Reviewing It My Way

Finished THE book. Here are a few thoughts:

1) The man never stopped loving cricket

There was not a single instance in the book where Sachin felt he was disillusioned with the game over his 24-year international career. It's quite evident and also remarkable that the reason he lasted for much longer than his peers was down to desire as much as skill.

2) The man loves batting and scoring hundreds

At various times while reading the book, I felt that the 41-year old Sachin was still a kid who has just discovered the joy of batting and that's all he can think about. There is a lovely paragraph (while narrating his version of his 200th Test) where he talks about his love for his bats and the way he takes care of them. Also, the amount of time he has spent in the book talking about his centuries and the missed double century in Multan makes it evident that scoring 100's was quite high on his list of priorities. In fact, he even made Dhoni declare late once so that Gambhir and Yuvraj could get to their hundreds.

3) Lack of opinion on the larger issues in cricket

Sachin probably has spent so much time cocooned in his batting that I wonder if he has any opinions on the larger issues that concern the game. There is almost nothing on how the game has evolved, the way pitches have changed character, the evolution of the T20 generation etc. Most of what he talks about is mostly to do with his batting, the games he has been involved in, and the incidents surrounding them. I am not asking for controversial opinions, or any big secret reveals - but a perceptive opinion on the finer aspects of the game is definitely missing. It's quite possible that he does have an opinion, unfortunately it is sorely missing from the book.

4) The time he spent in Yorkshire

The one topic on which I have read the most in my lifetime would be that of Sachin. So, I was quite prepared to not experience any 'Aha!' moments while reading the book. The one section I loved the most was when he spoke about the time he spent while playing as Yorkshire's first overseas cricketer. This is one aspect of his cricketing career that has not seen much literature and it was quite fun reading about how he often drove down wrong roads, and creatively utilized salad bowls to get more quantities.

5) The Fab 4 are there but there is no Azhar

While Sachin has spent some amount of time talking about Sourav, Rahul, and VVS, unfortunately there is nothing on Azhar. Considering that till 2000, a lot of his career was spent playing under Azhar's captaincy, it is almost baffling that he doesn't talk about Azhar's influence as a cricketer or as a captain. I would also have loved it if he had compared the captaincy styles of Azhar, Ganguly, Dravid, and Dhoni. These are things only Sachin can talk about and no other Indian cricketer can due to the sheer longevity of his career.

6) Sachin loves Harbhajan

Of all the cricketers he has played with and against over the course of his career, the cricketer who finds maximum mentions in Sachin's autobiography is actually Harbhajan Singh. There are so many instances where Sachin talks up Harbhajan's performances in a match, it makes one believe that Bhajji was the cricketer who got closest to Sachin. BTW, Sachin also picked up Harbhajan for Mumbai Indians the moment he became available and handed him the captaincy as well when he was unable to play which lends further credence.

7) Sportstar-style rendering

It would have been nicer if Sachin had spent more time talking about how it was to play the game against some of the top bowlers of his time. Instead, all we get is a Sportstar-style rendering with just adjectives being thrown about to describe bowlers. There are instances where he says he stood outside leg, outside the crease, used an open stance etc. but I wish there was more about what went into the mind of one of the greatest batsmen of all time and not on who took how many wickets in a match.

8) Sachin loves eating

There is a hilarious narration of an incident from childhood where Sachin once went to a Chinese restaurant but sadly ended up sitting at the end of the table which meant that by the time the soup and the food reached him, it was almost empty leaving him disappointed. The fact that he chooses to recall this particular 35 year old incident over many others, gives us an insight into his love for food. Of course, his first popular business venture too was a restaurant in Bombay.

If you are looking to read the book, I would recommend waiting till someone lends it to you. But again, you might be as irrational as me and buy it on an impulse in which case all I can say is 'May God (may or may not be another Sachin reference) Help You !'

Paati aka Amma

Who is a hero to you? Are heroes only those who exhort you to achieve greater things in life, push you to climb that extra step on the ladder? Can there exist a different kind of a hero? A person who through the show of emotions, in fact through a lack of it, implore you to become a better person? Well, I certainly do believe that kind of a hero exists. Where, you may ask? Right in my home, in the form of my Paati (grandmother), or Amma, as my sister and I fondly address her.

I have consistently seen people eloquently express the relationships they shared with their grandparents, but most of it is after they pass away like here and here.  It’s a perilous task to deify someone who is alive and someone whom you meet and greet every day of your life. This thought has always gnawed my mind though, why not write about a person close to you, a person whom you have grown to respect and admire considerably over a period of time, during their lifetime itself? If you are a cousin, a relative, a friend, even a stranger, who meets my Paati sometime, wouldn't it be nice if you can go and tell her that you read really nice things about her? It is with this strand that I piece my thoughts together about Paati.

When I was in school, I used to wait with anticipatory glee for the monthly edition of Gokulam. It was one of the little liberties my father afforded us as a way of entertainment. The stories in Gokulam that I relished in particular were the ones where children used to visit their grandparents during summer holidays and were treated by them with utmost care, affection, dotage, and of course, an enormous amount of sweets (Paati still insists on making sweets for us including her patented '7 Cake' during festive occasions, much to our dismay). And I am glad that whenever I visited Paati (she didn’t live with us back then), all of these and more turned out to be exactly the way in which I read about grandmothers in those imagined stories. 

Paati, like any stereotypical TamBrahm, was born in Mylapore, in 1929. She received reasonable education including learning music at the Music Academy. By 1949, life had taken her to New Delhi. Uprooted from familiar surroundings, faced with a new and fairly paternalistic environment, she was someone who never sullied or moaned about the responsibilities she had to face. This may not be the most unusual thing in the world, but then considering that to this day in 2014, I have never found her grumpy when asked to do something, even at the age of 85, it does acquire superhuman abilities. It is a trait I forever wish to imbibe, the art of gently accepting responsibilities and going about it in the most unobtrusive manner possible.

I don’t know if the term glass ceiling existed back then. But, Paati despite having to take care of family, including her mother-in-law, found time to teach Carnatic music and tailor clothes, and also became the first treasurer of the Delhi Tamil Sangam (co-founded by my Thaatha, looks at self and wonders where the genes took a wrong turn). I have repeatedly asked her about how she managed all of this and the only response I have gotten is a shrug of a shoulder. I don’t even think she is being modest, I think she is just being who she is, a person who is performing her duties with utmost sincerity. Unknowingly, she might just be following the Bhagavad Gita's dictum of Karmanye Vadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana.

I ask if going places fascinates her, seeing the country, the world. Has she ever had a bucket list that needed ticking off? And she says no. Those thoughts apparently don’t even occur to her.  All she says is she wants us to be happy, the people around her to be happy. And there lies the limit of her ambitions. Isn’t that sufficient sometimes, I wonder. The generation that we are part of maybe doesn’t allow us to encourage such thoughts. But it still lurks somewhere. The things we can learn from those who have seen life a lot more than us.

Here’s to my beautiful, lovely and super awesome Paati. Deliberate denture-less picture to enhance cuteness quotient J

Why We Watch the EPL?

@knittins raised the question of why the English Premier League holds sway over Indian audiences. As someone who was in the periphery of EPL watching 7-8 years back to someone who follows it with as much interest as cricket now, this is my reasoning:

1) Timing - The English Premier League matches happen at an extremely convenient time for Indian audiences - Saturday and Sunday  evenings - when they can relax and watch sports on the television. Also, the fact that there is a continuous narrative going on,  considering that the league starts in August and ends in May, makes you tune in every weekend.

2) Quality of broadcast - Spain, Germany, and Italy too have fairly competitive and high-quality leagues, but they do not  attract as much attention. There can be two reasons for this - timing and quality of broadcast. Timing because the matches in  these leagues start only at midnight for Indian audiences which make them inconvenient. And significantly, the quality of broadcast is way better in the English Premier League. Somehow the cameras seem distant when you are watching La Liga or Bundesliga games, but in most of the EPL games you feel you are much closer to the action. Also, the fact that crowds sound more vociferous and full in EPL grounds and commentators are more dramatic (not in the Saudi commentator GOOOL way :)).

3) Lack of quality choices - For an average Indian sports viewer, there aren't too many places to go to if he wants to view high  quality Indian sport. Of course, there is cricket. But beyond that, there isn't anywhere that you can go to ( the ISL, HIL, Kabbadi and Badminton leagues are very nascent). When you think of the boom that happened in Indian satellite television viewing  after the '96 Cricket World Cup, the EPL was extremely well poised to capture our attention. It was an established league with a  good set of superstars primarily led by David Beckham. I know of so many friends who started following Manchester United primarily due to the Beckham phenomenon. Also, football is a very easy sport to follow. There aren't too many intricacies you need to know to  start following the game.

4) Coolness factor - Just the way watching Hollywood movies is cooler than watching Indian movies, it is quite possible that young kids gravitate more towards Manchester United and not Mahindra United. This is relatively new though, when I was growing up, I didn't notice it among my friends. But, among the current young generation, it does seem to be so.

5) Purity of sport - Cricket has a fundamental flaw, in that its most challenging format, Test cricket, is long and tedious to hold the attention of audiences who cannot afford to spend that much time watching sport. So, the T20 format was created. And T20, for all its thrills and spills, is not something special that you will recall a match from 5 years ago and relive it in your memory. Whereas football doesn't have this issue. It's a game which needs very little tinkering from a rules perspective and it has been the same way since it was created. 90 minutes of high quality sport which is easy to understand and still requires a very high skill level. Should work right? 

6) Franchises are here to stay - Now let's say you support CSK. How many players from CSK are actually from Chennai? There is only one Ashwin who plays regularly. This in no way impedes someone from Chennai when he declares his allegiance towards CSK. Ideally a Kannadiga should support KKR because there are more Karnataka players there than in RCB. I started supporting Arsenal, because at that time they played a brand of football which excited me and I identified with them. You don't have to compulsorily have a direct association with the club you support in the current scheme of things. If you needed that, then Federer would have a very small group of Swiss fans.

So, once you start identifying with a club and start supporting it religiously, your interest deepens. There will be another guy who does the same for another club. And then Manchester United face Chelsea, and thus start Twitter wars.