(Image courtesy - Hindu Business Line)

In a nation given to hyperbole, loud celebrations, gaudy displays of wealth and a heightened sensitivity to taking offence, it is often difficult to find public personalities with a calm and dispassionate demeanour about them. MS Dhoni’s is a uniquely ‘un-Indian’ personality in that regard. In the nine years that he played Test cricket (and even beyond that in the other formats of the game), rarely has he looked temperamental, angry, pumped up or excitable. Not for him the fist pumps or big jumps after reaching a batting landmark, nor the high pitched exultation after a catch or a stumping or even the shrill shriek of joy after winning a game.

With Dhoni comes a remarkable sense of detachment. His joys are saved for elsewhere, places we will never know. Places where this intensely private man has not allowed the media circus that constantly follows him entry. You can bet that Dhoni loves the game but unlike the millions who follow it in India, for him the action stops inside the field. You almost get the sense that cricket is like a daily routine for him, akin to going to office. We all wake up in the morning, put on our best clothes, go to work and try to do the best job at it. All our lives we chase our dream jobs. We put endless hours to acquire skills that would lead us there. We study, reach colleges, pass interviews, test the limits of our ability to handle stress. Once in our jobs, we constantly tinker, improvise and add new skills. Offices though are not the places we live in. Our smiles, our laughter, our joys and tears are reserved for another environment – home. You would find many a cricketer for whom the stadium was his home and it is certainly true that the game deserves men of different kind. Dhoni though belongs exclusively to the former category.

You would be hard pressed to take a look at Dhoni’s face and judge the situation of the match. Captains are animated – they furrow brows, wave arms frantically, brood during a game, show expressions of frustration or delight, constantly speak to their bowlers. Yet, Dhoni was rarely into this gig. Whether his bowlers were spewing filth and getting spanked all around the park or whether Ashwin was running through a side on a slow pitch in India, his face had the same calm and stable expression. Wicketkeepers are even a noisier lot – their shouts and appeals are dominating noises of the stump microphones. And yet, rare would be that Dhoni appeal that would be none genuine. Rarer still would be the flourish or celebration after a catch. It is hard to believe that Dhoni carried out two of the chattiest and frenetic roles in the game of cricket for a number of years while simultaneously being the quietest person on the field.

Only two instances come to mind when Dhoni brought emotion into the game and neither was an express cricketing act. The first was when he paraded the entire team in front of the media before the 2009 T20 World Cup after reports had surfaced that Sehwag was faking an injury due to rifts between him and Dhoni. The second was earlier in 2014 on the England tour when he publically called out James Anderson to be punished after the altercation between him and Ravi Jadeja. Both in a way presented a crossing of line for man who had viewed every happening on the cricket field as transient. Both tested his credibility – the first as captain and the second as an eyewitness. And in both, Dhoni was prepared to stake his reputation, do the unexpected and get his point across.

It would be wrong to bucket Dhoni as a successful home and a losing overseas captain. Leadership is a by-product of those of being led but more importantly it is also an outcome of the time in which it is exercised. Dhoni’s legacy will not so much be the numbers but the man management skills he presented. The majority of his captaincy was spent leading men who were either contemporaries or mentees of Sourav Ganguly. Both Dravid and Kumble, who preceded him, commanded the respect of that group. Dhoni had bloomed in the Chappell years – a period Indian cricket likes not to remember. For him to have led the likes of Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman, Sehwag, Harbhajan, Yuvraj and Zaheer without any drama and take them to the number one spot in the Test rankings speaks to an amazing ability to manage upwards, show individuals respect while still maintaining the collective interest of the team above all. Of all the leadership challenges, change management can often be the toughest and Dhoni was right in the center when the Indian team undertook that journey as the greats retired and new men came to replace them. Sometimes, we often view the number of overseas defeats in the last three years and perhaps overlook the fact that it could have been much worse. No doubt India throws up a lot of cricketing talent but it takes a plucky captain to persist with talent when others are calling for heads. Murali Vijay, Virat Kohli, Ishant and Rohit Sharma (if he does manage to salvage his Test career) would perhaps have had stormier careers if not for Dhoni’s faith in their ability.

Of course, Dhoni was not the perfect captain. Away from home, his lost confidence in his bowlers too soon. Too often, with the opposition in trouble, he would back away quickly, put fielders out and wait for the innings to fold. The safety first attitude ironically only brought India risk and the number of test matches lost after letting the opposition off the hook are many. At one level, watching the bowlers go at four an over, you would sympathize with Dhoni. However, at another level, you wanted him to go for the kill, to literally hold his bowlers by the collar and holler at them a bit, to have the field up and that extra slip in place and not the let the last 5 wickets put up 300.

True to his nature, Dhoni leaves without fanfare. He has seen through the storm, got a new team in place and brought it to a position, where, if the bowlers can keep their brains for a day, overseas tests can be won. His successor is an anti-thesis of him – aggressive, brash, charged up and not at all shy of letting the opposition know that he wants to win. Virat Kohli can afford that luxury. This is a young team waiting to be led and he has a clean slate to define his legacy. When the times were messier though, when the eras overlapped, when the new and young mixed and when India needed a stable hand to avoid combustion, we had Dhoni’s calmness to assure us. Indian cricket was lucky to have him at the helm. There might well be a time when we just start missing him.

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This article first appeared on the Big Show in December 2011. The link to the original post is here

In military circles it is often light heartedly remarked about Russia and Afghanistan that invading armies over the centuries passed by the skeletal remains of previous empires that had tried and unsuccessfully attempted to conquer those lands. In the cricketing context, it is perhaps an exaggeration to compare the unforgiving vastness of western Russia or the rugged and inhospitable mountains of Afghanistan with the pleasant and warm lands of coastal Australia. The analogy though begs the question – Is Australia the most difficult country to tour, especially for the sub-continent teams?

Statistically, Australia remains the team to beat at home. Its winning ratio over the last decade (2001-2011) is a staggering 74%. The years of total dominance in the first half of the last decade contribute significantly to this healthy number. This record at home becomes more respectable when compared with other major countries – In the same period, South Africa has a winning ratio at home of 57%, England of 61% and India itself of only 47%. Neither are Australia’s numbers bloated due to runaway successes against minnows. Its winning ratio at home in the analyzed time period against England and South Africa combined has been 67% (2 out of every 3 tests). Interestingly the only test series to have been lost at home have also been against these two countries – The 3-1 Ashes loss last year against England and a 2-0 defeat against South Africa in 2009.

For the sub-continent giants Pakistan and Sri Lanka, there has been little joy Down Under. Pakistan has lost all 6 test matches in the last decade and while Sri Lanka has only managed to draw 1 and lost the other 3. Yet, amidst all this carnage of numbers, one anomaly stands out. Against India, the Aussies have won 3, lost 2 and drawn the remaining 3 – that gives a win ratio of 38%. Against no other country at home has this number dropped below 65% for the last decade.

MS Dhoni’s team faces the expectations of maintaining this competitive posture and given the ‘perceived’ troubles with Australia in the recent times even go ahead and retain the Border-Gavaskar trophy that has been in their possession since the home series of 2008. Six months ago, this script seemed a fairly promising adventure; post England, the tale is now one of redemption. For India all the marketing jargon of ‘final frontier’ is now secondary. They must first prove to themselves and then to their fans that the ability to meet opposition head to head on foreign soil, the single biggest achievement of Indian cricket in the first decade of the 21^st century, is still alive and burning.

On each of their previous two tours, India punched above their weight. Man for man, their batting perhaps matched that of the Aussies but never have the bowlers looked as threatening as the home side’s. In 2004, Zaheer Khan showed a glimpse of his brilliance (5/95) at Brisbane before departing for the rest of the series. In 2007, he again flattered to deceive and after a 4 wicket haul in the opening test at Melbourne, missed the rest of the tour with an injured ankle. Another premier bowler, Harbhajan Singh, also missed 3 tests on the 2004 tour with an injured shoulder and made more noise off the field than on it on the 2007-08 trip. In Australia, in 4 tests, Harbhajan has taken 9 wickets at an unflattering average of 73. On both occasions, India discovered new bowling talents in Irfan Pathan and Ishant Sharma, rookies who came back home with enhanced reputations, but it was one man who held their bowling effort together and kept the Australian batsmen honest. For a spinner, Anil Kumble had two outstanding tours of Australia in 2003 and 2007 taking 24 and 20 wickets respectively at averages of 29 and 34. On both occasions, he was India’s leading wicket taker by a distance. In a country where away spinners leaked 46 runs for each wicket (since Jan 2006), Kumble with 44 wickets at an average of 35 is the leading wicket taker amongst spinners in Australia over the last ten years.

This time though India go without their holding and strike bowler of the last two efforts, which makes it absolutely imperative for the fragile ankles of Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma to last the distance in the Test matches. It would be a surprise and not an expectation for India’s bowlers to consistently bowl out Australia and it is their batsmen who would have to land the heavy blows to keep the team in the bout. It is on the continued success of Dravid, Tendulkar, Laxman, Ganguly and later on Sehwag that the positive results away from home were achieved. In Australia, Sehwag, Laxman and Tendulkar average above 54 while Dravid, despite a poor last tour, still averages 48. The batting order will feature two first time travelers this time – Gautam Gambhir and Virat Kohli, with Rohit Sharma who impressed in the ODI outings in Australia in 2008, as the first backup.

Unlike England, if India is to make a match of it in Australia, their batsmen have to make up for the deficiencies that their bowlers will perhaps frequently display. And therein lies the weight of India’s burden. Dravid has had a wonderful year and looks assured and settled. Laxman had patches of brilliance and Tendulkar has been laden with artificial mental burdens of late. Sehwag has only now struck form (and how!) and Gambhir averages below 30 in his last 25 test innings with no century to show. Buffering this line up are Kohli and Dhoni - for the first, this can be a career defining tour if he manages to avoid the fate that England dished out to Suresh Raina; for the second, this would perhaps be a visit where he may be required to play above his test average of 38. Indian batting faces a collective challenge which would demand the shedding of indifference and inconsistency and the adoption of bold and certain postures. The pitches would be quick, barring Sydney and the engine of Indian batting would have to chug into life quickly and swiftly. A slow start would only create the danger of a repeat of this summer, when more than the English bowlers, the lack of certainty and confidence of the batsmen did them in.

Facing India would be an Aussie side that has tasted victory against both South Africa and New Zealand recently, has discovered a new found depth in bowling riches and would in all probability have an in form Ricky Ponting awaiting India. The gaps would remain at the top and at the bottom – an opening combination that contains a Shane Watson unable to bowl at full effectiveness denies Australia the comfort of a quality all-rounder, and a rookie spinner in Nathan Lyon may not pose too many uncomfortable questions to the Indian batsmen. Barring that, Australia will come hard with (speed) guns blazing at India and will perform the basics in fielding and catching well.

For India, the story is familiar and yet slightly deviant. Their batsmen must win the big moments for them but this time they will perhaps be afforded lesser buffers of luxury by their injury prone and inexperienced bowlers. History can often be a strange companion. It can comfort, as the statistics in the opening part of this article indicate, or it can sow doubts and suspicions, as the memories of England this past summer may testify. India have fought Australia to a stalemate during their last two trips Down Under; its critical, for the sake of their immediate Test match future, that they leave a more promising legacy behind on this trip that what exists in the harsh battlefields of Russia and Afghanistan.

Statistics Source: espncricinfo.com

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(picture source: Cricinfo)

As I write this the covers are being pulled on the square at Edgbaston and MS Dhoni is preparing for another ‘loosing captain’ speech (his third in a row, an unusual event in itself) and searching for reasons to offer for a loss that was as big and humiliating as the margin suggests – an innings and 242 runs. India now have been wiped clean 3-0 by an ascending England that completes a remarkable one year of test cricket for the hosts and raises perplexing and troubling questions for visitors.

The last time India performed with such abject hopelessness in an away test series (or any test series for that matter) was Down Under in the winter of 1999. The Sachin Tendulkar led team was demolished by a rampaging Australia under Steve Waugh and the extent of the defeat then bears a close resemblance to the ones we are seeing now –

• Adelaide – Lost by 285 runs
• Melbourne – Lost by 180 runs
• Sydney – An innings and 141 runs

It was a tour equal to the current one in terms of complete batting failure with only 2 centuries and 3 half centuries being scored in response to a batting flood from the Aussies. And despite the tireless efforts of the Karnataka trio of Srinath, Prasad and Kumble, the team never even won a session against the Aussies, let alone coming close to threatening them with a draw or a loss.

View the results of the current embarrassment in England and notice the pattern – Defeat by 196 runs at Lord’s, by 319 runs at Nottingham and the latest by an innings and 242 runs. The bowlers have tried and have been handicapped by injuries but the batting has opened the floodgates and let the invaders through. The three test matches have seen only 2 centuries and 7 seven half centuries and in neither case have the hundreds been big enough or the fifties been accumulative enough to push the total beyond 300.

The difference though lies in the expectations and the historical performance. No one gave the 1999 team a chance against the Aussies. There was not much you could expect from a team that had a support cast of MSK Prasad (opening the batting mind you), Hrishikesh Kanitkar, Devang Gandhi and SS Das for the likes of Tendulkar, Dravid and Ganguly. It was a complete collective batting failure with no opening stands of note and no stand out middle order performances. During the intervening 12 years though, India have done enough to wipe the stains of that humiliation and improve their reputations from easy cannon fodder to worthy contenders on overseas tours. Between 2000 and 2011, out of 54 tests played away from home (excluding Zimbabwe and Bangladesh), India won 15 and lost 21, giving them a win ratio of 27%, which while not comparable to an Australia or South Africa, is certainly much higher than those of any previous decade in Indian cricket.

During this period, the team was served by the bowling efforts of Zaheer Khan, Harbhajan Singh and Anil Kumble, but the foundation of the victories and match saving draws were often laid down by the batsmen. It is India’s batting core of Tendulkar, Dravid, Laxman and Ganguly (assisted during the later part of the last decade by Sehwag and Gambhir) that enabled it to post significant overseas victories (Headingly 2002, Adelaide 2003, Perth 2008, Hamilton 2009, Durban 2010) and often save games that could easily have been lost with a batting collapse (Nottingham 2002, Brisbane 2003, Adelaide 2008, Napier 2009, Cape Town 2011). This picture is perhaps appropriately reflected in the batting averages of the Indians away from home (admittedly not excluding Zimbabwe and Bangladesh this time) – Tendulkar expectedly leads with 55, followed by Gambhir at 57, Dravid at 53, Sehwag at 47, Laxman with 44 and Ganguly at 41. Each of them has, over the years, played a part in the setting up totals for bowlers to defend or responded to opposition’s attack with equal gusto.

It is based on the above that we must confront the critical hypothesis that now stares Indian cricket in the face as it awakens from the shambles of the England tour – India was and certainly for the near and medium term future shall remain a batting team. The bowling quartet (and a quartet it will be, for there is no genuine seam or spin bowling all rounder on the horizon) shall always possess one or at most two (if we are lucky) world class bowlers and not more. Kumble’s mantle passed onto Zaheer and from him it is now a toss up. Ishant Sharma perhaps possesses the best talent to claim it but is yet to stamp himself as a match winner as Zaheer did in 2007. The spinners will be effective at home but will remain predominantly stock bowlers outside and the seamers will never run through batting sides as the English and the South Africans now do. We will not have a Steyn or a Morkel and our seamers will always need receptive pitches to make the opposition batsmen hop.

It will therefore be the batsmen who have to bear a good 2/3rds (and at times even 3/4ths) of the burden of responsibility for winning games. They will need to compensate when the bowlers are hacked around during the first innings of a test match and will need to give enough to the bowlers to defend in the 2nd and 4th innings. This has been a pattern quite obvious in our recent one-day successes and will have to be the template if we are to be successful as a test side going ahead. Unless the soil of our pitches where Ranji games are played dramatically changes, we will need to look at our top 6 to win and save games for us.

It is here that India’s problems lie, not just as of now with the batsmen failing to fire in England, but also in the future as each of Dravid, Tendulkar and Laxman will not last beyond the next 2-3 years. Behind them, warming the benches is a lot that has justifiably failed to inspire confidence thus far. The spot vacated by Sourav Ganguly in 2008 is still up for grabs. And neither Yuvraj Singh (overall test average of 35 and an away average of 29) nor Suresh Raina (test average of 32) have managed to cement that slot as their own. Both have been patchy and inconsistent and have shown major shortcomings against the short ball and an inability to graft when the pitch is not to their liking. Yuvraj is now out with an injury and Raina, who after his knock at Lord’s could have made this his breakthrough series, has frittered away the chance and seems set to lose his place in the playing XI. That leaves four other young men who currently are lined up in the queue with an eye on the future – Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane. Kohli has started disappointingly and shown a visible discomfort against pace and bounce, even on docile West Indian pitches; Rohit Sharma has perhaps the most amount of talent but also the most fickle temperament; Pujara is only 3 games old and needs more chances and with the batting failures of England, Rahane may well find himself a part of the squad in the upcoming test series at home and in Australia.

The cupboard is not exactly bare for India’s batting but it’s a bit like sending cadets out of a military academy to replace experienced field commanders in the middle of a war. The transition, given the problems of the new crop of batsmen away from home, has to be phased and will necessarily involve pain such as that experienced in the last three weeks. It is critical that India’s new generation steps up to the mark in test cricket or else more such hidings may be in the offering. Test cricket is about the quality of effort and display of temperament and less about statistical rankings. The loss of the top spot must hurt but it is time to be realistic. A weak bowling and a declining batting line up will not take us back to the top of the summit. A more realistic short term goal would be stay in the top 3, keep in the hunt with the likes of England and South Africa and groom a new batting line up that can perform away from home. It is good to aspire for the numero uno slot but India’s priority in the near future has to be a Jardinesque obsession with building a strong XI that can play well away from home. The results and the rankings will take care of themselves by consequence.

Much would be written and lamented about the three tests lost. The bowlers were always suspect but the batting failure is inexplicable and as Ganguly has said, it seems more of a mental block than an issue about adapting to the environment. The batsmen, as has been pointed out, have been having a sub-par year and have not crossed 400 even once in the 7 test played in the calendar year thus far. It is not as if India did not have their chances in the series – they were 158/2 at Lord’s replying to England’s 474, only to get bowled out for 280 odd. Even after England recovered from 124/8 at Nottingham, the batsmen only had to score 350 in the first innings to get a sizeable lead. Instead the last 4 wickets were lost for 20 odd runs and the Houdini act enabled England to grab the psychological advantage. India turned up at Edgbaston conditioned for defeat and that is one mental spell that champions must immediately break out of.

The fourth test returns to the Oval in London. A ground where the blue of Indian fans will match the blue of the English as at Lord’s. A ground also where the pitch will seem flat and the batsmen may finally manage to play through the line of the ball with lesser risk. A 4-0 whitewash prediction was sacrilege when the series began but now seems realistic. India have been shuffling players, managing injuries and patching up their batting order. To use another military analogy, England has been pounding the heavy artillery while the Indians are still getting their battle formations in order. It is up to the batsmen to pull the team out of the current abyss. It is perhaps too much to expect a victorious turnaround or even a simultaneous coming to form for the top 6, but in this bout where India have been a mute punching bag instead of a living animated boxer, a batting effort exceeding 350 may well be a starting counterpunch.

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(Picture Source : Cricinfo)

As young boys, me and my cousins would scramble up to the roof of my grandparents’ single storey house in Chandigarh in our growing up years and engage in our favorite pastime. Much to the chagrin of my grandmother, we would not care a fig about the weather, most of our time together being spent during the months of the summer vacation, and run helter skelter on the roof making our presence felt to everyone down below. All we needed was a large wooden plank that served as the wickets, a smaller one that was our bat (on some occasions we managed to get a real one) and a rubber or a tennis ball. Each of us would choose a team, there being a fierce competition for who would take India. The entitlement would eventually be decided by draw of lots. We would call it our very own World Cup and the one who had chosen India would try his mighty best to justify the burden of carrying the nation’s name. 1992 went, 1996 went and so did 1999, by when all of us were in our teens. And by common consensus we had jokingly come to believe that it was easier for India to win the World Cup on our grandmother’s rooftop than in the actual cricket field.

For a generation of Indian cricket fans that grew up loving the game and following its team during the 1990s, every Indian victory was meant to be savored. For much like the legion of fans that preceded it in the earlier decades, it was more used to watching the team lose than win. We were devoid of cognitive images and memories of that small golden window between 1983 and 1987 when the world cup winning Indian team perhaps enjoyed its most confident period of cricketing performance since Independence. The 1990s had Tendulkar, the match winner and a number of dedicated performers such as Kumble and Srinath and saw the emergence of Ganguly and Dravid towards the later part of the decade. But the 1990s also had a list of test defeats all around the world, from the crushing clean sweep in Australia in 1999 to the heartbreak in Barbados in 1997 to the drubbing inside 3 days at Durban in 1996. The one day games were littered with instances of matches being lost once Tendulkar was dismissed. Barring the sandstorm series in the summer of 1998 where Tendulkar demolished the leg spin of Warne, Sharjah remained an arena identified with disappointments against Pakistan. Three world cups came and went with none seeing the team as serious contenders. The closest it came was in 1996 when a high charged triumph against Pakistan was followed by a disgraceful exit in Kolkatta.

The Indian cricket fan in that period did not take victory for granted and has suffered from perennial pessimism having seen multiple winning positions (17 runs needed with 3 wickets left against Pakistan in Chennai in 1999 being a prime example) being squandered to hand over the glory to the opposition. Thoughts of victory were entertained with extreme caution. Laudable efforts of a Tendulkar, Ganguly, Dravid or Kumble were welcomed with grave apprehension of the imminent collapse of a brittle lower middle order and a tail ineffective with the bat. Australia and South Africa were envied for their ruthless efficiency and dogged determination to win, Pakistan for its multitude of match winners with ball and hard hitters with the bat and Sri Lanka for showing us our inadequacies too often with the bat, ball and specially in the field. In the middle of it we had Tendulkar to savor, the rising graphs of Ganguly and Dravid to admire and the perseverance of Kumble to respect. Team victories were outnumbered by the losses that wounded the confidence. One of the most galling apart from Barbados in 1997 was in the 1999 World Cup against Zimbabwe when an India sans Tendulkar threw away a winning hand and the tail capitulated to grab a loss that all but ended any hopes of effective progress in the tournament.

For this generation of fans, optimism always came with a rider. The game was never considered to be over till the final run or wicket was taken (purists would say that is always the case!) and each Indian victory was meant to be cataloged in memory. It took a decade of gradual achievement, the emergence of new match winners and a captain who transformed the attitude of the team for the confidence to be planted. Saurav Ganguly became captain, a hopeless looking India performed a miracle against Australia in 2001 and a campaign in the 2003 World Cup that threatened to get derailed right at the start was transformed into roaring wave eventually to be stopped by an equally strong Australian juggernaut. The belief would grow gradually with victories in Australia, Pakistan and then England. Tigers at home and lambs abroad was a phrase we all knew the meaning of since our middle school days. It took monumental performances from the trinity of Tendulkar, Laxman and Dravid backed up by an untiring Kumble and the re-emergence of Zaheer Khan to chip away at the doubts that arose before every overseas performance. A new set of performers, emerging from the mofussil map of India, took over the reins towards the end of the first decade of this century. A new leader, exuding an almost un-Indian like calm amidst the frenzy of a cricket game, took over the reins of a team that believed in its strength (the high quality batting lineup) and was aware of its limitations (a thin and unpredictable bowling and an uninterested fielding). Yuvraj, despite his blip last year, Raina, Gambhir, Sehwag, Harbhajan and Zaheer – a new set of match winners whose rise coincided with India winning more games than losing. Dhoni’s ODI win % is close to 60. A decade back no Indian fan could have imagined this to be true for its team’s captain. A rising confident country broke its economic shackles in the early 90s. Its cricket team took a decade or so more but the reins are truly snapped now. The Indian fan now believes. There was guarded optimism in place of the superstitious pessimism when the team was tagged as favorite in the latest edition of the World Cup.

This World Cup and its final is now the new index by which the fan would measure this team. Our minds will be pulled towards the memories of 2nd April, 2011 time and again – a World Cup final, a toss lost, a required run rate of 5 and a half, Sachin and Sehwag lost within the first 7 overs. Those demons of old made hovered dangerously when Gambhir and Kohli began rebuilding the chase. But this is a different team and these are different men. An innings of high quality and balance by Gambhir, a statement of confidence by the captain and a run chase that should serve as a template in the multitude of cricket academies all over the globe. On this night, the team soaked the pressure like a sponge and showed a deep well of self belief. The Indian fan has finally been gifted for his attachment, sometimes tempestuous, to the nation’s most popular game. An entire generation now has its moment of glory to savor. The World Cup can indeed be won by India, and not just on my grandmother’s rooftop.

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Are you as mystified and puzzled by this entire Shashi Tharoor – Lalit Modi drama playing out on the TV screens as me? It is now into its fifth day and the matter has assumed such proportions that shoving aside the Women’s Reservation Bill, the Union Budget, Price Rise and the Dantewada massacre, the Opposition has deemed it fit to adjourn parliamentary proceedings over. The controversy ridden Mr.Tharoor found the Lok Sabha quite unlike Twitter where he holds forth without any interference from any pesky followers (you have to be Chetan Bhagat to perhaps have pesky followers on twitter). He was shouted and hounded and now it seems nothing short of his blood or the Prime Minister’s appearance will bring our legislature back to normalcy. Lalit Modi on the other hand has been displaced from his comfortable seating at Koel Poorie’s garish feathery red couch into the slightly uncomfortable embrace of Income Tax officials who, in a sudden awakening of Rip Van Winklesque proportions, have unearthed that there might be some hanky-panky with the way a lot of our IPL franchisees are owned.

So why if I may ask are we subjected to such craziness just the week after Sania and Shoaib? To me this is a classic case of ‘blow the horn and ask for details’ later. The last few days all I have seen in both the newspapers and the TV stations are loud tickers, headlines and allegations (That’s how the Times of India writes the word, italicized – it emphasizes that at the end of the day all they publish in their broadsheet are just allegations). Disappointingly, even the Indian Express, that beacon of investigative and uncomfortable journalism, has only been half heartedly reproducing the same text and claims and counter claims. As always, TV news anchors, specially those who wear indignation and self-righteousness on their face every night at 9pm have been quick to take sides and loudly proclaim conflict of interest and impropriety.

So all we know is that Kochi won the bid, Modi says that Sunanda Pushkar and others own ‘free equity’ in the franchise, the media takes over and says that Sunanda was the one we photographed Tharoor going around with and as per our grapevine the two are close ‘personal’ friends, Modi says Tharoor asked not to question the ownership, media says that means the Minister used a woman for proxy and benefited from the franchise win and that all that talk of mentoring the franchise for Kerela was a hogwash, Tharoor denies, IPL Kochi denies, Rs 75 crs are calculated and the opposition wants a CBI enquiry. In between all this, the BCCI, completely caught unawares by a storm rapidly engulfing them, censure Modi on Day 1 and then in their own time tested way start dealing with the affair completely non-transparently and off the record. The self righteous news anchor says Tharoor cant hide behind self-righteousness (a bit rich coming from him, don’t you think?), another anchor says the Minister should have known that getting involved in the bid would expose him to such questions and so we all await the next act of the drama.

Much like the Times of India, all I hear are allegations and insinuations along with calls for the Minister to resign. So let’s take it step by step. Tharoor encouraged the Kochi franchise we all know, he himself admitted as much on the day of the bid. The franchise has given what they call ‘Sweat Equity’ (and I must admit it is time that journos open up Google and read up what Sweat equity means), not just to Pushkar but to a host of other individuals along with Rendezvous Sports themselves in consideration of management and other services. We also know that Tharoor knows the lady in question, they have been publically seen and he has never sought to deny his close personal ties. These are all the facts that we know. The rest are the allegations, which if we talk only of Tharoor, boil down to this. The Minister used his influence, either as an MP or as a member of the Union Government, to influence the sale of the franchise to Kochi and in lieu of the same, the franchise allotted ‘free equity’ to his proxy which, given the value of the bid made by the franchise comes to a cool Rs 75 crs. So let’s take the debatable questions here –

a) a) Can a franchisee offer free or sweat equity to its owners/ members? Yes, as per law they are legally permitted to do so. In fact the ESOPs offered by the companies to their many employees are also an indirect form of sweat equity where labour is rewarded with ownership.

b) b) Should franchise ownership have been declared openly by Modi? Yes, because it is in everyone’s interests to know who owns and has a pie in the IPL but also No, if Modi as an IPL governing council member was bound to confidentiality by the franchise agreement.

c) c) Is Sunanda Pushkar a proxy for Tharoor? Maybe or maybe not. There is no definite answer to this question because it is a matter of perception. Had she been a Rabri Devi to a Laloo Yadav, the answer would have been an unequivocal yes. But if the lady has a professional background that can be proven (which is itself subject to unclear answers), then the yes get a bit diluted. Make up your mind on that. The only doubt I have, is if Tharoor was so clever as to outwit Modi and get Kochi a franchise over all others, then why would he be stupid enough to get his consideration allotted to a woman who could so easily have been discovered by the media and others? I can agree that he is politically naïve, but is he so plain dumb?

d) d) The key question though is – Did Tharoor subvert a fair bidding process and get Kochi a deal over other deserving winners? And this I believe is the crux of the argument. All other allegations of consideration, sweat equity, influence peddling and seeking to keep the details under wraps stem from this one basic point. Did the Minister in any way use his office or rank to bulldoze the BCCI to allot his people a franchise over the Adanis and Videocon? The answer may lie in the silence that surrounds this question. Modi, for all his noise and claims, has not even once brought this up. Surprisingly, the media has not asked this as well, choosing to focus on Sunanda Pushkar and the Rs 75 crs. It is easy to understand the silence though isn’t it? The moment Modi says that the bidding was subverted, the entire structure of the IPL comes crashing down on both his and BCCI’s head. For what that means then is that the IPL Commissioner and the game’s governing body allowed ‘auction fixing’ instead of raising a noise or postponing it all together. (They did postpone it earlier though when the BCCI believed that Modi had set too strong a set of conditions to allow fair bidding for the new franchises, and perhaps therein lies the answer to this story). You can see why Modi will never say this and why the BCCI will always maintain that the auction was an honest affair. Circumstantially then it is evident that the allegation of influencing and subverting a ‘sealed bid’ auction, certified as fair and proclaimed as a success by both Modi and BCCI, being guided and fixed by the junior Minister for Foreign Affairs is a bit thin as of now.

The only charge which then holds is that of someone holding consideration on his behalf. If the auction was not subverted, and if Sunanda is indeed a marketing dodo in her own capacity (would the media have raised this question if she was not a half attractive woman who was purportedly ‘seeing’ a publically visible Minister?), then what pray is the consideration for? Blessings?

Mentorship? Perhaps future insurance for government benefits? But then should it not have been given to someone in the state government from whom all the clearances and ‘benefits’ will be required? Can you think of an answer to this question?

The other charge that remains is of being associated with supposedly ‘fishy’ people and exposing oneself to conflict of interest. Since when have we started pillorying any Indian public face for being connected with people perceived to be ‘fishy’? Or have we ever questioned any politician for the conflict of interest that arises that when they get into sport bodies? Last I saw, all of them were going along fine. Media anchors and owners have conflicts of interests, giving prime time slots to their blood relatives – we never question them or bring them down.

Of course I could be wrong and Tharoor could be as neck deep in muck as Harshad Mehta, but I wonder why our newspapers and news channels don’t get away from ‘allegation’ reporting to perceptive and analytical reporting.

As for Lalit Modi, he clearly has bitten much more than he can chew and is now living on borrowed time. The one entity you do not want to confront head on is the Indian government and this is Modi’s second attempt at that after his run in with the Home Minister over the holding of IPL II in an election bound India last year. I have a suspicion that the script has not played out entirely the way Modi wanted it to and that he did not anticipate that his own neck and finances would end up on the chopping block before Tharoor’s. I also wonder whether many in the BCCI will finally see this as a chance to ease him out of the IPL or atleast cut him to size.

The Congress may be embarrassed, Tharoor maybe nervous, the Opposition belligerent but the only entity that has been harmed by this entire Modi triggered affair is the IPL. Questions will be asked and comparisons drawn with the Stanford sleaze. The tournament is estimated to contribute almost 40% of the revenues to the BCCI in the current year. No one wants a golden goose to be strangled, least of all some of India’s leading politicians who sit in the IPL governing council. Tharoor may survive if Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi can summon the patience, Modi it seems is a whistle blowing liability the BCCI can ill afford.

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Unlike a lot of other posts that you have read on this blog, this one is going to lack a theme. These are just ramblings. I have been meaning to write but events have been out pacing me and the sudden heat that has come over North India a little too early has sapped my stamina and patience a bit. So have the mosquitoes. Summer comes and I turn into an anopheles swatter. For the first time in many seasons I did not even have the energy to stay up late and watch Barcelona and Bayern Munich play in the Champions League.

What keeps me going though is Lalit Modi's circus. The 8pm daily dose of bat hitting the ball is not exactly just and pure cricket but it is entertaining none the less. And I am a sucker for it. This season I am specially hooked. Because it allows me to watch Tendulkar in action for a few more weeks. I have been watching him since he hit those sixes of Abdul Qadir in 1989 and this frankly has been his best year - perhaps even better than 1998. Another player whom I sit in front of my television to watch is Anil Kumble, who ironically is India's best T20 bowler at the moment, at a ripe age of 39. Besides Kumble and Tendulkar, giving the timeline and conventional T20 logic a bit of a spin is Jacques Kallis, who seems set to keep that hideous looking orange cap on his head for the remainder of the tournament. And while T20 is compulsorily required to be all about sixes, fours and batsmen carting the bowlers around, I have taken a few sighs of satisfaction at how decent totals like 160 and 180 have been competitive, at how the slowness of the Indian tracks is causing the likes of Gilchrist, Symonds and other hitters to struggle, at how, once again, a lot of young Indian players (Saurabh Tiwary, Manish Pandey, Kedar Jadhav, Umesh Yadav, Rajgopal Satish) are making their presence felt and emphasizing the fact that a team in the IPL is as much about the 7 Indian players who take the field as it is about the 4 overseas ones whom the owners have splashed cash to purchase in the high stakes auction. You only have to be supporting the Deccan Chargers to realize the importance of that last point.

But I also have my irritants about the IPL - and you shall notice almost none of them relate to cricket. Why do we need advertisements between deliveries in an over is beyond me. The only time I look forward to them is when Sivaramakrishnan has mike close to his mouth. Also, I have realized that the mute button on my TV remote has a perfect positive co-relation with the appearance of Navjot Sidhu on the screen. This time around he has a new mate in Boria Majumdar at Times Now, who after a losing his patience and opportunity to speak in the first few episodes has now decided to keep rattling along just as Sidhu does. The end result is that there is more pandemonium in that show than even in zero hour of Parliament. But of course, Sidhu would not know about that. His was one of the lowest attendances in the previous Lok Sabha.

What I also fail to understand is the complete loss of proportion when it comes to describing the action on the screen. Either the commentators have written contractual obligations that say that every wicket is a moment of success, every six has to be described as a DLF Maximum and every catch is of 'Kamaal' or they have simply forgotten how to use adjectives. I wonder what the case really is since I have noticed both Harsha Bhogle and the slyly sarcastic Ian Bishop refraining from gratifying Lalit Modi's principal sponsors too frequently.

The only silver lining with respect to the IPL coverage is CNN-IBN's late night show with Cyrus and his silly jokes and Harsha Bhogle with his matter of fact analysis that escapes most of his colleagues in the commentary box. The others either shout and scream ala Messrs Sidhu and Bor(e)ia or just seem disinterested (NDTV, with their 'expert' Ajay Jadeja going on a holiday in the second half of the tournament).

Other than that, the last few days have been about the highly relevant national icons Mr.Amitabh Bachchan and soon to be the second Mrs.Shoaib Malik. Now as far as Mr.Bachchan is concerned, I can understand his anger. Even I would be irritated if despite all the acting achievements, advertisements and other performance, people deliberately fail to recognize me and get themselves photographed with me. Mr.Bachchan is a free citizen and he has every right to endorse every brand that he likes, whether it is Mulayam Singh Yadav's (and earlier Amar Singh's too) Samajwadi Party or BJP's Narendra Modi - Ok, let me rephrase that - whether it is Uttar Pradesh's development under a benevolent sarkar (UP mein hain dum, crime yahaan hain kum!) or Gujarat's vibrant tourism. The Congress should mind its own business and let the Bachchans alone! What sacrilege to even ignore and question such a national icon!

As for Shoaib and his new wife, I am too bored to write anything. I have never been a fan of both of them, have never admired either their looks or their sporting performances. My only reaction when I heard of this union - rotf...lmao...

tepid aint it....i told you its the summer...it does that to me...

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One screaming hot afternoon in Chandigarh, I settled down in front of my grandfather’s eight year old, curve screened Salora television set to watch a game of cricket. The date was the 21st of May and I had reached the city to spend the summer vacations after celebrating my birthday on the 19^th. The spirits, you can guess, were high. I was in the room to the back of the house, occupied by a cousin sister who worked with a local newspaper and who every summer would be kind enough to share it with me as I spent the days bouncing around Sectors 46, 47 and 33 of Chandigarh with a set of three cousin brothers. My sister’s room was the boiling pot of the house – even the kitchen with all the cooking, burning and frying happening in it, struggled to match the temperatures and heat that could be reached there as it was serenaded by the sun post noon since it faced west. This natural anomaly was compounded by the fact that the only mechanism to control the heat was a cooler which for some quirky reason that my grandfather struggled all his life post retirement to discover, would blow cold air only from one half of its screen while spouting the atmospheric hot one from the rest.

At half past three, a delayed start to compensate for the equally blazing hot weather in Chennai, the game was all set to begin. My grandfather and I, bathed in sweat and shirts off, considered the Indian prospects while my grandmother slept comfortably in a much cooler room in the front of the house that was far away from any rays of the sun. This was 1997, India was playing Pakistan in the Independence Cup (there was a slew of them in 97 and 98 with all the four cricketing nations of the sub-continent celebrating half a century of good riddance from the British and in case of the Bangladeshis, from the Pakistanis) and this was the big ticket clash. Both teams had a win and loss under their belt by then. Sri Lanka had already qualified for the final and this was the last league game and a virtual semi. The expectation was high, even though those were the days of the disappointing 90s when victories over Pakistan had been scarce.

In the second over of the match, came perhaps the only moment of joy of the entire evening for the Indian fan. Shahid ‘Ball Chewer’ Afridi, skied a catch that was comfortably held by Ganguly at mid-off. The danger man was gone and there was a feeling of anticipation and relief. The next few hours belied all. The languid and fluid Saeed Anwar, still in his clean shaven avataar, played havoc with the bowling. Subject to an attack that comprised of the laboring medium pace of Kuruvilla, slow predictable left arm spin of Sunil Joshi and the fizzing leg breaks of Kumble, Anwar embarked on a feast. There were the side dishes as well such as eighteen overs of part time medium pace dished out by Tendulkar and Robin Singh. And of course, the icing on the cake was the lanky seamer from Karnatka who over the course of his career helped many an international left-handed batsman such as Jayasuriya, Anwar and even Curtly Ambrose to improve their career averages – Venky Prasad. Anwar reached a quick fifty and then fell down with cramps in the 18^th over, post which Afridi came back to run for him. He reached a 100, conserved energy and drank fluids, had three big partnerships and hurt Indian egos no end. Despite all the bonhomie and friendship during those IK Gujral days of 1997, this was nothing but a plain and simple humiliation. Anwar overtook Viv Richards’ record of the highest individual one day score and a prospect of India letting a Pakistani batsman hit 200 against them in a one-day game looked very real. Six shy of that, Anwar looped a soft catch to Ganguly again at short fine leg. I was 14, had watched a lot of cricket by then, but was still fiercely parochial and patriotic and took pleasure out of Anwar being denied a double. What happened in the rest of the game was immaterial. Dravid hit a valiant hundred, was denied a runner by Pakistan who very quickly forgot how Anwar had made his runs and India fell short by 35 and were booted out of their own Independence party.

Which is why, sadistically, yesterday’s knock of Sachin Tendulkar’s is a such a big jewel for any Indian fan to flaunt. Pakistan are no longer the team of the 90s, India has far more match winners in their team than the bare looking team of 97 and cricket has come a long way in the last 12 years. But still, if there was one person whom you wished/ fantasized/ prayed for overtaking Anwar, it was Tendulkar. Tendulkar, who did it batting a full fifty overs, at a better strike rate, without a runner and still came back to field in the second innings! You may call me a meano or a jingoist, but for a young fan who sat through each and every shot of that Anwar inning, this was revenge as sweet, sadistic and cynical as it comes.

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I began my Republic Day by watching the new Mile Sur video on a news channel. Aptly titled ‘Phir Mile Sur’, it’s the same composition with the old underlying tune but suitably modified to reflect new trends in Indian music (multiplicity of instruments and fusion being prominent) as well the new faces on our Hindi movie scene. The makers could perhaps have attempted to reduce the Bollywood flavor of the video and introduced a more nuanced regional perspective (but certainly not S.Sreesanth, as one friend demanded on Facebook after seeing the video earlier on YouTube!). ‘Phir Mile Sur’, despite some tackiness quotient, is a decent reflection of how much India has changed over the last two decades. When the original was released, the year was 1989-90 and the nation was in a vortex of internal instability. A coalition government had just taken oath in New Delhi after the grand fall of Rajiv Gandhi’s super majority. Kashmir was beginning to simmer and Punjab had been festering for almost a decade. Then there were the recurring disputes of the Northeast and on top of all this was the Mandal genie released by VP Singh in the autumn of 1990 leading to self-immolations, massive protests and civil unrest in Delhi (I remember my school being closed for a few days when the situation had gotten seriously tense). For someone who would sit alongside his father and watch the state drafted news bulletin every night on gloomy Doordarshan, the words ‘Khalistan’, ‘Militancy’, ‘Encounter’, ‘Unity and Integrity’ (a favorite of the Prime Ministers of those days), ‘Tarn Taran’ (Punjab’s most violent district) and ‘Curfew’ very quickly became a part of the lexicon. And I did not even have to run to a dictionary to understand what they meant. The context of those days provided all the meaning. In the backdrop of all this and the economic uncertainty that followed a year later along with Rajiv Gandhi’s bloody assassination, India needed a ‘Mile Sur’ to make some attempt, howsoever feeble, to remind us of the clichéd ‘Unity in Diversity’ model of our political sustenance.

Two decades later, the uncertainties have changed with one critical difference. Most of them are external and not internal. The language of ‘Unity and Integrity’ has now been replaced by that of ‘Development and Growth’. The old distant terrorism that urban India knew of only through DD’s daily news is now a phenomenon that we have recognized as a daily classless danger to be lived with and confronted. Our internal contradictions of the 80s, like old skin, have been shed and our new fault lines will be a friction of ideas centering on how growing aspirations in a rising economy should be catered. Separate smaller states will be demanded, not only because they promise a symbol of identity, but because they hold the promise of overturning the economic neglect and offer opportunities for ‘sharing of riches’. The gun toting Naxal may be wiped out but discontent in rural India will not be unless we achieve a greater allocation of benefits and decide on how best to acquire land equitably. In that sense, perhaps India still needs a ‘Phir Mile Sur’ not to remind us that we share one political legacy of unity but perhaps to hold out the assertion that as the efforts of that legacy begin to bear economic fruit in the coming decades, we all are entitled to our legitimate slices of the pie.

So how much have we really changed in the two decades after that depressing autumn of 1990? I was recently watching a YouTube clip containing highlights of the games from the Hero Cup held in the winter of 1993. It’s an event cricket historians seem to have forgotten. It still remains the last time India won a five team one-day international tournament. It was also the first time that the BCCI sold television rights to a satellite TV channel (Star) instead of Doordarshan leading to litigation at one end and cricket’s TV boom at the other. On the clip I saw, the boundary hoardings consisted of the following prominent brands – Hero Puch, Modiluft, Peerless, Directors Special, Vimal, Kelvinator, Coramandel Cement, Yamaha and Pennzoil. That covers a decent number of sectors of the industry in terms of representation. Notice the one that it doesn’t – Telecom; because telecom would only be deregulated towards the end of the 90s and would go on to change lives in a remarkably similar way as the diminutive little Maruti 800 did. Notice another omission –no cola companies in the above list. While Pepsi came back into the Indian market around 1990, Coke wouldn’t come till 1993-94 and the real advertising war between the two giants for the large Indian middle class purse would begin only mid-90s onwards with star power being recruited and campaigns often turning nasty.

The cricket example above though, is only symbolic. Just as telecom is virtually a separate sector of the economy today in terms of the sheer impact it has on lives, the economic reforms of 1991 have perhaps singly overtaken any other event in defining the India of the last two decades. The reforms opened opportunities, mostly in the urban centers, brought global brands to India, gave a fillip to the economy and enlarged our wallets. Larger wallets in turn meant that the world started looking at us as a mass of people with an economic aspiration to spend and a social aspiration to climb. It is no wonder that every significant consumer as well enterprise product and service company is present in India today enamored by a market that promises top line growth of double digits which is no longer possible in a saturated market back home in the US or Europe. Good or bad, the one basic outcome of the reforms was that money was no longer a bad word. Consumption was suddenly an aspiration and not a moral sin. The political empowerment of India with the coming out of multiple political parties in the 1990s would be accompanied by an economic empowerment that would in some way, though perhaps not entirely and effectively, permeate every section of society. We only have to look at ourselves to realize the extent of the shift.

In 1991, my father’s office still had round dial telephones and there was no aspiration in my family to own a similar one at home. My father drove a white Premier Padmini (Fiat as we knew it then) that perhaps had the most awkward gearbox ever seen in a car on Indian roads. Computers and software were something you didn’t even read about in the newspapers let alone see one in your school or own one at home. TV still meant Doordarshan which would close its telecast between 11am to 2pm and 3.30pm to 7pm every day unless there was a cricket match on. Vacations anywhere in excess of 500kms meant budgeting a total of 4 days for to and fro travel by train. There were no brands of denim jeans. The only shoes you could wear were Bata, Liberty or Action. The only toothpaste you would use was a Colgate and the only soap you would use was a Hamam. The only fast food outlet in Delhi was Nirulas, the only rum my grandfather could drink was the army canteen issued Old Monk (a favorite passed on through generations) and the only decent whiskey available to him was Red Knight made by Mohan Meakin in Solan. Need I say more!

I sometimes wonder if we ourselves have grasped the impact of the last two decades. Time is never a constant and every decade or so, some nostalgic blogger like me would reflect on the years gone by and how life has changed. Every generation feels it has passed through the most impactful change. As children of the economic liberalization of this country, my generation can at least claim to have witnessed the transition first hand. How impactful it would turn to out to be for the longer destiny of India is something that as always, history and posterity can dwell upon at leisure.

P.S. – The Indian Express this morning carried a beautiful five page feature on landmark judicial cases and the personalities behind them that influenced both the working and the interpretation of the Indian Constitution. Stretching across the 60 years of the document’s existence, it highlighted the men and women, jurists and lawyers who sought to enforce the tenets of our governing document in our day to day lives. Express began the series with a case that it called the most important ever in the history of Indian constitutional law. In early 1973, a 13 member bench of the Supreme Court (the largest ever gathering of justices summoned to debate a judicial matter in the country’s history till date) decided by a wafer thin majority of 7-6 against the State and in favor of a temple priest. The judgment was historic in that it placed the Constitution above the Parliament and entailed that there was a certain ‘basic structure’ of the Constitution that Parliament could not alter even with an amendment. This basic structure included among other things the fundamental rights of life, liberty and equality. In the coming three decades, the Courts would use this principle to drive the primacy of fundamental rights (most recently in the Sec 377 case last year where the right to equality was sighted) and uphold the rights of the ordinary citizen against the high-handedness of the executive. That single judgment made the difference between the Indian Constitution being a living, thriving document impacting the lives of its citizens or being a set of rules of a banana diplomacy that a despotic government could change at will and a compliant judiciary would endlessly blink over.

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I have the latest issue of the ‘Outlook’ magazine lying next to my bed and it asks a pertinent question on its year end cover – Was 2008 India’s ‘annus horibilis’? It’s a question that occurred to yours truly sometime around Diwali, when in a moment of somber reflection, memories of the previous ten months came flitting by. A year that even till then, had been a blood soaked one. A year that had seen multiple bomb blasts (worryingly most of them caused by home grown terrorists), had seen reverse terrorism by a section of the Hindu right, had witnessed brazen vandalization of churches and attacks on its faithful across Orissa and Karnataka, had given enough perceived reasons for the majority to doubt the minority, had seen politics plumb to newer depths with wads of notes being placed on Parliament’s table and had brought with it the final nail in the coffin of the once glorious and golden national sport of hockey.

At that moment of reflection, I quickly dismissed the thought. We had seen worse and we had overcome it. During my own cognitive lifetime, 1992, the spring of 2002 and the summer of 2000 had been much more depressing times on account of different reasons. But as Mumbai singed, struggled and wept my heart sank with it. Those four helpless days of end November, while not shaking my faith in the structures bestowed upon us by the founding fathers, made me question to a great extent our honesty and sincerity in preserving and improving them. We might be a nation of young people, with a fast growing economy and skilled population, with a mostly tolerant and cordial multi-cultural society but, and this is a significant but, if we are not honest towards our nation and our ideals we will be like a beautifully dressed ship standing in the middle of the ocean with no fuel to propel us towards safer shores; sitting still and vulnerable to plunder of every passing pirate.

So was 2008 India’s year of horror and will 2009 with its promise of continuing economic downturn, a divided polity, unending terror, troublesome and failed neighbors be year of horror raised to the power two?

No, says the ever erudite and balanced Ramachandra Guha in the middle of the ‘Outlook’ issue. No, if you lived through 1948 (the year of Gandhi’s death, Kashmir war and continuing displacement of partition in a new, uncertain nation) or through 1984 (the real annus horibilis if you ask me – Sikh terror, Operation Bluestar, Punjab under martial law, Indira Gandhi’ death, massive riots in Delhi and the Bhopal gas tragedy – a black year of death). With not much to be optimistic about as we turn gingerly into 2009, here’s to the one hope we can all carry – maybe 2009 will not be a 1984, maybe it will not even be a 2008; perhaps this nation will once again summon reserves of resolve that it did after the gloomy winters of 1984 and 1992. Despite the pessimism that surrounds us, yours truly is glad to be coming to you at the end of 2008 and not 1984.

There is no point to a year end post if I don’t subject you to a year end list, and you are perfectly excused if you want to put on your parachute and jump out of this web page now. Still I shall continue with my list, biased towards a natural Indian perspective, but still containing some global names and achievements. If you are still reading, then you may agree or disagree – either way you are perfectly entitled to add/ delete to or modify this list.

Event and person of the year: On a slightly cold early winter morning, change came to America. As Barack Obama accepted his victory in front of a packed Chicago park, the world watched, many with hope, some with uncertainty and some with disillusionment. No one backed him when in January he pitted himself against the might of the Clinton machine. Obama’s achievement was not that he won or for that matter that he won as a black man, but in the fact that he won by remaining honest to his beliefs and ideology. It is a fact which you realize after reading his brilliant book ‘The Audacity of Hope’. Throughout his campaign, Obama never shied away from confronting the tricky, thorny issues that define the fault lines of America today. When faced with embarrassing comments made by his black pastor about 9/11, Obama gave perhaps the best speech of his entire campaign. In an honest appraisal of America’s doubts he talked of how blacks still faced subtle economic and political resistance, of how the nation had still not pulled them out of their ghettos; but was balanced enough to point out that if his elderly grandmother felt uncomfortable when walking across two young black men on the street, then there had to be something wrong with the way they conducted themselves. He did not back down from questioning the commitment of young black fathers who abandon their kids and called for more responsibility to be taken by the community (you almost wish someone would cajole the Indian Muslim community the same way). Often accused of talking down to the blacks, Obama won neither because or despite his racial color. He won because he represented a fresh, honest and balanced face to America. There is much he stands to lose. Cynicism can quickly replace hope; events can quickly overwhelm individuals and Obama faces a Mt.Everest of problems on hand. The world watches as Obama sizes up the peak – the price of disillusionment will be high.

Worst call of the year: Political analysts might debate if John McCain’s presidency bid would have turned out differently had he not picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. One thing though, seems sure, McCain would have commanded a lot more respect and maybe even votes had the bimbo from Alaksa stayed as far away from his campaign as Anchorage is from New York. As the pitbull turned hockey mom slipped from one embarrassment to another, America found a reason to laugh amidst the economic gloom. The much proclaimed ‘Palin Effect’ did come, but in a direction reverse than that in which it was supposed to go. Now she wants to run for President in 2012. I can’t wait for the jokes to begin. Palin confirmed that age old adism – style without substance never sells.

Political coup of the year: No, this isn’t a military coup – it’s a coup that Manmohan Singh managed to pull off (with some help from another Singh) despite all the odds against him. When it seemed that the nuclear deal’s death was a ‘done deal’, Singh cocked a snook at the outdated Marxists, gave Prakash Karat a convenient goodbye and showed remarkable political acumen to bail his government out with considerable ease. Akshay Kumar acted in the movie but this year clearly there was another Singh who was King.

Gaffe of the year: I am spoilt for choice for this category. Not to be biased towards anyone’s propensity towards idiocity, it is fair that it should be shared by all the deserving. Simi Garewal for making us realize that our slums are mini-Pakistan, Narendra Modi for standing outside the battlefield of Oberoi Trident in Mumbai and showering his state’s crores on slain policemen, Sarah Palin (again!) for all her utterances, Oscar Fernandes for justifying the lynching of a corporate CEO and Mukhtar Naqvi of the BJP for making us look at the powdered and lipstick bearing faces of the women protesting against terror on our streets.

Worst business decision of the year: Granted that we are in difficult economic times, yet Jet Airways’ decision to sack around 1500 employees in one go secretly and without any notice period was nothing but an invitation to trouble. That the sacked employees, large enough in numbers to get organized and be noticed, went straight to the North Indian hating Raj Thackeray did not make matters any easy for Jet chairman Naresh Goyal. Overnight, he had a change of heart, realizing that the employees were like ‘family’ and he had responsibility towards them. This father won’t be shedding any extra kilos in the near future.

Villain of the year: But for Mumbai on 26/11, this award would have gone hands down to Raj Thackeray. The North Indian hater ‘marathi manoos’ caused much agony to his home city of Mumbai, made his goons bash up poor taxi drivers and railway exam students, tore away Mumbai’s remaining claims of cosmopolitanism and even managed to get the Marathi middle class to theoretically back his arguments. He was upstaged by his own city. Mumbai’s date with terror made Raj cower in fear in his home (his Sena all withdrew into their rat holes) and brought a new villain to our front pages – Ajmal Kasab might be a young gun toting brainwashed terrorist but he is symptomatic of our western neighbor that has no clue as to where it is going. Like Kasab, Pakistan is flailing its tentacles in all directions, firing mindlessly, hoping to catch anyone who comes in the line of fire. Yours truly has been calling it a failed state since the turn of the century. 2008 was the year when the world discovered this truth. As world opinion turned against it, Pakistan began the year with uncertainty (in the aftermath of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination), elected a civilian government, saw the exit of a discredited dictator and installation of a discredited politician as President, endured bomb blasts caused by its own monsters and ended the year short of being officially classified as a rogue state. Pakistan though lives in denial – it still believes that it can use its home grown militants to achieve ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan and bleed India with thousand cuts. The army remains unrepentant and unwilling to acknowledge its lack of control, the ISI is still a state within a state and Pakistan has now turned in to a whore state – throw some billions at them and you can make them agree to do what you want. Like a prostitute, Pakistan can give you fake pleasure but not sincerity of purpose.

Movie of the year: Without a second thought it has to be ‘The Dark Knight’. A movie that turned the concept of superhero comic flicks on its head. The beginnings of shades of reality began with the new Toby Maguire Spiderman movies, was carried on by Chris Nolan’s ‘Batman Begins’ and finally came full circle with ‘The Dark Knight’. It was bleak, pessimistic, deep, and subtle with many layers of meaning and with surely one of the finest performances in a negative role in Hollywood history. How much did Heath Ledger’s premature death contribute to the movie’s success is a matter of speculation but Ledger is well on his way to a posthumous Oscar. The Knight acquires deeper significance in the environment of violence that we live in. In one of my favorite scenes from the movie, Batman’s butler Alfred narrates the tale of a Burmese thief of jewels who would hide in the jungles and steal valuables for pleasure. Alfred’s point being that some people are not after anything – they are in it for the sheer pleasure of anarchy they cause. When Batman asks as to how the Burmese thief was caught, Alfred nonchalantly replies that he wasn’t; the forest had to be burnt down. It illustrated the dilemmas that the protagonist of the movie and the world today face – whether the rules of civilization can be preserved in the fight against evil. The Joker calls upon people to spread anarchy, chaos, expect the unexpected and leave everything to random chance- see any resemblance with the mindless anarchy spread on our streets by gun wielding terrorists who want no money and no hostages? Like the Joker, they delight in seeing our disorder. The Dark Knight is perhaps then, a lot more relevant that what we might have thought it initially to be.

Failure of the year: The Australian cricket team. Ricky Ponting promised us new age cricket when he landed in India but instead oversaw the rise of a new age that promises to usher in an element of vulnerability in Australian cricket. After the disgrace of Sydney, Australia lost the off the field battle with the BCCI over the racism row and Ponting lost it on the field against a young gangly fast bowler from Delhi. Two consecutive lost tests at Perth, loss of their home one day series and a drubbing by an inspired Indian team – is it any wonder that Kevin Pietersen and England cant wait for the summer of 2009 to arrive and the Ashes to begin. The golden age of Aussie domination seems well and truly ‘over’.

Sporting moment of the year: In a year in which Indian cricket had much to cheer about and Indian hockey much to cry over, it is perhaps fitting that the list should recognize that one man who literally shot his nation to glory. Abhinav Bindra finally fulfilled his potential, shot a perfect round and in the terribly competitive world of shooting brought India its first individual Olympic gold. Whether this feat inspires more to emulate Bindra will depend upon whether Indian sports is governed by those who harbor love and affection for it. Indian sport can do with scheming Pawars and Dalmiyas but not with arrogant KPS Gills. Individually, MS Dhoni, Vishy Anand and Jeev Milkha Singh shined; Vijay Mallaya bought a sub standard team that gave a sub standard performance, both in F1 and IPL, Sachin Tendulkar exorcised ghosts of fourth innings failures, Virendra Sehwag found redemption, Saina Nehwal gained in stature and boxing promised current and future glory. But for the sheer weight of his achievement, Bindra upstaged them all. His victory was truly well its weight in gold.

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I was at the Ferozshah Kotla last Saturday as India tried their mighty best to let Michael Clarke and Australia to escape with a draw in the third test. The crowd, frustrated after the string of dropped catches, was pleading for a quick end to the Aussie innings and the only bowler on the field who seemed capable to them of doing that was Virendra Sehwag. But Anil Kumble was his usual stubborn self and in another display of perseverance kept bowling continuously from one end after tea. Amit Mishra was at the other end and seeing no sign of their beloved Sehwag the chanting for a change started in the stands. But it was a strange kind of chanting. It was more an entreaty, a pleading request to an elder brother to kindly pass the ball to his younger one. ‘Kumble bhai’, went the leader of the chant, ‘please yaar…samajh yaar, Viru ko de yaar please’. In my almost two decades of watching cricket, I have heard people comment in varied hues on different Indian cricketers. Most of them have been lauded on their successes and mercilessly beaten down on their failures. Even the great Sachin Tendulkar, while growing above the game for most Indian fans, has not been spared of accusations of batting selfishly for his hundreds and failing to perform in fourth innings of test matches. One man who has been spared of all accusations and critiques by the general public has been the quiet and hardworking Anil Kumble. Cricket journalists and ex players may have questioned his ability to spin the ball (stupidly in my opinion, when there was already a precedent of a fast and zipping leg spinner taking more than 200 test wickets in Chandrasekhar) but for the average Indian cricket fan on the street Anil Kumble has been a synonym for trust and reliance. Dravid may have lost his form, Ganguly may have been erratic, Sachin may have compromised belligerence for quiet run gathering but Kumble was still the same as he started out – economical, at the batsman and accurate. To understand the importance of Kumble you have to turn the clock back to mid and late 90s. Before Harbhajan burst on the scene and Indian cricket enjoyed a diversity of pace bowling riches, Kumble was both a stock and strike bowler for his captain. After the opposition’s opening batsmen had laid into Srinath and Prasad, both Azhar and Tendulkar would invariably turn to Kumble. On innumerable occasions, Kumble was the man Indian captains looked towards for blunting the impact of the likes of Jayasuriya, Aravinda De Silva, Saeed Anwar, Aamir Sohail and Adam Gilchrist. Coming on within the first 15 overs with field restrictions, Kumble relished the challenge and would immediately plug the flow of runs. While the other Indian bowlers would have economy rates of tending towards or in excess of 5 an over, Jumbo would walk away with a dignified number of 3 an over against his name. In many games his spell was the difference between a total of 280-290 and a chaseable 250 (remember this was mid to late 90s, before the 300 + chase became an achievable rather than an unlikely possibility).

If he lived with one albatross around his neck, it was that of not being able to take wickets on foreign shores. He responded in the only way he knew best – through hard work and perseverance of effort. Over the years he shortened his run up, raised his jump to exploit his height for bounce and added a crafty googly and a turning leg spinner to his repertoire. He buried the ‘non-performer at overseas tag’ with two sterling displays – the first in Australia in the winter of 2003 where he was the most successful Indian bowler (24 wickets from 3 tests at 29 runs apiece) and in Pakistan in the historic tour of 2004 (15 wickets from 3 tests at 25 apiece). And yet, despite his limitations, Kumble perhaps like his spinning counterpart Muralitharan remained a solo match winner for India for a long duration. His impeccable record at home underscores his importance again in a period when pace bowling had not yet started winning games for the country. He needed no certificates from the media boxes – there were ample batsmen to vouch for his trouble making abilities. None more so than Stephen Waugh, no less a persevering batsman himself. He credited Kumble with being at the bat all the time with each and every delivery. And every word of that appreciation was true. You only had to watch him bowl that first delivery to Hayden at the Kotla in the second innings to realize that Waugh wasn’t exaggerating. A fizzing leg spinner that was in line with the stumps and almost sneaked through to trap the batsman in front.

Anil Kumble retires like few Indian cricketers have in recent memory – with hardly any qualifications in his record and mutual respect and admiration from everyone around him. He retires an achiever all right but without any pretensions. He retires a team man to the core, his place safely reserved in history as the best to ever hold that red cherry in his hand with an India cap on.

I had planned on writing a farewell for Sourav Ganguly at the end of series after he had played his last test innings. Anil Kumble’s retirement now demands a packaged farewell for both. Not that Ganguly’s achievements are any less diminishing in Indian cricket. Statistics will tell you that he has been the most successful Indian captain. India’s results and style of cricket in the 21st century will tell you that he has undisputedly been the best Indian captain. You cannot even give Ganguly the gift of being ‘at the right place at the right time.’ If anything, he took over Indian cricket when it was at its lowest trough, post the match fixing saga. Sourav not only had to deliver results but also restore credibility, and the second task, as any incumbent politician will tell you can be quite a daunting one. Ganguly’s contribution lies not just in bringing a sense of ‘in your face’ confidence in the way India conducted themselves in the field (he staked his personal reputation on this by frequently getting into arguments with opposition captains and match referees) but also in the way he nurtured a talented crop of youngsters who shall take over the torch from his generation. Harbhajan would surely have been a Sikh migrant sitting in the US today had Sourav not insisted on his inclusion in 2001 and Yuvraj, Zaheer and Dhoni all made their debuts under him.

In the midst of all this appreciation of his captaincy, one almost forgets that Sourav was a tremendously talented one day batsmen. He formed the most successful opening pair with Tendulkar and brought the similar aggression to his batting by frequently hitting bowlers over infield to get India going. His test innings of Lord’s and Brisbane are frequently cited but he also dug deep and bailed India out of trouble during the series in South Africa in 2006 and England in the following year. To say that Sourav Ganguly reflected the ‘New India’ is to overstate a cliché, but he definitely changed the way India shaped up towards other teams in the cricketing world. His tenure marked Indian cricket matching its performance on the field with its clout in the money stakes. He took an India languishing near the bottom and left it sniffing the soil of the top. As he retires, Sourav may well thank Dravid and Laxman for that incredible day at the Eden Gardens in 2001 which changed the fortunes of his captaincy. Had India lost that game and the series with it, Sourav whose off field activities liaisons were being reported daily by the media would not have carried on at the helm much longer and Indian cricket would perhaps have not seen the rise which that ‘come from the dead’ victory over Australia propelled.

Shakespeare depicts King Henry V of England exhorting his soldiers at the Battle of Agincourt by stating that whosoever shed his blood in battle would be his brother that day and together their army would constitute a ‘Band of Brothers’. Sourav Ganguly created a merry band of his own, one that effectively changed the standing of his Indian team in the cricketing battlefields that they took to.

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