Ears glued to the cricket
This piece originally appeared in Cricinfo:The Long Room on Feb 14, 2010
The generation of Indian cricket fans whose lives straddled the British Raj and the Indian one are a unique lot. One would think that, when it came to picking a cricket team to support, the independence movement would have impelled them to wear the tricolour on their sleeves with pride, but that wasn’t the case. Down south, from where my parents come, the 1950s and 60s bred a distinctive bunch of cricket loyalists.
GS Sundaram was my grand uncle (one of many), and having served the British Raj as a privileged and educated member of an Indian society that was largely illiterate, he managed to achieve a neat bit of mental trickery that allowed him to claim: “I support India but I like English cricket.”
Of course, back then Indian cricket was the equivalent of the Wright brothers’ 1901 glider, while England was more an Airbus A380, so that helped. Everyone knew it was futile supporting India in a match against England, so by the 1950s it was politically correct to admire English cricket while admitting that India had some distance to cover before they could compete as equals.
It also helped that he lived in a hamlet near the southern tip of India, far away from politics and jingoism of Delhi, and was the only man in the village with a radio. That confers a certain kind of power.
His Philips valve radio, the crystal ball that gave him his powers, could barely pick up the BBC, but static or not, GS was Moses. He held court when Ken Barrington unleashed crisp cover-drives and Colin Cowdrey leaned into an on-drive. He translated crackling bits of commentary into expressions like “splendid shot” and “wonderful flick o’ the wrists”, as young kids - my father among them - sat enthralled by the vivid (and often entirely made-up) cricket imagery he painted.
Like most from the radio era, he would often let ears become eyes, reprimanding Ted Dexter for needlessly chasing one wide outside the off stump, and demonstrating to his willing wards the right way to defend off the back foot. Barrington was, as far as he was concerned, the greatest batsman in the world. Ken was poetry, and GS would imagine his favourite poet, Keats, writing an ode to the square-drive, while he daydreamed about daffodils growing in Xanadu and Kubla Khan singing the rhyme of the ancient mariner.
He could afford to mix things up a bit. English literature was both mandatory and mostly inaccessible in India back then. Just being able to speak English put one on a pedestal so high that people rarely cared for the content of your speech. When his wife scolded him for spending his time fantasizing about Sir Colin’s majestic straight drives at times he ought to have been at work, he would respond with Shakespeare and ask if Mrs GS could hold a candle to the ethereal beauty of Desdemona. GS was an Anglophile but a harmless one.
Things became more difficult when Mr Sobers et al started to showcase to the world glimpses of what would eventually become the Caribbean juggernaut of the 80s. GS had to make some choices then. Would Peter May and Dexter still rule his cricketing heart, or would he have to start supporting West Indies? The colour of his skin eventually prevailed and he made an exception. When Rohan Kanhai faced Fred Trueman, he prayed for half-volleys. He also expounded on the evils of slavery to the kids gathered around his radio.
But Barrington continued to be his hero. If somebody was silly enough to make a careless remark about how Neil Harvey was really the better batsman, the radio would be switched off and the offending party removed from the premises. If Ken edged one to first slip, the radio would be switched off and the kids sent out so he could recover from his disappointment privately. Given the rarity of Test matches in those times, every garbled, static-filled “splendid shot” from the willow of Barrington was a rare thing, a treasure to be cherished.
Cricket was (and mostly still is) for most Indians a prohibitively expensive game to play. The village my father hailed from had a cricket association that would scrounge around to be able to afford their quota of two cricket balls (which cost Rs. 3 each, in the 50s) each month. Batsmen would be requested to avoid hitting the ball into the nearby river, as that tended to cause unplanned budgetary overdrafts. The leather balls themselves arrived all the way from England, and lasted about 10 days worth of cricket each. When a few over-enthusiastic improvisers indulged in a few too many agricultural heaves into the river, it was benefactors like Sundaram who coughed up the rupees and annas to buy more equipment.
It was common for batsmen to wear a pad on just the front leg, so that overall wear and tear on gear was kept down to a minimum. Indians from that era were well versed in the art of jugaad, of making do, but for some reason no one wanted to skimp when it came to the gentleman’s game. Scorebooks would be procured from afar, and a good one-rupee coin used for the toss (not just any four- or eight-anna coin), and whites were mandatory.
Cricket was a ritual. Its arcane rules, the paraphernalia and the sheer minutiae involved in every game, all amounted to practically a religious experience for my father’s generation. For conservative, religious and finicky gentlemen like my grand uncle, the rules of the game bore a similarity to the Vedas.
GS Sundaram, Bachelor of Arts, Gopalasamudram, Tamil Nadu, India, passed away well before innovations like limited-overs cricket reared their heads. I suspect he might not have enjoyed them. He lived his life in a more leisurely era, one that never considered time worth saving. He never ever watched a game of Test cricket in his life, and yet he managed to instill an intense passion for cricket in my father’s generation. They, on the other hand, had an easier time getting us excited about cricket. They just had to switch on the TV.
30 April 2010 · Comments
The Great Indian Irate Crowd
This piece originally appeared in the New Indian Express on 20th Feb 2009
This is a scene that, like the proverbial policemen arriving on the scene well after the Indian hero has done his um..heroic deeds, repeats itself daily in several airports around the world. An Indian airline runs into a problem - engine trouble, tire puncture, wing falls off et al, a flight gets cancelled, and the perennially financially challenged airline’s pared down staff have to deal with the Great Indian Irate Crowd.
A small bunch of unempowered and underpaid employees of the airline first have to deal with a mob of people, all of whom believe that their need for alternate flying arrangements is the most pressing. They form a line, not perpendicular to the counter, but parallel to the counter and soon several arms are waving all manner of documents in the face of the harried airline reps.
As the shouting match intensifies, the harried airline employees build defensive fortifications around themselves. Whatever little hope they had of even marginally addressing some of the crowd’s concerns has by now vanished and emergency shutdown procedures are initiated for their collective auditory apparatus.
Once people are done with trying to (and failing to) prioritize their need to immediately travel from point A to point B, the digressions start. One or two elderly, and eloquent gentlemen will bemoan this state of affairs and paint the entire airline company as a bunch of child molesters. More folk will chime in and provide more anecdotal evidence to strengthen this accusation. “This happened to me last time also. These people, na, will never change.”
After a few more ad hominem accusations are thrown around, one chap will now, almost on cue, raise his voice a few notches and start doing the whole rage routine. “My son is getting married tomorrow, and because of you, his life is going to be ruined”, he will scream. The moment that happens, a few more will realize that articulating a potentially traumatic and life-threatening need to fly right now is a good strategy to pursue and soon, someone will add “My daughter has an entrance exam tomorrow” or “I have a heart-bypass surgery in a few hours”.
Once the invading horde realizes that the airline staff’s castle is not easily breached thus, the crowd will bring in the battering rams. “I demand to speak to your supervisor RIGHT NOW”. Yes, now that it looks like this lot is not going to fly, what better to do than insult one’s only hope of a seat by pulling rank and hierarchy and refusing to accept that they might just, given a little chance, address the problem.
The sad thing is that Indian crowds do not do this to non-Indian airlines when they mess up. They will behave like civilized folk, form lines, ask politely for compensation (and use received compensation to do some duty-free shopping) and travel happily on the next flight. Somehow, when dealing with our own kind, we go in with a preconceived notion that it’s all a grand conspiracy by the airline to cheat us and that showing a few clueless employees that the angry Indian can be a force to be reckoned with is the only strategy that is available to us.
50 years of red tape and inefficiencies may have held India back economically, but in my opinion, the more damaging effect it has had on our psyche is the Great Indian Irate Crowd’s inability to believe that improvement is even remotely possible. Yes, our people, na, will never change
30 April 2010 · Comments
Hi-tech schools, low-tech admission process
This piece originally appeared in the New Indian Express on 20th Dec 2009
It’s a cold day in the Madras winter, well, at least what passes for “cold” and “winter” in these parts, but you get the mood I’m trying to set. The queue snakes its way from a small window on a tastelessly designed cube of a building to a large, foreboding gate and out into the chaotic street where cars and two-wheelers are not “parked” as much as being generally “stacked” like clothes in a teenager’s closet. The middle aged folk in the queue are twitchy and nervous, and could collectively make a year’s worth of housing loan EMI payments for a doctor who specialized in reducing blood pressure. They keep looking anxiously at their watches (and mobile phones) and soon enough, a huge pile of nails liberated from fingers forms a snake like skin around the queue.
To add more drama to this already volatile mix, a watchman hovers around, and taking inspiration from the spiritual calmness of those good folks at Tirumala, suddenly screams the Tamil equivalent of “Jaragandi” at this queue. The crowd is flustered, and some attempt to politely ask the watchman how they are supposed to move when the small window at the mouth of the queue still remains stubbornly closed. The watchman does not seem to pay attention. It is only once a year, on this particular day, that he gets to treat adult humans like children and he is not going to be swayed by some trivial logic about closed windows.
Then all of a sudden, the small window creaks open and the crowd gets agitated. All semblance of a queue disappears as people madly rush to the window to receive their manna from heaven, an admission form to a “prestigious” school in Madras.
The clerk at the window, who has been carefully chosen for his ability to transfer anger arising from domestic troubles at his home to the hapless person currently on the other side of the grilled window, now demands to know the parents’ antecedents. A 10-generation family tree and affidavits from the Shankaracharya (or the Pope) are apparently mandatory. The parent must also produce a letter from their employer to the effect that their jobs are non-transferrable. They must also personally connect with GPS satellites and estimate the distance from the footstep of their home to the gate of the school within a 1 nanometre margin of error.
Some of the more “prestigious” schools will even have TV media stationed outside, to advertise to the rest of the world that, even more so than proving Fermat’s last theorem, which kids graduating from these schools will likely not be able to do, the most difficult thing in the world is getting an application form to admit one’s kid in one of these (Tirumala like) temples of learning. My suggestion - if schools are taking the Tirupathi approach, they might as well learn the art of managing queues from them.
The real irony - schools that now charge for “Computer classes” from L.K.G onwards apparently do not possess the common sense to make admission forms available on a website, you know, on that thing we now call the internet?
30 April 2010 · Comments
Oh hello
I am the chap who writes here. Occasionally, a few misguided editors in mainstream media get this notion that I can churn out something semi-coherent for them. As and when it catches my fancy, I might choose to post some of them here. A quick analysis of the hate mail I get for my column in the New Indian Express reveals that I have grumpy old readers. It is only fair that I cater to the angry young readers online as well.
30 April 2010 · Comments
Peaceful Troublemaker
Flickr Images
Copyright © Theme created by 
