On Dravid

I love how we sing songs of praise when an icon walks into the sunset. Most of all, I love how fans and columnists write their best lines across newspapers. I was hoping Mumbai Mirror would let Kunal Pradhan do the writing about Dravid and did they made me happy! Rohit Brijnath wrote for Mint and am glad to have discovered him. 


My favourite so far has been the blog by Sidvee. What an outpouring of words. I love the bit where he compares Dravid and punctuation. It is so personal and so close to the writer's heart. 




Kunal Pradhan on Dravid : 


Here was a man, not without faults, who started with limited talent but had an insatiable hunger for self-exploration that allowed him to fit into any role. Ask him to open, he would bat through the innings. Ask him to stand at short leg, he would come up with the sharpest of takes. Ask him to move to slip, he would set a world record for catches. Ask him to keep wickets, he would dive with abandon. Ask him to come down the order in the slog overs, he would completely re-invent his batting.

Rohit Brijnath on Dravid

At the core of the great athlete often resides a self-centred animal. Lit up by the spotlight, the rest of the world falls into his shadow. Once, a former cricketer, his nationality irrelevant, dined at my house and was staggeringly oblivious to my other guests. He was prepared to be questioned, he simply did not have any for them. As if they were the distant, faceless crowd in a tiny stadium.

He wore polished shoes but never an aura. In a world of Gods, he preferred his humanness, an unadorned man battling his own imperfections with a low-key dignity. He was forever conscious of the families he represented (his own, the team, the fans, the game at large) and owned an authentic decency we crave in athletes but rarely find.

Finally, a fan writes about Dravid. Sidvee makes me weep with his lines. 

There is a constant temptation, especially when a cricketer retires, to draw comparisons. We live in a world that loves definitives. It frowns upon ambiguity. We want to determine your exact location in the pantheon. I will refrain from this. I am sure you are tired of being compared to other great Indian batsmen. And I am not about to bore you.

What else will I remember? Hmm. That shirt of yours immaculately tucked in. How did you manage to keep it tucked in every single time? I’ll remember the way you chased the ball to the boundary line, as if you were competing in a hundred-meter race. I’ll remember the intensity with which you studied the pitch before the game, like a geologist, scraping the surface with your palms, examining the grains of sand, gauging the direction of the breeze. You loved all these tiny details, didn’t you?

You’ll hear a gazillion sighs, sighs filled with longing. India 8 for 1 and you sitting in your living room, sipping tea and watching TV. I’ll be surprised if you don’t palpably feel a nation’s collective yearning for a sunnier, glorious past.

Thank you. Its been a privilege


This is another interview of Rahul Dravid ( from Sidvee's blog ) that I need to share. It's the dilemma about legacy and love for sport.  Here's the text from this post :

 I was reading what Ian Thorpe said when he came out of retirement and somebody asked him about his legacy: ‘What are you doing to your legacy by coming back and coming eighth in a race?’ And he said, ‘I can sacrifice my legacy for the love of the sport.

That makes sense. It’s pure, he [Thorpe] still enjoys swimming and he enjoys competing. Sometimes we get too caught up in legacy; what are we going to leave? Sometimes it’s not about that, it’s about the player actually playing at that point in time. He’s not concerned about his legacy, he’s concerned about what actually made him play the game in the first place, which is that love of the game, the desire to compete and play. And that will go at some stage. That probably should be the decision.”