#
so the one counter to that was double everything the money which dalmia was very good at
#
when nothing works money works so everybody's monies were doubled whatever happened in 83
#
everything the finances were doubled so pakistan and india collaborating to get the world cup to
#
the subcontinent it is held jointly between india and pakistan subsequently also it happened in 96
#
but the two countries were not you know it had become a little inimical to each other so but
#
overs reduced money doubled and the world cup comes to the subcontinent is a in my opinion amongst
#
the greatest world cups that have been played india didn't win pakistan didn't win there were
#
the two favorites it didn't happen australia beat england in the final at eden gardens 90 000 people
#
plus turned up which made india the mecca of cricket in my opinion that is a turning point
#
and of course after the ip l started and everything else it's also become the eldorado
#
and it's worth stating again that in these tribal times 90 000 people turned up to watch a match
#
that did not involve the country it didn't involve the country it was amazing it was absolutely i
#
mean it was astounding and that's what i mean calcutta got its you know charm as the cricketing
#
center from there and you know the calcutta fandom as we go you know whatever it is the
#
the mindset of the calcuttans now why they are so passionate and crazy about sports that's a story
#
in itself and then of course india some could ask you too passionate given 96 passionate but
#
by 87 and then of course we are approaching liberalization and cable tv penetration starts
#
happening you know that's where the influence subsequently of mark mascariness comes in
#
broadcast rights start getting valued far more liberalization opening up of the
#
airwaves broadcast and therefore the valuation going up of cricket rights all happened within
#
that four five six years starting from 87 if the 87 world cup had bombed then things could have
#
been different but 87 world cup only happened because 83 because 83 happened so you know if
#
you trace back the monumental growth of cricket in india not just in terms of passion and coverage
#
and all but also in finances it all goes back to 83 i sort of remember this big story about
#
how in the early 90s when a bcci wanted durdarshan to broadcast their matches durdarshan said how
#
much money will you give us to broadcast the matches i mean just imagine what a shift in
#
mindset then subsequently kind of happened absolutely i mean you have to pay the broadcaster
#
the cricket board had to pay the broadcaster rather than the other way around insane absolutely
#
insane and you mentioned indira gandhi and i just remembered another of these memories which are
#
like these childhood memories and again i was around 10 at the time that india was playing a
#
one-day match and my favorite batsman at the time dilip engsarkar was i think approaching his 100
#
and he had this long frustrating relationship with an odi 100 till he finally got one and then he
#
got more but this was i think before he had his first odi 100 and he was i think approaching 90s
#
and sandeep patil was playing a blazing innings and yes i was there i was there at that match
#
yeah and i actually thought that the way patil is growing maybe he can also get a 100 because
#
he was just blazing away and then came the news that mrs gandhi had died and the match was called
#
off yes we were in pakistan sialkot yeah this is a match at sialkot and uh the test series had been
#
very dreary there was a lot of excitement coming up for this one day series and especially because
#
india was you know world cup winners so and they started off very well but the first match the
#
assassination news came in and that night itself last thing dungarpur was the manager uh so it was
#
like pack up time and in sialkot we didn't even have hotels we were staying in a guest room
#
i think the players also were staying in some uh we were in the guest house and they were in some
#
other maybe a far more elaborate guest house but it was back to india within 24 hours
#
from sialkot to karachi and then to mumbai so i want to ask you about another shift that then
#
happens well like commercially everything changes the center of the game begins to
#
a shift but another interesting shift that happens and at mirrors a change that happens
#
in the country through the 90s is that uh the demographic composition of the team changes
#
in a sense like what we've had through the 50s 60s 70s 80s is that you have these power centers you
#
have the bombay school of cricket and you have delhi and you know stray players from here and
#
there but it's not incredibly diverse it's just a sort of these kind of pockets of influence and
#
then with liberalization all of that changes in a very drastic way and it and the change is slow
#
you could say that the change truly manifests itself only today or in recent years like i
#
remember harsha bhogli did an episode with me where we sort of discussed and i wonder what
#
your thoughts are on it on how so many young people who came up in pakistan you know you'd
#
make your debut at 18 and you'd be burnt out and finished by 20 and part of the reason some could
#
speculate is that in those days in the 80s and 90s the middle class in pakistan was really small
#
either you were from the elites but if you were a talented kid breaking down from below
#
you weren't able to cope with the sudden fame and success and you didn't have that support system
#
whereas as harsha said that through the uh you know 90s and 80s you look at that whole generation
#
of tendulkar dravid ganguly kumle so on i think the phrase harsha used was middle class values
#
and that in a sense also has shifted not in a bad way but it has shifted in a good way in the sense
#
that people from small towns dominate the game today you have inspirational success stories
#
like muhammad siraj and shami and teen atrajan who are from really humble backgrounds who are
#
coming up tell me a little bit about how this change happened was there resistance to it did
#
the system kind of resisted at a certain point in time and how did the ecosystem change and make it
#
sort of possible for all of this to happen so i think there's been a fairly dramatic shift i mean
#
there were the traditional centers five six of them mumbai or bombay madras bangalore calcutta delhi
#
kanpur was a test center though not such a great cricket center but it was a test center and so on
#
so i think that that started showing a shift from the 80s and kapil dev was one of the guys
#
you know he became an iconic figure and therefore very influential especially in the north
#
which was outside of delhi not so you know engaged in cricket when i say north it could
#
also mean up and haryana and panjab and the the gospel of cricket started spreading and one of the
#
things that while bcci is much maligned for many things of acts of omission and commission and
#
rightly so but one of the things which they did which other sports in india failed to do
#
is spread the gospel of cricket across the length and breadth of the country and create
#
give enough infra not the topmost which has now happened and you know we've got actually a
#
surfeit of stadiums now cricket stadium we don't need so many where it's there but decent enough
#
facilities for smaller towns and more fossil areas to you know come and play there so the
#
pipeline from very remote areas was established by the bcci and then the you know television
#
you know television spread the coverage around every home people community television boxes
#
people watching matches and you know saying hey i can do this the monetary rewards of cricket
#
started rising and therefore it became an option a very strong option for livelihood if you were
#
good enough of course the whole thing exploded with the ip l further you know there's been
#
geometric progression since then and now everybody wants to get into the ip l somehow or the other
#
the comparison with pakistan is there i think harsha is right but it stops at a certain stage
#
because i think pakistan's biggest problem has been the lack of a half decent administration
#
that can look after domestic cricket and therefore also cricketers so while they were they've also
#
produced fantastic talent raw talent they've not been able to nurture them for any great length of
#
time or enough of them you know so they produced great players in spite or despite the system not
#
being so great while india have been able to harness especially in the last 30 years
#
and produce and look after its cricketers much better you know and look at there's been some
#
thought also in this look at the preponderance of fast bowlers today it was unthinkable i mean
#
one of the biggest laments of indian cricket has been except one couple day one couple day
#
what will we do we can't win overseas we'll struggle today you're spoiled for choice you
#
know you've got so many fast bowlers in fact the problem today is batsmen are not making enough
#
runs for fast bowlers to win your matches overseas and that has happened because the pitches have
#
been made better for you know getting the fast bowlers to come and make their skills worthwhile
#
not just spinning tracks under prepared pitches where you win a match in two and a half days and
#
why should any fast bowler make the effort but now if there are pitches being prepared and there is
#
reward for fast bowlers to put in that hard work and get into an ip l team and each ip l team now
#
has 16 17 indian players next year after the auction there's going to be 10 teams that many
#
more players needed and my surmise now is that for each place that an indian player gets into
#
in any of the ip l teams there are five other competitors he has left behind
#
so that there there are so many more who are part of the you know of the waiting to get a look in
#
and then there's a cascading effect you know so i think that indian cricket has become richer
#
in the financial sense of course but also richer in its in its skills and in the opportunities it
#
gives to the practitioners today far better than ever before and i think that's what is helping
#
indian cricket i mean one of the unfortunate things which has happened as i speak unfortunate
#
in the sense that we went we couldn't win the world test championship which you know one thought
#
that they would given all the the skills the players they had at their disposable of course
#
give credit to new zealand for winning that but that hurt you know in terms of because
#
winning that you've been number one team for three and a half years test team but in the final you
#
lose out i think that was finally determined by really one game yeah yeah no i'm just saying so
#
it's a sense of loss in terms of having in you know having a cup in your again if you look at
#
the number of matches that india has won is far greater than all the other teams you know you
#
know you mentioned a kind of fast bowlers and i'm reminded of an interesting incident that happened
#
where the night before a test match began you know there were two debutant fast bowlers in that test
#
and they were both muslims and i was chatting at a party along with a couple of other journalists
#
with the then chairman of selectors i won't name him now great cricketer in his own right before
#
he's an old man now i don't want to get him into controversy but he was kind of tipsy and he said
#
that you know why these why i picked these two kids and we said sir why and he said you know
#
because if you think about fast bowling they eat meat and two muslims he said you look at the
#
patans why does pakistan have so many good fast bowlers yeah so that whole martial theory you
#
know martial as in m-a-r-t-i-a-l that whole martial race theory which which actually for a long time
#
dictated the composition of the pakistan army i don't know if it still does but the indian army
#
stopped the practice of you know building units according to which race you're from and that
#
that old fallacious notion that certain people can fight other people can't fight you know and
#
that's obviously complete bunkham that brings the importance of the ip l here because it was a
#
conventional notion that indians can't do fast bowling you know and and yet here we are today
#
where some of the best fast bowlers in the world are very much from india and i think one of my
#
pieces in in in your book also is about this and i remember even at the time before the ip l started
#
you know i wrote a piece about how it would sort of revolutionize indian cricket because there
#
were so many naysayers that commercialization and tamasha and all of that and it has exceeded
#
even my expectations in this sense that one before that cricket was a monopsony you had one buyer for
#
your services that was a bcci here even if it's within an artificial environment you've broken
#
the monopsony you have a you know a number of different buyers who are competing for the best
#
talent who are incentivized to invest in scouting and training and all of those things and the
#
incentives for young cricketers no longer are that let me go abroad to college because who knows
#
whether i'll be the next Sachin Tendulkar here you know so many people succeed so many different
#
role models and it's completely transformed the game even in terms of skills like earlier you
#
mentioned that you know Virat Kohli's fitness and i admire that greatly like if there is one thing
#
that you know that where Virat Kohli is unparalleled is in his work ethic yes remember
#
i remember seeing him when he was 19 years old and i thought he doesn't have it he's you know
#
predominantly offside game and square of the wicket and all of that and it just didn't seem
#
to have it and to transform himself into what is unquestionably the the world's best batsman for
#
a period of time and the best odi player ever is i think just mind-blowing but i think that
#
the fitness standards of the indian team are not because of that one guy it's because of the
#
incentives of the ip l where every run matters so much more and you see these crazy catches
#
which would be outliers you know you occasionally see a jaunty rhodes pull it off but now so i mean
#
the big shift has been that indian cricketers have become athletes they are athletic you know
#
earlier they were never athletes i mean a bowler a spin bowler not a fast bowler in india would be
#
a great fielder of his own bowling but not otherwise you know and so i think that
#
we used to always marvel i mean when i i my first match i remember brian booth 1964 which i watched
#
live brian booth you know his throws from the deep i mean we would if the throw came straight to the
#
wicket keeper the entire stadium would applaud and if an indian player threw it my god there would be
#
like unstinted applause because you know the arms were weak the speed was not as good tiger pataudi
#
tiger pataudi was called tiger because he was so fleet-footed so any those were exceptions now
#
today if you don't the the the poor fielder is the exception not the good fielder the standards have
#
gone up so high the poor fielder is not even the exception because you'll never see him he won't be
#
in the team yeah exactly and especially in white ball cricket so there's no chance there's no chance
#
so i think that has been a big shift that and it's all come down to reaching a certain value
#
proposition for yourself if you're a terrific batsman and you're a poor fielder you may still
#
not get a value which you feel you deserve or actually which you should you should get i'm
#
talking of a value for an ip l team or you know one of those if you're a terrific fast bowler but
#
you can't feel you're letting the ball go through between your legs and can't bend down you might
#
not be selected you know you might be skillful but you might not be selected and if you are selected
#
you might still not get optimum value for what you are what you could have got otherwise so that has
#
also started you know kind of playing on the minds of people and let's also factor in one thing which
#
has not yet happened it could happen in the future the indian cricket establishment does not allow
#
its cricketers to play overseas in other leagues while it invites all other cricketers right there's
#
a ban especially for those who are eligible i mean you can have a retired cricketer going in
#
playing some t10 or something that's fine but if they somebody goes and appeals that restraint of
#
trade it could happen that they'll be allowed then you'll find that more cricketers are in demand
#
you know and they can go and play here there anywhere those who don't get into the ip l teams
#
and are not part of the indian team what do they do for those two three months they might want
#
livelihood so that is still not being permitted so that could change in the future so more demand
#
will be there for you know more cricketers so i mean it might affect international cricket and
#
the itinerary of how cricket is played that's a different matter but i'm just saying that the whole
#
shift has happened because there are more opportunities careers could be short-lived
#
you know there'll be more dead bodies on the floor because other younger players have come in and
#
they've replaced those who are not delivering or they could be longer lived because people
#
who are there are just much fitter than an earlier generation was so that yeah but i'm saying that
#
you will need to keep performing all the time you know yeah you know in the you could get a two
#
year period where a guy is not doing well and say no no he has a lot of class that is may not happen
#
now you know it's not easy to happen now there'll be questions asked immediately because somebody
#
else is coming making a flurry of runs or taking wickets and you say hey you know and it's become
#
competitive people are more results driven there are more results happening in matches matches are
#
producing more even test matches 75 77 percent results i believe that the standard of cricket
#
overall not just t20 has just gone up over the last 15 years and i think t20 is the reason because
#
contrary to what people said back in the day that oh it'll just be a slog fest bowlers will suffer
#
i think batsmen have had to lift their skills because hey less balls to play with and therefore
#
you can't waste any balls so your attacking skills have gone through the roof and bowlers
#
their skills have gone through the roof because bowlers still decide matches no matter what form
#
of the course that you play and it's not just india's fast bowlers but the development of great
#
spinners and what they bring to the table i think is also off the charts and you you see that in
#
test cricket as well i you know did an episode with gideon here and prem panicker and gideon
#
made a fascinating observation about the odi world cup before the last one where he said that if
#
you watched that odi world cup 2015 world cup where he said if you watched that world cup
#
the good teams they are batting like it's a t20 and bowling like it's a test match absolutely
#
he's it's a fantastic observation is absolutely right so what has happened it's compelled every
#
cricketer now who wants to go reach anywhere or even get into the higher or upper echelons of
#
domestic cricket you have to be far more skillful you have to be far more inventive you have to
#
improvise a lot more i mean we never heard of carrom ball yeah you know spin or cross seam
#
bowling i mean it may have been there but otherwise you look at any coaching manual of the past
#
they would tell the fast bowlers to grip the seam in a certain way which was an upright seam
#
and move your fingers around for in swing or out swing but now fast bowlers are trying everything
#
they are trying a knuckleball also they are bowling at 110 fast bowlers earlier bowl fast
#
you know and gavaskar made a very interesting one he says my days fast bowlers bowl fast
#
very fast or very very fast you know that was the kind of bowling we faced but now
#
even in test cricket with so much protective gear available yes we've had an unfortunate incident
#
of philly who's you know getting hit and losing his life which is very unfortunate but there's
#
one of the reasons you know people like us journalists and experts end up being very
#
critical that batman is playing recklessly but actually what has happened is psychologically
#
with so much protective gear he's willing to take that risk because the threat of getting hit has
#
reduced yeah so earlier he was curbing him himself from a natural shot that he had in his armory
#
to score runs for us apart from the fact that he might lose his wicket but he was prepared to take
#
the risk but what if i miss i'll get hit on the head or the body or something and i might lose out
#
on the next match and that prevented or stopped them from taking the risk today those risks are
#
being taken by almost every team except in dire situation dire crisis when you have to bat out
#
periods of play in a test match or save a test match that's when and therefore the commentary
#
is always he's playing real cricket or old-fashioned cricket and all which is such humbug
#
you know which is humbug because you do whatever is a there has a maximum expected value in a
#
situation that sometimes you know i remembered a test match where abd villiers and i think faf
#
duplessis just you know played at this or hashim amla i think for a while batted at this extremely
#
slow strike rate of 20 because they needed to save a match and you will have similar situations
#
where batsmen are just going for it not because they are reckless but because the expected value
#
of aggression is so much more and everything is you know the situation in that sense and look at
#
what's happened i mean the australians brought about a shift there the west indians in many
#
ways the great west indies team there was a bit of a negative way in which they played not the
#
way they played but the fast bowlers they would bowl 65 70 overs in a day because you know then
#
they had to bring in the 90 over thing the australians when they became a great team post
#
border and border they started scoring at 33 40 350 runs a day you set up the match on on day one
#
you know if you're batting first you got adam gilchrist coming at number six or seven who puts
#
you the next day into a position from which you can't lose so they kept winning match after match
#
and series after series and just change the you know the the way test cricket would be played and
#
became so much more enjoyable now a lot of teams i mean if you score at less than 2.8 or 2.7 5
#
you're actually not playing well you might end up losing the match yeah the more balls you face the
#
more likely it is that you're going to lose your wicket at some point so very difficult like it
#
can happen in england or you know suddenly you have to have a collapse so then you have to see
#
out a session that's different but by and large the thinking today is that at least three runs
#
in over you know 90 overs 275 280 300 in a day is what is needed for me to set up the match
#
in an attempt to win it what's also happened is that the orthodoxy is being redefined like i
#
remember watching the under 19 world cup two world cups ago when india lost in the final to
#
west indies i think it must have been 2017 when rishabh panth was in the side opening with ishan
#
kishan and armaan jaafar sarfaraz khan all those guys were there and i remember watching armaan
#
jaafar play these beautiful innings where it struck me that he was playing incredibly unorthodox
#
strokes like reverse sweeps or whatever and making them look like they're out of the textbook like
#
it was so natural and reflexive to him he's not trying something special it's part of his
#
armory baked into his reflexes because he's practiced it from when he was 12 and not
#
you know learnt it as an adult to play for a particular situation coaching methods have also
#
changed i mean a gavaskar by his coach would have been told never to hit the ball in the air
#
today's coaches if they tell a youngster don't hit the ball in the air he'll change the coach
#
because he's watching ip l and odi's and saying if i don't hit the ball in the air where will i score
#
runs from you know so you have to learn to improvise and make that adjustment within your
#
own game you know and it's become mandatory you cannot not do it that's become the big change
#
yeah i mean if you hit only in the v that they'll put fielders in the v and then you're done you're
#
finished you're gone you're gone so you mentioned an interesting thing a while ago which you know
#
gives me a segue to my next question where you spoke about how if indians are allowed to play
#
overseas leagues they'll have more leagues and that might affect international cricket
#
and there's a part of me which is thinking that maybe that's a good thing and the reason i say
#
that is that when cricket is between nations it's bound up with a lot of tribalism it can often
#
seem like what our will called war minus shooting and and i understand that tribalism to a certain
#
extent is you know baked into every sport you have your team and even if it's a club you know
#
you could form a tribe around it though i haven't really seen hardcore mumbai indian tribes or
#
whatever you will support a team but it won't be a matter of life and death you won't kill someone
#
for it while at the level of countries is different and i'm wondering how you see that evolving over
#
a period of time because i think it's a healthy shift all these international cricketers playing
#
together at least those older tribes not mattering so much and you know when you look at the journey
#
of indian cricket you know we used to have the quadrangular and the pentangular which was played
#
on a basis of hindus versus muslims versus europeans versus whatever which was actually
#
explicitly tribal and parsis also parsis also and mahatma gandhi hated cricket for this reason
#
apparently it's a good reason but it's also a great sport and so how have you sort of seen this
#
changing over all these years in the sense that i would imagine that cricketers except those
#
handful of elites who were lucky enough to say play county cricket in england or whatever
#
would be living in an insular world where they are meeting only their own types only their own
#
tribes like when you when you watch the ugliness of some india pakistan matches of the past
#
especially when the media builds it up and the media is only building it up because they think
#
there's an audience for it and plays is that a disturbing aspect of sport that is always
#
an undercurrent when sport is being played and are we living in times where maybe it doesn't
#
matter so much maybe that's another really bright aspect of franchise cricket that we can see you
#
know an australian an indian an englishman and hopefully one day inshallah pakistanis as well
#
in the same dressing room being a team together yeah so i mean it's a complex you know question
#
and situation and there are myriad possibilities for instance india pakistan it's a very unusual
#
and offbeat coexistence as two cricketing nations so we've had a series in the 50s or couple of
#
series in the 50s one in india one in pakistan then one more in india in 62 61 62 and then nothing for
#
17 years till 78 because you had two wars 65 and 71 being fought and then cricket is seen as a
#
let's bring the countries together closer and interestingly it's by not by the congress or
#
whatever it's the at that point in time the janta government you know which has atal bihari vajpayee
#
who's the foreign minister who initiates this and then we have kargil i mean then we have 87
#
where there's eyeball to eyeball confrontation on the border and then we've got zia ul haq coming
#
to india and you know tensions getting deflated and the test series brings things to normal and
#
then it goes bad again kargil and then again it's a bjp bjp led government nda government with
#
vajpayee as the prime minister and lk alwani is the home minister which allows the indian team
#
where you went to pakistan in 2004 and five maybe even later i went in 2006 one after yeah yeah but
#
in 2004 and five when great tour it was a great tour and you know it didn't seem possible but it
#
happened and then after that we've had no you know 2006 of 2006 we've had no tour of pakistan
#
so it's been like hot and cold so it it you know the tribalism in this whole and then the role of
#
the media and the way passions are stoked and reach boiling point is always a threat you know
#
and it's not something which is easily palatable at least to me or digestible because i think
#
you know maybe a romantic notion but there should be a slightly more loftier
#
reason to play sport not one-upmanship of this kind but so it works and sometimes it doesn't work
#
i am a proponent that sport should be allowed you know between the two countries to try and reach
#
a rapprochement or a level of interaction which is very important especially when your neighbors
#
so when body line happens and england and australia almost come to war in a sense that is
#
more symbolic war than real war because they're separated by you know several continents
#
though the rivalry has become now you know part of such great tradition and legacy that it's played
#
very intensely but it's never a warlike situation like there is between india and pakistan whether
#
bilateral matches themselves bilateral cricket is losing currency it's a bit of a yes and no
#
so what has happened certainly in cricket and especially test cricket is that frankly there
#
are only three countries that play test cricket to an audience which makes it worthwhile which is
#
india england and australia and these are the three countries that's why the big three and there was
#
this you know conflict within the icc because the audiences in the other countries have changed
#
dramatically pakistan has been very iffy ever since the terror attack on the srilankans 2009
#
i don't even know if they've got a very committed audience for test cricket so too in the west indies
#
so too in new zealand so ultimately if test cricket is surviving today it's because of these
#
three countries and is that too many or too few to sustain the sport you know the money is huge
#
because india is a huge country the number of eyeballs is still phenomenal between india australia
#
and england but the footprint of the game is not expanding where the longest format is concerned
#
and therefore t20 seems like the more viable option including getting into the olympics
#
which has been a long-stated desire of many players though of course the icc and bcci also
#
didn't want you know they lose control at least for a mega tournament and then it affects in many
#
ways you know so i mean this whole thing about the bcci i personally feel that bcci given its
#
current position should be in the vanguard of protecting and promoting cricket in all its
#
formats but they're never the leaders you know so 2007 for instance when t20 world cup was
#
being mooted or 2005-06 and it happened in 2007 in india was the last country to agree to play and
#
therefore you found that the big players didn't go as it happened the only led his team to victory
#
and rewrote you know the future of cricket was rewritten after that because we won the t20 world
#
cup and then the ip l happened and then whatever but india bcci did not want to play that they
#
reluctantly agreed so i was at a i moderated a session once in 2010 just a year before
#
tiger pataudi passed away where he was it was called the raj singh lungarpur memorial lecture
#
raj singh had passed away by then so he ends with this thought and he had been part of the
#
ip l governing council former india captain he says bcci the the problem is that the icc is
#
the voice of cricket or needs to be the voice of cricket bcci is happy being the invoice of cricket
#
you know and it it was a very very pungent very telling comment so i think bcci now that it's got
#
you know is money is not the issue you got the hottest property the ip l you know you got a
#
committed following and runs into millions and millions of people how do you take the sport to
#
the next level is really the challenge and i'm not seeing any great vision that is emerging i have
#
great apprehensions about the bcci's current leadership but all said and done i think in the
#
last decade barring one area they've done a pretty good job that one area is of course one would have
#
liked them to promote women's cricket much more strongly because i think there's great
#
potential for building an audience there uh you know bcc has done wonderfully for itself
#
yeah you know for indian cricket has been fantastic the last decade and more maybe two decades yeah
#
you know they've done apart from the shenanigans within the bcci you know within the board itself
#
that apart but for the sport they've done a lot old cricketers have been rewarded huge amounts
#
of money given as bonuses or ex-gratia payment you know for illness ailment money for players current
#
including right up to junior level they're getting a lot of money to support themselves
#
and also the pipeline junior india a that's one reason along with the ip l why it's so deep
#
india a tours have been fantastic you know and they've got some the right people i mean rahul
#
david heading national cricket academy india a coach under 19 coach you can't ask for a better
#
deal better situation you know so i think in many ways they've done that but i'm saying for the
#
vision of the sport they could do more right so you know we've spent a lot of time but there's
#
no way i'm ending this episode without talking about many of the colorful characters of indian
#
cricket you know many of whom have chapters in your book dedicated to them written by some really
#
fine writers i want to talk about one specific question which is about how a player can sometimes
#
in a different way seem to become almost a template like if we start with vijay merchant for example
#
right the whole bombay school of batting is from there that whole kharoos attitude that kind of
#
comes from there and he first becomes an icon and then becomes a template and then you know
#
you kind of wonder that sometimes does chasing an ideal become a constraint in itself that you only
#
bat that way and one kind of understands why that kharoos kind of batting comes about and leads to
#
you know gavaskar and then in a more refined form tendulkar because right up to gavaskar you're
#
playing to the imperatives of the time where the team is pretty much bound to lose where your job
#
is not to go out there and be super aggressive but just hang in there as long as you can and save some
#
face and all of that and it's also possible to then look at a number of individuals like a merchant
#
and a gavaskar and say that and build a narrative which is not necessarily true you know i mean sandeep
#
patil is also from bombay and not at all in in that mold so what are your kind of thoughts on it
#
like i think some of this could be laziness on the part of cricket writers that we look at say
#
a hyderabadi risti batsman and talk about the lazy elegance and compare azaruddin to jay simha and
#
you know that kind of thing is is it dangerous to sort of think like that or did merchant really
#
have that kind of a incredible impact that shaped an entire sort of school of batting as it's often
#
called i think it happens you know i mean there can be players who can shape a whole school
#
you know so the more risti kind of batting skills come from the south more because people talk about
#
it and if imagine if you're a youngster if you're an azaruddin who's growing up watching watching
#
wishy or watching jay sima or abbas haldi beg of one of these you know and the coaches are telling you
#
you know so that stays in your mind and then you say okay how is you know how does jay sima play or
#
you know abbas play or wishy play so you learn the more risti kind of stroke play that is the
#
hallmark of people from your laxman now in in mumbai's case you know the first original
#
hero iconic figure of indian cricket is colonel ck naidu and then muhammad nisar and amar singh
#
these are the fast bowlers not too many batsmen you talk about then lala mannath comes and makes
#
a hundred from the north but in 1946 when india go to england and you know merchants cause more
#
than 2000 runs in a wet english summer and he's hailed as somebody who's got the technique which
#
is what english cricket thrived on you know and the the mastery of english conditions was paramount
#
where the english writers were concerned or english cricket thought leaders and remember a lot of
#
literature that we got in our early years was from england england has been profuse in cricket
#
writing not so much australia certainly not the west indies not pakistan perhaps india now in the
#
last 20 25 30 years so what the english people thought became a paragon of virtue cricketing
#
virtue and then he was immensely successful in mumbai he had the advantages of having his own
#
personal coach because he was a well-to-do man he was from a business family and etc etc but he
#
became a role model for the way he played i remember once speaking to i met mitchell merchant a couple
#
of times in his second innings as he used to call it when he was with the associate with the blind
#
madhav manthri was a great admirer of vijay merchant i asked him once i said what do you like about
#
vijay merchant he says everything his judgment of length line how to leave the ball how to minimize
#
risk and therefore by implication optimize opportunities if there was no risk and he was
#
he would go gaga over his late cut he said nobody played that late cut like that now imagine madhav
#
manthri is sunil gavaskar's uncle yeah mama's brother and when young gavaskar is growing up
#
his ears must have been filled with stories about vijay merchant and what batting meant by his mama
#
and this is what he did this is what he did in england this is how you should bat this is what
#
happens in mumbai it rains so much kanga league when you play these are the pitches you can't take
#
these risks you can take that so gavaskar is already growing into that school and when he
#
growing into that school and when gavaskar is going into that school all the people from chikalwadi
#
and dadar and wherever else a young vengsarkar is growing up he's also learning about from vasu
#
paranchpe or whatever you know all that is fine don't throw a bat look at how gavaskar bats look
#
at how merchant used to bat so the culture develops of course there are people like sandeep patil
#
but sandeep patil's father himself was a you know he used to hit over the treetop he was that big
#
big hitter so in his house he emulated his father but the wider cultural thing was that mumbai
#
opportunities to bat are few therefore very strong on batsmanship not so much on bowling
#
mumbai cricket you waste that opportunity you take the long journey home by train carrying
#
your kit bag and your next match your next you know your coach might not even send you to bat
#
if you batted number three or four and you've thrown your wicket away next match you may be
#
eight or nine so all of these kind of you know crystallize into a certain cultural template
#
but of course it's not so rigid as to only this works and not that when you see a rohit sharma
#
bat today he's got fantastic technique you know he's a typical true blue mumbiker as one understands
#
from the stereotype but he's also new age modern cricketer who can you know who will bat like a
#
viv richards the way he bats in white ball cricket or even in test cricket you know he'll he's got
#
the big shots he's got the temerity to take on spinners fast bowlers tendulkar of course was
#
the one who straddled both white ball cricket and test test red ball cricket like none before him
#
or perhaps even after him so there has been a tradition which develops over a period of time
#
and then of course more embellishments are added to the tradition and changes are made as the ethos
#
changes and the sport changes yeah i mean it's fascinating you mentioned about how you know if
#
a kid goes out there he's got one chance he may not get another chance if he wastes this one so
#
what is your incentive your incentive is to minimize risk so one can you know the whole
#
school of thought can just evolve from the incentives as well as the role models that you
#
have and i think you mentioned somewhere that sandeep patil in his house had an actual aeroplane
#
yeah on his terrace and he it served as a bar see sandeep was a flamboyant you know flamboyant
#
personality even now he's a lovely guy to meet he was the first cricketer i interviewed in 1980
#
he was selected for the tour of australia for the magazine sports week magazine so you know and i
#
went and spent time with him he showed me the plane and the plane was a bar you know and he was
#
24 or something i said wow what a guy i mean we are almost of the same age i may be a few months
#
older than him but and you know he was it was very fascinating and then he went and got a smashing
#
100 adelaide after being hit on the head so he became an even more colorful character he could
#
hold his place on the team he had fitness issues you know it in those days you could have an have
#
a throwing arm which didn't work and still be in the team as he would he would tell you himself
#
now honestly that he's saying otherwise i wouldn't be in the team but yeah so all kinds of people were
#
who make up a team as we know what's interesting to me and from an indian point of view is that
#
the indian cricket team or the dressing room is a microcosm of indian life
#
so there is a bombay school of thought in the team there is a south india thing more and more
#
north india than just delhi you know and tiger pataudi mentions this and this is something
#
which is reflected about the 60s or when he took over in tiger's tale he says the biggest
#
challenge i had was these guys were all speaking in their own different languages
#
you know and and this happened for a long time because even even up to the 80s and the 90s
#
you know like first of all you had a zonal selection board so there were these quotas
#
and how absurd it seems now how absurd it seems now and and then you had i mean the classic
#
illustration of this of course is kapil and gavaskar the rivalry between them though the
#
interesting thing is that they also had great regard for each other like in fact you know
#
dicky ratnagar writes in your book on the piece on kapil that in that melbourne test in 1981 when
#
kapil took five for 28 and we won by 59 runs when he was asked about what motivated him incidentally
#
a match in which gavaskar almost cost us the match by staging a walkout yeah yeah when you know when
#
lily abused him yeah and he almost forced of course he regrets that action now but then kapil
#
live came and yeah and kapil said quote i have to do it for sunil stop quote yeah and there's another
#
incident where at tunbridge wells during that 175 you know when the innings is done sunny meets
#
him halfway with a glass of water yes because he doesn't want him to wait to drink his water so
#
there are these beautiful touching moments but it was a very strong is what i remember mutual
#
admiration society i know i got to know both of them quite well so in fact also became the editor
#
of sports week magazine after he had quit so i worked and he would come with his handwritten
#
editorial to start with and submit it and you know he would come maybe once or twice a week but
#
always a little moody but always full of great thoughts if you could kind of incite him into
#
talking about whatever you know couple always warm you know not very expressive in in in the sense that
#
you want to elicit something from him you know the power of expression was obviously greater
#
with with sunil but couple was in his own way he would communicate the funny thing about couple as
#
you know which you know shastri writes and he tells me also that you asked him any question
#
even in hindi in a press conference he would insist on talking in english all his replies would be only
#
in english there's a lovely anecdote in your book where i think in 78 79 when he's uh you know
#
waiting for the team to pakistan to be announced and he's being interviewed by durdarshan uh by
#
raj singh dungarpur on the cci lawns and dungarpur asked him congratulations couple you must be
#
looking forward to your first tour and couple says no and raj singh says what you aren't looking
#
forward to the tour and couple says no i don't want to look forward he was captain in 1985 86
#
to australia there was a press conference at uh i think ambassador hotel on the terrace before
#
the team's departure so couple what do you want to you know what do you think about the tour he
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says i want to come back victorian yeah very spontaneous great fun you know which is completely
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the wrong description for him because he was anything but victorian there's so many fascinating
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characters in indian cricket just reading your book again reminded me of that like you know the
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previous histories i've read like nihir bose's history and uh guha's history just it's just so
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filled with these colorful people we know manka and you've reproduced rajan bala's profile of him
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another person who is number one not talked about in the way that he would today like whenever i
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make my all-time indian 11 i always have we know mankad at number six because you know great left
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arm bowler great batsman and i remember as a young journalist i looked up the stats as young
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journalists tend to do and i looked at we know mankad stats and pauli umbriger's stat his
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contemporary all-rounder and if you just look at the stats you think that oh umbriger is far ahead
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but then you go a little deeper and you realize that mankad missed the best years of his career
#
because of the war yes uh that you know if you look at the context of his victories that india's
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first five test victories had a big role played in them by we know mankad if you look at how good
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he was against fast bowling while of pauli umbriger there are you know contrary stories
#
told and you kind of realize that so it's very interesting that when you speak about the history
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of indian cricket you're actually in a sense dividing it in two parts one part is that part
#
which people haven't seen on television people do we are relying on stories we are relying on
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contexts only so much you can make out from the scorecards for example so these people aren't
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almost real people they're like mythological figures absolutely amit and i had uh you know i
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mean one of my regrets is that i didn't get enough material of the 50s you know from 47 onwards i
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didn't want to go beyond or pre-47 i wanted this to be a journey from 1947 and the decade of the
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50s till vinu bhai mankad retires look at his achievements he's got 100 against don batman's
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team which went on to become the invincibles in that series the matches were lost but he made
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100 he's taken wickets in against that great australian team he is the architect of india's
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first ever test victory against england at madras he is the architect of india's first victory over
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pakistan which is a great emotional high as you know i mean there are only two test matches in
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the history of cricket named after the player one is mankat's test of 1952 lords the other is
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botham's test of headingley of 1981 he has got a first a first wicket partnership with pankaj
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roy which stood for like decades and decades from 1955 till maybe early 2000 you know and the
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influence he had on players and team he was captain he was not captain he was a bit of a rebel
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you know he had a mind of his own he had a sharp tongue as one gathers uh i spoke to the late
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ashok mankad his son you know he ashok used to always refer to him as vinu bhai he wouldn't say
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my father or my dad and this that he would say vinu bhai and he said there was nothing that vinu
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bhai didn't know about cricket he knew everything he says the greatest quality in him was he would
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read batsman's mind that's a way of putting it but he was one jump ahead what we when we watch
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a shane one or an r ashwin bold today exactly is exactly that you know they're plotting and
#
planning one delivery to another something is brewing in their minds and then they yes they
#
will get hit you know something will happen but the effort always to get the better it's an ego
#
battle with the batsman and then the role is reversed when he's batting i mean apart from
#
the great kapil dev and again the stats and all that but i i can't see how vinu mankad who my to
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my in my opinion was an even greater personality in the fort from 47 period till say 60 then even
#
vijay merchant for his deeds and his achievements you know how he cannot be part of an indian great
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indian all-time 11 i'm going to end the episode later on when we end the episode by asking you
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to name your indian all-time 11 and i'll share mine as well but before that let's continue talking
#
about these great players very quickly and i'll link them all to a question and i have a question
#
here about the spin quartet and you have some excellent writing in your book about the quartet
#
and my question is this that when we look at the past we are essentially cherry picking moments and
#
memories correct and it is likely that we will remember the highlights yeah while when we look
#
at the present we don't cherry pick the highlights we know the whole thing watts and all right
#
and that brings a danger that we can sometimes romanticize the past yes and we can romanticize
#
the quartet like much as they are of course legends and i love reading about them and
#
all of that it also seems to me that like in my all-time indian 11 there's no one from the
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quartet because you know vinu bhai is there so you don't need bedi and i'm picking ashwin as my
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off spinner and that's just what it is and you know if i had to have a leg spinner i'd
#
uh you know pick kumle yeah so is that also a danger then of looking at the past which also
#
might do injustice to the people themselves because then if you ignore their warts you are
#
actually doing an injustice to them because you're looking at them almost as mythical figures
#
and not acknowledging the other material human challenges that they faced and they overcame like
#
you know prasanna in those overseas tours of new zealand and australia and the way he bowled and
#
all of that incredible achievement but you know what's what's your take on this so i think yes
#
there is the pitfall i mean you can look at them with you know those tinted glasses and say everything
#
about them was great perhaps not you know i mean you got kumle and you've got ashwin and you got
#
harbhajan who's got 400 plus wickets they've been some stellar performers how do you how would they
#
compare i think obviously there's a romanticization of their performances uh there's also you know
#
distance and nostalgia makes everything look warmer and there's a glow about it but having said that
#
i think one has to look at it you know on on harder or sharper scrutiny you'll find that there
#
are great virtues for instance prasanna's performances in the 60s overseas in australia
#
in 67 in new zealand they were fantastic he picked up so many wickets bishan singh bedhi
#
and look at their domestic performances chandra shekhar winning a match on his own at the oval
#
in 1971 a seminal moment as we know almost unplayable on his day on indian pitches certainly
#
but look at what his handicap was how he came i think also when they worked in venkat ragman
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perhaps the most underrated most unsung came back at the age of 38 and also bowled he just
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suffered in comparison because prasanna was around and i think prasanna was favored by pataudi
#
uh and you know as the perhaps he thought he was the better bowler don't forget prasanna also
#
missed out five years he made his debut in 62 and then came back again in 66 67 because he was
#
studying he was becoming an engineer incidentally the literacy levels of the indian cricket team
#
used to be very high till 20 so many engineers so many engineers graduates were almost everybody
#
now i think apart from ashwin they might it'll be very difficult to find another graduate
#
but that's also the way the game has changed you know with so many people getting in at 18 19
#
nevertheless so bedhi prasanna and chandra shekhar and venkat ragwan they came at a certain time
#
when india was really struggling to win matches and especially with even look at the background
#
vinu mankar had retired jassu patel had retired gulam ahmed had retired they were
#
they were very big bowlers in the 1950s the big loss was subhash gupta who should have been
#
on the 1961 62 to west indies he wasn't because you know he and kripal sing that phone call incident
#
phone call incident with some girl and you know the selectors took umbrage at it you know some
#
their hotel room and those were the ways in which selections were done so he quit in a half he went
#
and you know settled down in the in the west so there was there was a void of match-winning
#
spinners yes there was bapu nadkarni and chandu borde and salim durani who was in and out of the
#
team but when these guys came together and pataudi in a sense masterminded okay let's get an all-spin
#
attack and you know he'll open the bowling or a gavaskar or somebody else will come and bowl one
#
or two overs roll the ball along the ground you've not seen those matches i've been as a youngster
#
you know and they would after the every ball the fielders would roll the ball back to the
#
bowler to get the shine off yeah you wanted the spinners you want the spinners off in the
#
on in the third or fourth oh and then there would be this roar across the stadium if betty got the
#
ball or chandra and you know when they ran into bowl there would be this bowl that sound would
#
come in 30 000 people screaming so that created a certain aura which is magnificent and then
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then they charmed everybody wherever they went because these kind of spinners were not seen in
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england or australia with so much success of course they also had their great spinners
#
you know underwood and ashley mallet and but not so many numbers so many of different types
#
so it just added to the whole romance but i think that they were they were 800 plus wickets between
#
them you know and i think with better feeling we all talk about the great fielding setup which was
#
also there vadekar solkar abid ali venkat ragwan himself but they all came i mean fielding standards
#
when you look at their averages you'll find that they are 29 30 31 if the outfielding was as good
#
as it is today it would have been better some of the lofted shots which should have been taken
#
would have been caught so i think that there's a lot of merit you know ultimately you can't compare
#
players from one generation to another that is always the danger so it's not to say that
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harbhajan is not a good bowler or ashwin is not a fantastic bowler and kumle of course has got his
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own you know monumental stature or status in the game i think that they provided that richness of
#
talent and skill which made india synonymous with great spin in the you know not that there
#
were no spinners earlier there was vinu mankar there was jasu there was gulam ahmed there was
#
subash gupte 50s and 60s 65 onwards or 66 onwards is when this this quartet comes into play and for
#
about 10 12 years they hold sway and and you know if people give credit to clive loit for figuring
#
out that in west india should play to their strengths and bowl with four fastballers equal
#
credit to pataudi a few years before that for figuring out the whole quartet plan and as you
#
said you know the incentives again we had great closing fielders because we had great spinners
#
so much greater demand for closing fielders like solkar and yajubendra singh and all two kind of
#
i think pataudi was very clever and very decisive you know i mean some people would argue that the
#
short leg fielding position was actually devised by him where solkar excelled because before that
#
you don't find short legs you find backward short leg oh fascinating you know not so much as forward
#
short leg so here's here's a question about pataudi that i think in some ways if you again
#
just look at the bare biographical details it's easy to be unfair to pataudi because what do you
#
see you like you have a great chapter in your book called merchant bags as tiger by mihir bose where
#
he talks about how vijay merchant as head of selectors you know got pataudi kicked off from
#
the captaincy and one speculation is it is because iftikar ali pataudi but you know mansoor's father
#
had you know treated merchant badly at one point in time but regardless he loses the captaincy it
#
goes to vadikar and vadikar promptly wins in 71 in west indies and england seminal epochal all of
#
that and suddenly in your mind's eye vadikar is a great captain and pataudi kaun hai but actually
#
pataudi was not just a brilliant captain brilliant batsman brilliant thinker of the game i know you
#
admire him a lot so so tell me a little bit about him pataudi i admired from the time i got to know
#
about cricket i mean you know your favorites keep changing my first favorites were rohan kannai gath
#
mckenzie graham mckenzie and then suddenly became very quickly swiftly jay sima and pataudi and i
#
had this great desire to meet him he used to be living in bombay in those days maybe early 70s
#
you know he used to be always at the bombay gym you know playing snooker or playing he was a
#
multi-talented sports person and i knew somebody who was working there some distant relative of
#
mine i said i must somehow i have to meet pataudi he says he comes every afternoon for a tipple for
#
a drink or a beer glass of beer and then he you know whatever he has lunch and go i said you have
#
to get me in he said but you're not allowed you know under 18 you're not allowed i was not 18
#
so i said listen what i'll do is i'll make a false side lock side burn and i was i had a my mustache
#
had sprouted i said i'll duck in it you have to smuggle me in i'll look 18 plus so he smuggled me
#
in the bombay gym and i had a scrap of paper with a little pen pen and i went up to him he was sitting
#
with his peak you know this cap he used to wear at a slant and he was smoking a cigarette and not
#
looking at me and i said sir autograph and he looked at me and he signed that piece of paper
#
and went back to whatever he was doing and i didn't have to wait long because i was worried
#
i'll get caught so i grabbed that and i ran away when i met him much later as a professional and i
#
talked to him about this he had no memory of it at all obviously obviously but i asked him i said
#
you know those were i think the days when he had lost his captaincy so i asked him i said you know
#
what what were you doing he says no i mean you know i was trying to get into politics he had
#
misadventures of getting into politics and this that and he said but i you know i always wanted
#
to play i didn't want to tour so i didn't go to england in 74 i didn't go to the west indies i
#
think he was obviously miffed that his captaincy was taken away but he came back and captain india
#
and that fantastic series against west indies which we lost three two but it just breathed
#
life into it with his captaincy and the bullying of these or this this quartet and i kept you know
#
asking him that what was it about you and merchant that somehow didn't work out why did he
#
he's saying some things are best forgotten you know i have moved on that's it so tiger
#
pataudi was very enigmatic i met him many times in delhi been to his house at one point in time
#
i was planning to do a book along with him and rahul raaved and raj singh dungarpur on the
#
history of indian cricket in each one of them doing different eras you know and he was very
#
excited it didn't happen and you know as i mentioned that last the meeting i had was
#
at that raj singh dungarpur he had this great sense of humor you know where he said icc is like
#
the voice of cricket and bcc is the invoice of cricket he had these smart one-liners very sharp
#
in his observation very great role sense of humor not very elaborate you know you sometimes think
#
he's not saying anything but it carried a lot of weight so he was that kind of a personality
#
and when you look at it from a player's point of view imagine a guy playing with one eye it's insane
#
collin milburn had a car accident lost an eye he was an england batsman he came back and he
#
couldn't last one test match you know and he gave up so for him to play with one eye i mean
#
there have been people azim hafiz used to be a pakistani bowler with two fingers less in one hand
#
and he bowled but sight is a problem bs chandra shekhar polio affected hand you know but sight is
#
everything in for a batsman for a batsman and to to survive his batting average when you talked
#
of the figures not being flattering he made six centuries test centuries and the batting average
#
was about 40 except for his last two three years and his last years can be misleading like even
#
with gundappa vishwanath uh you know people used to say oh his average is in 50 so i remember when
#
i was in crick and foe i actually tracked his career record and it was above 50 for most of
#
me and gavaskar were neck and neck they were neck and neck for the five seven eight years of their
#
life you know till right at the end he had a bad patch and it fell away so you know but that also
#
is in a sense gavaskar's greatness you know to keep the ambition alive and the grind and the you
#
know i must i mean relentless and also as we discussed to quit at his peak and to quit at
#
his peak with that 96 yes you know i mean gavaskar is a phenomenon he's a phenomenon i mean you know
#
he's not a drudge batsman you know a lot of people mistake that you know he was a
#
egg and pakar ke you know he would do just keep accumulating runs that was not he was a
#
terrific stroke player he had all the strokes in the arm he was you know virtuosity batting
#
virtuosity personified technical virtuosity i often think that when we think of cricketers know we
#
put them in these slots and we think of them as just that for example when people talk about
#
tendulkar and dravid you know for them tendulkar is a great natural talent and dravid is a great
#
technique and i am like the opposite is also true tendulkar's technique is incredible and dravid is
#
so talented yes and to you know to pigeonhole them like that so sometimes they have to adjust
#
within their own what are you doing in this what's your role in this team you know so that's
#
something that you have to i mean look at gavaskar's series against west indies in 1983
#
there are shades of every everything in that series that 2900 very attacked the west indies
#
121 against west india delhi yeah then he makes 236 which is completely different completely different
#
zero for two he walks out to bat at number four he's not opening the innings and even there
#
apparently it was politics because i think kirmani was uh not out on 60 something and he hoped to
#
get his 100 and people thought gavaskar can go on to a triple hundred but if i remember correctly
#
kapil who was captain declared because there was some point system for man of the series
#
and he was ahead and i think he didn't want some marshal or somebody somebody in the west indies
#
team to go ahead of him oh okay now i can't remember that no yeah yeah no okay it's a vague
#
memory yeah no no i can't remember that but 236 i do remember zero for two yeah and you know and
#
uh you know he used to he had a room in konimara though he was not captain he had a room to himself
#
and one i went to meet him because he was also writing for midday all right so in those days so
#
the two guys sitting in his room were gundapa vishanath his brother-in-law and dom morez who
#
was writing his biography now if you met both of them you could you know i mean you can imagine
#
the conversation between dom morez used to speak through clenched teeth in you know very accented
#
heavily accented english and gundapa vishanath in his karnataka you know accent and both of them
#
you know talking to each other i sat there for half an hour i couldn't make head or tail of what
#
each was saying to the other but they got along like a house on fire so and gavaskar said let
#
them be he went off to sleep because he was batting the next day is it possible for a young journalist
#
today to have the same kind of career you've had because today you will simply not get access to
#
these that's the problem that's a big problem because the access is become you know the access
#
has now become formalized to the extent that every match you'll have a player come and give
#
address the the media you know that's it the rest of the access is not easy and more so now in today's
#
world where all these players they are superstars have their own social media accounts which give
#
them millions of people as followers and they really i'm talking to my followers here i can
#
see why do i need you unless there's some major explanation that has to be given some controversy
#
or something it's very difficult to get access to players and that i think is a challenge
#
it's a growing challenge for for for you know people in the media and journalism yeah no and
#
as far as social media is concerned like one person i'm really impressed by is ashwin the kind
#
of things he does on youtube and as a creator he's a fascinating character apart from his the way he
#
has grown as a cricketer and become that wicked taking bowler uh you know which at at one point
#
in time it seemed like his he might be you know career might finish prematurely and then he's
#
just become stronger and stronger in his bowling batting little custard about what he wants to do
#
a little prickly as a personality which is also extremely you know fascinating he has a mind of
#
his own and i think he's also realized that you know he can handle a different portfolio using his
#
cricketing clout or his persona and his expertise to be in the media be upfront in facing audience
#
and fellow players and you know i think it's absolutely fantastic no simply tremendous
#
because combination of talent attitude intelligence all of these things which is so rare very rarely
#
do you you know find that kind of confluence maybe draw it as an earlier confluence but what ashwin
#
is also doing is you know there are two interesting kinds of stardom one is where you are larger than
#
life as our film stars and cricketers have tended to be where you're worshipped by people people
#
may actually literally build temples for you and the other kind of stardom which is a more modern
#
kind of connect that people have with their audiences is more intimate yes where they feel
#
that they know you you're talking like them you're sitting with them and i think through his youtube
#
and through his twitter ashwin kind of approximates that and therefore actually you know kind of
#
manages both in a sense which is doing a marvelous job because he is making the effort to go out and
#
reach out to an audience you know i mean they may or not be may not be as fans but he's reaching
#
out to an audience which in a in a different avatar all together which is absolutely fantastic
#
mind-blowing so you know i've taken a lot of your time you've been very generous with me so
#
i'll now ask you for your all-time indian 11 my all-time indian 11 oh that's always a tough call
#
but uh let's let's see test 11 yeah let's go with let's be purists today yeah i think t20
#
it's too early to form judgment because so much is still happening yeah so i would say that
#
gavaskar sehwag certainly uh tendulkar number four
#
um number five i would put koli three number three would be david yeah yeah uh number five number
#
six i would put vinu bhai vinu bhai number seven for me would be kapil dev number eight ms dhoni
#
we are identical so far carry on we're identical so far we are identical uh
#
zaheer khan i would include uh as as another fast bowler it gets tougher with the spinners because
#
even ravin the jadeja has got an very impressive and interesting now coming into his own now coming
#
into his own and also as an all-rounder there's ashwin how many have we got as yet uh we got to
#
nine with zaheer nine was your zaheer right nine is zaheer so ten would be i would go with prasad
#
i would go with prasanna you know i would go with irapali prasanna and 11 would be
#
we've only got zaheer and kapila we have to include one more fast bowler that's a tough one it's uh
#
i'm stuck on this you know whether it should be bumra though it's very early you know between
#
bumra and shrinath is where my needle gets stuck but uh let me see i'll actually go with bumra he's
#
made such a huge impact you know 100 wickets in 24 tests winning matches overseas he's just been
#
but it's a very tough call between him and shrinath so we were the same till number eight
#
and number nine i would i'd pick ashwin over pras and 10 and 11 is is a bit of a problem i'd
#
actually just go on faith and go with bumra as my second choice for fast bowler because i think he's
#
going to end up as uh being considered one of the greats and 11 would either be zaheer if i
#
won three fast bowlers or if the match is in motera or something then i'll just take kumle
#
yeah yeah oh kumle of course kumle yeah yeah yeah i'm sorry so instead of prasanna kumle
#
instead of prasanna kumle yeah how could i forget kumle yeah yeah so you're right i mean the choice
#
between the 11th person will depend on the track where you're playing so therefore the the best way
#
is to have a choice of 12 players so you interchange one so we are both happy that way there's no dilemma
#
you know i mean and see kumle also serves the purpose of he can also bat a bit he's got a test
#
hundred yeah yeah you know ashwin can his echo for multiple hundreds yeah even bumra can
#
you know be useful yes and uh i mean kumle has many roles that he can play including a captain
#
you know so who would your coach be from those who've been coach of the indian team from those
#
who've been coach unfortunately otherwise in an ideal world yeah i mean you could just pick
#
patodi for example yeah again very tough call my choice would you know be between two bombay guys
#
ravi shah sri and ajit vadekar yeah ajit vadekar was a sterling chap to have you know he's one of
#
those guys who really nursed uh sachin tendulkar he was early you know from 90 to 92 93 uh i think
#
he was and also because he was from bombay so there was an affinity with with vadekar but
#
and also a man of grit uh a very genial chap he had his own flavor to him spoke uh spoke
#
uh he was always trying to crack jokes which sometimes bombed but it didn't deter him he said
#
he would crack more jokes to make up for the earlier one and then it would be he would be
#
great fun on a tour or an assignment you know ayaz your one your book is great it contains
#
multitudes as i like to say thank you i say that about people it's just i hope everyone picks it
#
up not just because i'm fortunate enough to be among some very fine names in uh being having a
#
couple of pieces there but it's just a wonderful book made me so nostalgic and made me feel so
#
warm and also i have not even covered half the questions i had for your themes so we'll have
#
to you know save that for another day but thank you so much for your time thanks amit thanks for
#
having me here and i think it's been absolutely wonderful few hours that we spent together thank
#
you cheers thank you if you enjoyed listening to this episode hop on over to your nearest bookstore
#
online or offline and pick up indian innings the journey of indian cricket since 1947
#
edited by ayaz memen you can follow ayaz on twitter at cricket walla that's cricket w a l l a h you can
#
follow me at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen
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at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the
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