Gavaskar&Vishwanath, Tendulkar & Dravid, Who next?

Taking a look at overseas performance of India since1932, two distinct pattern seems to emerge.One between 1971-1982 and one between 1996-2008.During this period while India managed to do well in India, it was competitive abroad winning series in England, West Indies and Pakistan, often for the first time.Both these phases saw India having two very  good batsmen, Gavaskar and Vishwanath in the first phase and Tendulkar and Dravid in the second.There was a decent support cast and good bowlers but the bulwark of two competent world class batsmen kept the team afloat.the decline of the second pair and now lacking any pair with similar capabilities, India finds itself in a situation where overseas visits often end with defeats and inconsistent performance.

There have been away series with bowlers led by Kapil Dev helping India make winning forays, home and away.There have been batsmen like Amarnath, Vengsarkar,Azharuddin and Sehwag who have shone and in Sehwag's case dazzled but the confidence the two pairs brought were unmatched.The present has Kohli, definitely the best ODI batsman today but who else?

India's World Cup

The World Cup presents the Indian Cricket team with an opportunity to outshine the rest in a few weeks and drown out there tales of woes of the past year and "Turn(ing) all (your) sad sounds around

 When you sing “Hey, nonny nonny” instead." That is what they have been doing for the last two Sundays.India have it in them to defend their title, their recent form notwithstanding.The indian cricket team winning abroad in 2015 will not solve long time problems but give ideas to the ICC. what about a world Cup in the West indies with all of India's matches in the USA.What kind of crowd can you expect?And a sustained six weeks of cricket could change the scene in the USA where weather in large parts are conducive to cricket.

Reflections on popular Fiction

Q: How is your writing different from, say, a Jhumpa Lahiri, a Neel Mukherjee or a Jeet Thayil?A: I think we are writing for different people. We may be writing about the same things, which is India. And we may all be Indian. But I think they are writing for a different audience. I am writing for a different audience. People say they are very good writers. Much better than me. So maybe that is the case. I don’t know.(from Book talk: an interview by Ankush Arora  http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2014/10/10/chetan-bhagat-half-girlfriend/).

This is how Chetan Bhagat differentiates his writing from that of contemporaries like Jhumpa Lahiri and Neel Mukherjee.But as a reader who finds books by both Bhagat and these authors referred to at the same place, be it on Flipkart or amazon or at the bookstore at the neighbourhood mall, I really feel let down by Chetan Bhagat. I bought novels by both Chetan Bhagat and Neel Mukherjee last month and read them in the same week.

Q: We have an India-origin author once again in the race for the Booker Prize. Have you read Neel Mukherjee?A: No, I am dying to read it. Listen, these are brilliant authors. I write for very different reasons. I want every Indian to pick up an English book. Every slum girl or kid to pick up an English book. And for that I have to write a certain kind of a book.
That is what Bhagat thinks but behind every writer the inherent desire is to be read by a large audience.Dickens and George Eliot were best sellers and so are Rushdie and Coetzee. Actually Bhagat is insulting the intellect of his readers when he says he is writing for a particular set.Just like a driving license, reading ability comes at a certain level.If you can read Chetan Bhagat, you can read Neel Mukherjee as well. At least Mukherjee gets his Calcutta and Midnapore right and writes a credible story where you wait with anticipation for the turn of events more so than in Bhagat.And just as when one learns to drive in a city, she can gradually take to the highways, so too can the reader growing up on CBSE English Core and communiccative English learn to enjoy so called serious fiction.

Random Jottings after reading Neel Mukherjee and Chetan Bhagat in the same Week.

"...a cloudy suspension in all that clear amazement and disbelief that could only be called envy as if a fellow prisoner had been released and he left behind to serve his sentence." this is a part of a sentence from Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others( London: Chatto and Windus,2014), chosen at random. To the readers who are familiar with the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief" coined in 1817 by Coleridge it will perhaps suggest that the writer read English while at the University.Even a trained reader has to carefully interpret what the writer has written.When compared to the writings of a close contemporary also writing in English, Chetan Bhagat, one wonders who these writers are writing for. Chetan Bhagat, perhaps has even this group of liberal arts graduates as his readers in mind but Neel Mukherjee?

While this question would require a longer study, the fact that Chetan Bhagat in his extra literary pursuit talks about the serious writers, the lit crits and so on means that he is also concerned about a group of people who while some were trying to get into an IIT were reading a book a week, often more and talking about them.This group has always been there. From Ravi Babu with his zemindari to Amitav Ghose with his day job.Even Chetan Bhagat started as an investment banker. If Neel Mukherjee went to Don Bosco School and Jadavpur followed by both Oxford and Cambridge, Bhagat went to an IIT followed by IIM and lived in HongKong and Singapore.So what essentially makes one different from the other?There have been writers like Saul Bellow who have studied engineering but have written what is taken as serious fiction. There have also been writers like Dan Brown and John Grisham who while professionally trained have written for a larger popular audience.

Yet, when one reads Chetan Bhagat and Neel Mukherjee in the same week, one realises how much liberty Bhagat takes with facts and the use of a language.While he is writing fiction, facts in his fiction often far from actual facts.  Harbhajan Singh gets his hattrick in the wrong innings, Sociology is taught at St.Stephen's College, the Dumraon Royals are shown as having a Maithil Brahmin surname and so on. The lack of research and not getting facts right  are perhaps what make the lit crit unhappy with Chetan Bhagat but also restricts his readership if not in serious numbers, then definitely in its width among those who have grown reading books, Harry Potter to Dan Brown and on to Rushdie and Coetzee.

Around a month back, this column had noted that while the west Indies and Australia were rebuilding,Pakistan were a pale shadow of their former stature.How wrong an estimate this has proved out to be.While Pakistan has performed well both with bat and ball, Australia have shown that they are  still frail on batting friendly slow turners and the West Indies lie in tatters.

Private World of Cricket

For much of the twentieth century a private club called MCC managed the England cricket team.The matches other than tests that the team played was for the MCC. The tours up to 1976-77 were of the Marylebone Cricket Club. Indian Cricket is run by a private society called the BCCI. Similar private bodies run cricket in several places.It is because of this that international Cricket had been organised on International basis but were actually like two or at times three clubs   competing with each other.The World Cup in 1975 started a trend for an International tournament but the same teams which played bi laterally started  playing in a multi team event.Cricket actually found its equivalent of the FA Cup and not the Football World Cup.For this to happen, cricket will have to welcome teams and organisations not wishing to be affiliated or not affiliated to these private National bodies.

WIPA

The West Indies cricketers must be an optimistic lot. From the days of Dinanath Ramnarine as President of WIPA, the cricketers have hoped the players' associations are able to control the Board to give them the best playing conditions.They even indulged in Player strike but the Board played a third XI and lost to Bangladesh at home. Now the association is headed by Wavell Hinds but WIPA and WICB appear to be on the same page. Bravo has written saying that he and the team have lost confidence in WIPA. The question then is, Who does WIPA represent.I can only think of BCCI who at present are bank rolling WICB and the Indian players and not the West Indies can have much leverage.

As the Wset Indies and India prepare for an interesting second match of the series and Australia begins their match against Pakistan, we can see a pattern emerge. The West Indies and Australia are clearly keen on rebuilding.Pakistan are noe losing the plot and are a reminder of what a good team they once were.

A New Season begins.

A new Indian cricket season has begun.By stealth as it were. Neither List A nor First Class cricket has commenced.There was a Mickey mouse tournament in which several Indians played but the series involves only ODIs and Tests.The last time an Indian origin player was captaining the west Indies in India, Malcolm Marshall was discovered.Let us hope, this will be one series from where the West Indies will rise from their mediocrity.

It took India nine years of playing One day internationals before they won an ODI against the West Indies at Berbice. It will not be the West Indies' first in India but the impact of a series win in tests could be  their Berbice moment.

Chetan Bhagat's Imaginary World

Chetan Bhagat's Half Girlfriend( Rupa, 2014) is a story about a basketball player and his making a half girl friend even while he is waiting for the basketball trials for admission to st.Stephen's College in Delhi.The Girls' trials are on at the Basketball courts and it is here that he meets Riya Somani, also a basketball player.The novel tells the story of Madhav Jha, from Dumraon royal family in Bihar, and his quest for his ultimate Holy Grail: Riya Somani. While  Bhagat manages a passable story, he makes hash of an opportunity of doing a decent campus comedy.

The last time Bhagat was writing a campus book, Five Point Someone (Rupa,2004), he was able to at least give glimpses of the life inside an IIT. From Ragging sequence to the competitive atmosphere and difficulties faced by his characters add to the thematic complexity of that novel and rounds off a  love story. However,there is no attempt to enter the class rooms or show the protagonists actually studying or for that matter taking part in any meaningful basketball match or tournament.This is a shortcoming which becomes obvious as the writer harps on St.Stephen's college and its elitism so much from the admission interview stage itself, that it almost becomes a character in its own right. Yet, the author introduces us to only three each of Riya and Madhav's friends and that too in a very sketchy way. Even Madhav is presented in a manner in which we do not know how much of Sociology, he has picked up in the three years.

Sociology Honours is the course Madhav is supposed to be doing at St.Stephen's. As Delhi's St.Stephen's College has never taught the course, the college in question becomes purely fictional.If it is so, Bhagat's naming of a residence block after Principal Rudra of St. Stephen's college appears to be very creative indeed.However, it is obvious that Bhagat wants to focus on St.Stephen's but he has not done any research. Research has not been  done about the way interviews are conducted or the sequence of Sports quota interviews. However, Bhagat talks about the novel being about Bihar. Even then, no research has gone into how a Madhav Jha could be found in Dumraon. The Dumraon Royal family belongs to an entirely different caste than what Jha would signify.Moreover, the Dumraon Royals went to schools like Doon and Rajkumar College, Rajkot. A scion of the family would have come to St.Stephen's after 10-12 years of English medium education and the whole novel actually ends up reflecting a lazy and arrogant attitude in showing a slice of Indian life not the way it is but the way Chetan Bhagat imagines it to be.

One of Bhagat's least successful novel which comes apart at every place and there is no underlying theme as even the love is not described properly.If Madhav actually loved the girl, he would scarcely be talking clinically about her with his friends.Half Girlfriend, then is an attempt to cobble together a novel without giving too much thought to either the real world or the fictional worlds of Delhi's University enclave and Buxar's Dumraon.

Impossible Takes a little Longer

359 was highest total in an ODI scored by Australia against India.It proved insufficient as India finished with more than six overs to spare.And in the UAE, Pakistan closed in on to a rare victory against South Africa.They recently lost to Zimbabwe but are poised to win a Test against the other African Test team.The near absence of improbability makes cricket interesting.

Sohag Ghazi

In the week that Sachin Tendulkar announced his retirement, a personal test Match record has been created by a young man not far away. Sohag Gazi of Barisal and Bangladesh scored a century batting at number 8 against NewZealand at Chittagong and went on to take a hattrick. This is the first time in the annals of Test Cricket that a player has been able to do this.The Test ended in draw but Gazi's feat is unique in Tests.In First class cricket this has been achieved no less than 13 times but here too Sohag Gazi has the distinction of having achieved this in 2012 in a lost cause against Khulna.The only other player to achieve this feat twice was the South African all rounder Mike Procter playing for Gloucestershire.While We will return to Tendulkar on reaching his 200th Test, We wish to be celebrating Sohag Gazi more often.It appears that Shakib will soon have company on bill boards across Bangladesh.

Radio Commentary Today

The generation who have grown up listening to radio often nostalgically talk of radio commentators of the past.Having listened to commentary of matches on crackling short wave radio in their childhood or youth, they recall the commentators like Brian Johnston, John Arlott, Allan McGillivray, Omar Qureshi,Devraj Puri and Vizzy. However the serendipitous find one made twiddling with the short wave radio has come to us in a new avatar.On the internet and more easily through the smart phone one can access numerous Medium and FM stations.The commentary is smoother and even  with perils like buffering, normally of good quality.

This medium has introduced me to whole lot of commentators. Jonathan Agnew and Simon Mann of the BBC, Jim Maxwell of ABC,Brian Waddle from New Zealand, Fazeer Mohammed and Andrew Mason from the West Indies and Natalie Germanos and Aslam Khota from SABC’s Radio 2000 are all my new finds discovered after having discarded my last Short wave radio.Extra pleasure comes from the radio jingles and advertising spots, especially on the Caribbean stations and Radio Sport New Zealand. These help in knowing the preference of people from different cultures.

The fact that I can check on scores and match details on Cricinfo actually enhances the pleasure.I followed several of last year’s t20 world Cup matches from Russia via internet on SABC Radio as BBC TMS feed was available in the UK only.While PBC commentary feeds are available on the net All India Radio is still to surface.However, being based in Delhi means the smartphone can also double up as an fm radio and live coverage of India games are available.

Of ODIs and Tests

After the thrilling if a little technology induced end to the First Ashes test Nottingham, a friend quipped that the Test was interesting only on account of its ODI qualities. However looking back quickly over a century and more years of Test Matches, while one can think of any number of Test Matches which resulted in nail biting finishes, in a little over forty years only the 1975 World Cup finals come to that kind of closeness of contest and there too if Lillee could bowl more than his 12 overs things would have been different.

The West Indies Pakistan match in the first World Cup probably comes close as Murray and Roberts added more than sixty runs to win the match. However it was the 18 year old Miandad bowling the last over and not Sarfaraz Nawaz. The essential quality of a cricket match over one innings or two is that the team scoring more runs wins. By limiting a team from batting to the end, this basic premise gets jettisoned. A team may declare but to be forced to restrict its innings is a different ball game altogether.

The One day Cricket is struggling against t20 for the very reason that a team blessed with extraordinary talents cannot by the very nature use those talents to the maximum. In t20 if you have one weak bowler, he has only four overs to hide and the spectator does not have to go through ten overs of long hops and donkey drops. The problem that Test Matches have to counter is mainly sociological. Cricket from early times started in rural settings and gradually got adopted by gentlemen of leisure with income coming from India and the West Indies. With gradual decline of such people, the retired community and students remain the principal segment that test cricket depends on.But the situation will auto correct and Indians can take summer and winter vacations to include a Test match, the Australians can come to England and India and the whole World can visit the West Indies.There are more cricket followers in the USA then in NewZealand and it is just a matter of time before a Test Match involving India and the west Indies at Bridgetown or Antigua with the beaches thrown will be a big draw.

Afterword

In the last six months, since I last posted, I have been busy with something a little removed from Cricket called CLAT. The series in Zimbabwe, ended in a draw and the ODI series win by 2-1 does not quite indicate whether Bangladesh has regressed or Zimbabwe has  progressed.However, the tie in cold Dublin is a sign of Irish progress. Kiall O'Brien may have felt that it was like a defeat but the way he and Paul Stirling played around the D/L target which was actually more than what Pakistan had scored, Eoin Morgan may have made a mistake in choosing his team.

With an inevitable touch to it, the circus called the IPL has unravelled even as the Carribean League is getting started.There was something as rotten as in Hamlet and one had to just wait.It was fun and also got the kind of publicity cricket has not been getting.I was in Jaipur when there was an IPL match was on and the city was obsessed with it.The organisers of the Jaipur Travel Bazaar probably did not factor in the IPL.But in delhi, IPL barely caused a whimper.The local team was in the dumps and Kohli, Manhas, Bhatia, Dhawan , Gambhir were playing elsewhere.So Delhi Daredevils were playing home matches totally out of context but atleast they have not figured in fixing deals.

The farce will continue and IPL will have a final on Sunday where everyone will believe that nothing has happened.The Indian and International Media are besotted with the IPL and get paid to be in India around this time.It is the mainstream media that has retained its critical ability and  have declared IPL a disgraced farce farce that it is.

Test Series in Southern Hemisphere Winter

One had nearly missed this contest..Bangladesh-Zimbabwe Test series beginning next week is a sobering reminder of what Test cricket once was.Low intensity professional sport with some amateurs thrown in.Though most countries have t20 leagues and it would be hard to find a batsman of the calibre of William Porterfield of Ireland, who made a remarkable season opening century, albeit in Abu Dhabi, this series will be more of a contest than Australia- India series that concluded recently.. It is an indication of the times that the customary Champions County vs MCC match is played not at Lord's but at Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi.

Those of us who were cribbing about the IPL not being quite cricket, this series should come as a balm.The competition between not the bottom teams but actually between teams ranked nine and ten and with several teams from Dublin to Kabul wishing to be where they are.It is therefore a full fledged Test series and the fact that in this global consumer age 150 million Bangladeshis matter with their 300 million eye balls, this series is a mainstream event surely with more people seriously interested in it than in the fortunes of the Pune Warriors.Tigers are the team to follow in April before Newzealand arrives in England.

Another World

Craig Ervine has reportedly refused a Zimbabwe contract as he would be getting only US$ 100 per week against nearly twice he can earn playing club cricket in the UK.The wages a professional cricketer playing internationally across so many formats in Zimbabwe are so different when compared not only with the developed or BRICS countries but also compared to Bangladesh.India can absorb only limited numbers in IPL, but an international cricketer ready to go to England for US$200 per week should be lapped up by our private school system as Coaches and DPEs .Surely, Schools can afford Rs.30,000 per month which works out to more than 120 Dollars a week for 52 weeks.Besides an English speaking Test Match cricketer can obviously get other coaching and speaking deals.Time, perhaps for an agent to step in.

And that also brings us to the happy state prevailing in India for years altogether where a national player even in a minor sport gets a regular job in the Railways or the Services earning decent wages and housing.If they are good and go on to become PT Usha, they grow out of their jobs or rise within the organisation like the 1982 Asian Games Hockey Captain Prem Maya and the more famous Mohammed Shahid. Indian cricketers, of course,  have it quite good from very old times. even in the seventies, they were making close to US$300 per test and had a full time job as well.Even Gundappa Vishwanath who did not go past high school,  found comfortable bank jobs moving up the Security hierarchy.

Beyond the IPL

A few hours after the close IPL match at Bangalore, another match went to the wire, almost as the T&T team defeated Jamaica at Sabina Park with two balls to spare in the Carribean One Day Competition.The match was close even without the likes of Gayle and Narine. The IPL has now become the major cricket league and scouts go everywhere to find talented cricketers everywhere.However, it is really good to remind ourselves that good cricket can be played without superstars and exciting cricket is being played in the world outside the IPL as well.
On a day that Chris Gayle was the most prominent Jamaican, spare a thought for young Jermaine Blackwood , who scored an impressive eightyfive and with Andre McCarthy helped Jamaica put up a challenging total. The more well known Lendl Simmons guided T&T to a nail biting win. 

The Long season draws to a close.

The First Class cricket season in India has come to a close.It has been a very long season with the first match being the Test Match between India and New Zealand in August 2012.Fittingly the last was the Test at Kotla. In between there has been a series loss to England followed by a first time 4-0 win which hopefully augur a new phase of cricket for India.

 Cheteshwar Pujara scored over a thousand runs this season and Rahane looks to follow Amol Mazumdar as very heavy First class scorer who could not play tests. Rahane of course played a test toward the end of the season.He however has not given any indication that he will have a long first class career. Pujara is on course to become the first batsman to have the best list A average before playing his first ODI.

As IPL takes over the off season in India, we have a few Regional 4days matches from the Carribean and the soon to commence English cricket. The English season will probably begin amidst sleet and snow but there is the series against NewZealand  too look forward to.By the time IPL draws to a close at least some of the Indian eye balls will shift to the test series in England. So while IPl tries to dissuade us from agreeing with Eliot that April is the crullest month what with zillions of exams all over the country cricket will accompany cricket in Chaucer's land with its "shoures soote". 

that brings me to the General prologue of The Canterbury tales and even while wading through Chaucer, often with Neville Coghills wonderful Penguin Classics translation in verse, I would be transported to england in april where cricketers from all over the world from Richards to Border and Barry Richards to Imran Khan would come to England as if on a pilgrimage in April at the start of the English season, something as regenerative than the pilgrimage Chaucer talks about.The beginning of the Prologue to bring all the non Eng Lit types up to date.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote° The droghte° of Marche hath perced to the rote,° And bathed every veyne° in swich licour,° Of which vertu° engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus° eek with his swete breeth Inspired° hath in every holt° and heeth° The tendre croppes,° and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne; And smale fowles° maken melodye, That slepen al the night with open yë°— So priketh hem Nature in hir corages— Than longen° folk to goon° on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes,° couthe° in sondry londes; And specially, from every shires ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, The holy blisful martir for to seke,° That hem hath holpen,° whan that they were seke.° So, while everybody who is anybody in cricket have come to India this April, let us rejoice with a Zimbabwean by the name of Craig Ervine who will come half way around the world to england to play club cricket at about 200 US Dollars a week.The pilgrimage still continues.

sweet showers dryness / root vein / such moisture By power of which the west wind Breathed into / wood / heath sprouts . birds eye(s) . Then long / go . far-off shires /known .

The Best of Times, the worst of Times

Not long ago, this columnist bemoaned the fact that under Dhoni, the Indian team plumbed the depths never encountered before by losing back to back 4-0 defeats overseas.And in little over a year since Australia beat India 4-0 in Australia, India has beaten them 4-0.And Dhoni has taken India to heights it had never been before. In between was a little matter of a home defeat to England.That was by no means a one sided defeat and when two teams play defeat is always a possibility.After all, England are battling at 90/4 with a day to play and 391 runs still required to win the test at Hamilton.Such are the uncertainties of the game.At another end of the spectrum, West Indies have just won six test matches in a row, four of them at home and two in Bangladesh.The three teams they defeated include Zimbabwe and Bangladesh.While not much can be read into the wins against these teams,it surely gives the west indies to be a fighting opponents on their spinning tracks.There are so many spinners bowling in regional 4 Day contests that the west Indies are now a true inheritor of the great tradition of Valentine and Ramadhin. The great fast bowlers look to have come out of some other universe.