A cricketing anthology usually offers multiple delights, delving into the sport’s history, offering nostalgia’s warm notes, and helping us deal with various perspectives, be it from players or journalists. Seen in that light, Indian Cricket: Then and Now, edited by former first-class cricketer Venkat Sundaram, ticks most of the boxes.
Want to know the Parsi and royals’ connect with this game? Dive into the opening bit from Raju Mukherji, and from there on either read in chronological order or pick chapters you fancy. It could be a profile on M.S. Dhoni or Shashi Tharoor waxing eloquent about his fandom for this particular game. This could also be about establishing a connect with a writer you idolised from childhood and so we do have the late K.N. Prabhu and R. Mohan’s despatches.
Fresh look
In the foreword, Rahul Dravid, legend and also an avid reader of the elegantly written piece, states: “I have always held cricket writers in high esteem.” And these sporting chroniclers lend muscle and the odd chuckle to this 341-page tome. There is R. Kaushik describing stylist G.R. Viswanath and Vijay Lokapally focussing his lenses on Virat Kohli. Incidentally, both these gentlemen have written books on these two great individuals and it is apt that Sundaram requested them to distil their impressions into a few pages.
Other veterans like Clayton Murzello, Suresh Menon and Partab Ramchand also dip their pens and the ink emerges with fresh tales about mighty players. From the late Vijay Merchant to Dilip Vengsarkar, players too express their thoughts with the latter unabashedly declaring: “Lord’s has indeed been my ‘Theatre of Dreams’.” Meanwhile, former India spinner V.V. Kumar delves into anecdotes that have a theoretical touch and a humorous vein and then he gets serious and announces: “No bowler can be termed great unless he can run through the opposition on a good wicket.”
Diverse voices
The book isn’t just about players and journalists, even if they do occupy a prominent slice of the papyrus on offer. There are viewpoints from match officials as evident in V.K. Ramaswamy’s ‘My Umpiring Journey’ and good old Narottam Puri delves into cricket and commentary. And surely you cannot keep Shashi Tharoor away from the game and he offers a personal insight into the way he embraced cricket and reveals his childhood fondness for Budhi Kunderan. “It was exhilarating stuff, and I was hooked for life,” Tharoor recalls.
Being the quintessential wordsmith, Tharoor draws threads from Salman Rushdie, and also finds a link between Kunderan, Virender Sehwag and Rishabh Pant, all being free-spirited players. Sundaram has done well in collating diverse voices and dishing out a cricketing chorus that can be sampled as individual units or as an evolving monolith. The choice rests with the reader.
Indian Cricket: Then and Now
(Edited by Venkat Sundaram)