My Tribute to Rahul Dravid

The last update in my FB wall said "If I was any good at writing, I should have come up something like this" and I posted Arun Venugopal's excellently worded article on Rahul Dravid for Sportstar. (http://www.sportstaronnet.com/stories/20120322507102400.htm). As soon as I posted it, something dawned on me, just for that one fleeting moment, and I realized what it was. The great man Rahul Dravid whom I admired the most, wouldn't have posted someone else article to describe the way he would have felt about his heroes retirement. He would have taken all the painstaking effort to come up with one on his own. Although the only effort that I took is to waste three hours in my office to write this, I hope it echoes every fans sentiments and their feeling for my great hero.

The Retirement

And then it happened. On March 9th 2012, Rahul Dravid announced his retirement from all forms of international cricket. Although I had been preparing to hear this press conference for about a day, with all the rumours floating around, when the moment came, I cannot help but feel that tinge of sadness. It was one of those moments where you shake away that couple of drops on eyes when someone you had known all your life is moving to different city and you might not see them for couple of years. The press conference was short, crisp and that trademark sweat on the forehead was to be seen (even in his retirement press conference). There were no tears or talk of glory - the word 'process' was mentioned few times - no names were named and everyone were thanked. This was not Showtime on Primetime Telivision but just a formal retirement announcement.

And all importantly it was on a Friday and not on a Monday morning. It showed the charactor of the man. Everybody involved in the PR business knows that the worst day to announce something good and the best day to announce something bad to avoid negative publicity was on a Friday or a holiday (if you are still wondering about this theory, Tiger Woods first press conference, after his infidelities became world known was on a Friday to avoid negative publicity). The rationale behind this that the newspaper readership or online news viewership would be at its lowest on weekends as most of the people would be busy shaking that hangover from Friday evening, or busy with family and friends. There would be no after work drinks discussion on the importance of Rahul Dravid's or his value to the Indian cricket, no small talks in break room while drinking water. No one would even bother browsing and reading about the great man online from home. People would rather prefer a matinee movie rather than IBN live. In my own selfish way, I was hoping the retirement would get enough press coverage and Dravid would get the accolades and the type of 'off the feild farwell' that he deserved to get something akin to Shane Warne and Glenn Mcrath after the famous final Ashes test in Sydney on that fine January afternoon in 2008. And to be fair it did get enough credit and more. It was heartwarming and the best article which epitomizes Rahul Dravid the person was from Rohit Brijanth for Livemint.

I remember

-that my first memory of Rahul Dravid was way back in 1996 against SL, it was the very first match that Sachin Tendulkar captianed (incidently I think he scored a century and India lost that match-just a piece of STAT- no pun intended), Dravid was run out for couple of runs somewhere close to the end of the Indian innings. I definately remember cheering for Dravid during his 148 in Jo'berg and I had become a fanatic by the time he had scored his 144* a matching saving innings in rained test match against WI in Georgetown. It gave me a sense of satisfaction that I watched the entire innings of 233 in Adelaide bunking couple of days of college and 270 in R'Pindi which was during my semester study holdidays. The monumental Pindi innings lasted for 3 days-few balls on Day 1, the entire day 2 and almost till Tea on day 3. I can say with pride that I watched those innings, except for the nature calling bio breaks during the playing time.

-I could still feel the joy when I saw the 50 of 22, one late evening in a bus-stand in rural Tamil Nadu and the 3 sixes of Samit Patel during the only Twenty-20 that Rahul Dravid played. My only regret in both the innings was there was no Tony Greig or David Llyod to commentate, similar to Sachin's finest hour in Sharjah, whereas it was the monotone of Sanjay Majerakar and Wasim Akram respectively. Is that called destiny?

-the days when I would feel the butterfly during his innings in 2008, when I would pray GOD and watch with one eye closed when Mitchell Jhonson was running in to bowl.

-the sweat in my palms after the 136 against England at Mohali. I remember that feeling in my stomach after the 20 ball duck in the second innings that not many people seemed to remember. I hoped that was not the last innings Rahul Dravid would be remembered for.
-The sense of fullfilment in my 20 year cricket watching came, when after waking up in the wee hours watching Rahul Dravid bat and pile up consecutive centuries on consecutive Saturdays and the 3rd on the next Sunday (lucky me) in the recently concluded series against England.

After Retirement Contemplation

Only a handful of cricketers have played cricket, learnt from it and remade their game to suit to the needs of ever changing game of cricket. Most players loose thier fluidity, their ability to change with times and redifined terms and formats of cricket. And it is a self-mastery and the kind of dedication out of this world that saw the man, whose press conferences and oration that bespoke a rare brand honesty and intelligence that extended his career to the kind of greatness that few can claim to have acheieved or even contemplated to acheive. No pure batsman who have not kept wickets for their state have kept wickets for their country and none of the legendary middle order batsman ( one and 2 drop) took up opening.

I have been reading lot of stuff on the web, some well written and some gibberish tributes to Rahul Dravid and I noticed 2 imortant things that everybody seemed to resort too.

1. Dravid was not as talented as some of his peers but compensated for it by his sheer power of will and perseverance.

2. Dravid to Sachin Tendulkar is what William Ponsford was to Donald Bradman and what GR Vishwanath was to Sunil Gavaskar or adding in another anology is what Scotty Pipen was for Michel Jordan in terms of their contribution.

This, I would agree and would make an wonderful arguement with Virender Sehwag or VVS Laxman but not Rahul Dravid. As the great Sachin Tendulkar himself said there is no tribute is worth or can describe someone who had played 168 matches and scored 36 centuries. This is just in terms of stats which people refer to, but not in terms of their contribution to Indian cricket, not in terms of playing that significant innings abroad that would put the Indian cricket on World cricketing map and earn the respect of opponents from outside the subcontinent.

As for the first statement, it is a no brainer. Name atleast 50 cricket players who had that natural talent and technique to adapt to different format of the games and score runs, the way Dravid did. If you can. Then name all the players who were more talented than Dravid and check that against the number of people who played international cricket and you would know Dravid's talent percentile.

And its been 10 days since Dravid retirement. As I am aimlessly typing Rahul Dravid in google (actually I just hit 'R' and google does the rest for me) and sorting it by the hour, I am wondering if I would feel the same joy that I got when Dravid scored a century, if I hold the record for watching the most number of balls in Test match cricket since I have almost watched all of Dravid's innings in the last ten years or would I watch a cricket match in the wee hours to just see Dravid feilding in the slips.

My favourite movie had a tagline which said
"How much can you possibly know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?". And there was Dravid fighting for Indian cricket, for the last 16 years which said it wall. He was a Gladiator.
Thankyou Rahul Dravid. Thank you 13288 times.

And then It Happened

The about me in orkut profile says ' Punter in Paradise'. I am not living in a paradise and for sure I am not a punter. I try to reason about everything within the realms of my little grey cells. I just had this phrase to sound cool, just like any other guy at my age, who is single and ready to mingle would have. But I never thought this tag line could fit me one day until this happened.

It was another one of my trips to Edison, NJ (actually I lost count on the number times I have been there.) The plan was to go to Atlantic city which is renowned as the Vegas of the East and to spend some time in the casino's, beaches and return to Houston on Sunday to face the Monday morning blues.  As an afterthought it was one of those trips where everything fell into place like a T. The wheels of the red Chevy were into motion by 1230 in the afternoon and the shit we were talking in the car wouldn't make anyone associated with me proud.

It was about 2030 when I started to gamble for the second time in the slot machines. I started with a $20 bill and went to $38(lucky me) and then lost some and stopped at $20 again. This was my first time gambling and I was pretty happy with the way things were and to be in a no gain-no loss situation that I found myself in. One advantage, when you play with high risk in slot machines is it does not put you into the torture of slow death like roulette or poker. All you need to do is press a key and wait for the screen to flicker with all the symbols and and if you get few in series or parallel you make some(more) money.

Coming back, I again restarted with $20 and I was reduced to $6 in no time. At that I thought the only way I could make money from a casino is to join Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan  but then ......I still remember the exact moment as if it were a few seconds back. It was my last chance because I didn't want to loose more money and I pressed the key and I heard the sound---cling, kling, cling-----sounding like a Mandolin or the sound of coins falling from above. The amount started to increase from 6 to 60 to 120 to 180. All my friends gathered around me to peek into the screen which went berserk  and finally ceased at $249.

Now I could understand why people get addicted to gambling and always have notion that they could win something with the last roll of the dice, no matter what the odds they are confronted with. It's pretty funny that I never got the urge to gamble more. I made myself a promise that I would never gamble for more than $20 in my life even if I feel I could win all the riches in the world with the next few dollars.

With gambling there is always a probability you can make money, no matter how much you loose but the irony is possibility of the outcome is low.

Remember the quote 

' Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy'. Its really true coz if you think you can win riches by gambling you will go down in the casino books as one more looser as Tragedy and Trump (Donald Trump- Casino owner) go hand in hand..

Irressistable force Vs Immovable object

I was watching Tashan the other day and I suddenly remembered one of my favourite film's and also one, I consider to be an all time best from Bollywood industry titled 'SWADES-We the people'. The fact that Tashan was utter trash is really a minuscule matter here. The sine qua non of SWADES was surely its screenplay (mainly climax) where the protagonist resigns his NASA job and comes back to his homeland. That was awesome. Real best.PERIOD.

The author himself is one of those zillions of student's who after his board and entrance exams thought of one of those cliched phrases ' If only I had one more chance'. I always believed I was one of those guys who came till the very end and failed to step to that next level by a small margin (like the one that differentiates a 95% score to a 89% score).  Then I asked myself a question ' Will I be one of those Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering graduates working in a software company?? (I didn't associate myself on anything related to coding.)

Fast Forward----2 years----I am in USA working as an intern Flight operations and Performance engineer with Continental Airlines, living life in my own terms with 'hell lot ta fun'. But now for the past few weeks I have been asking the same questions but with a twist ' Will I be one of those millions of Desi's to be lost in this jungle of Indians working in America??' The time when I thought that the new land, culture, people, places, ---u name it--was cool is a distant memory . It still paints a rosy picture for sure, but its more like comparing Da Vinci's Mona Lisa to a pirated India FM downloaded picture perfect wallpaper. That's what America is. A pirated picture perfect wallpaper.  Its Tamil New Years day here and we (I echo the sentiments of many of my friends and most other people here) are doing our assignments, racing against deadlines, applying for jobs, working our ass off just for one reason--namely to live a fantasy life.

It is very difficult to define what a fantasy life is. In general it symbolizes a life with no worries with all the material comforts or the life that people would have dreamt during their teens , hearing stories about out neighbours, second cousin or uncles wife's sister's grandchild living in foreign countries. 

This is where a movie like SWADES becomes great. It puts things in perspective and brings a sense of balance to life and the way we need to look at it. If the fantasy life is like an irresistable force then the values, culture and family, a sense that has been imbibed in one's formative years is an immovable object.

Its pretty difficult to compare an irresistable force with an immovable object and choose one among them. Now you would know why SWADES is one of those beauty or what you call a timeless classic because it helps you choose one.

Dravid or Dhoni: The debate is on

I never thought I will be posting a blog one day. But here I am.

I haven't been doing anything concrete for the last few weeks. The job that I loved the most for the last 8 months is getting stressful and throwing some conundrums to which I have no answer. This coupled with the fact that I am staying alone in a city where there is no one I can relate with is proving to be far more difficult than I initially thought it would be. But is this the reason why I am blogging?? No.  I would prefer to play a game of crazy taxi in Face book than writing some s#$t in the Internet.

I have been reading stuff in the Internet about the victorious Team India returning from Down Under and how Mahendra Singh Dhoni inspired a bunch of tyro's to glory.  That apart I could see few people praising the Indian captain far too much (most common in India and Indian cricket) . The fact that I could not digest is that a few respectable critics  hail Dhoni as a  great finisher of games and are also talking about how he copes with the pressure cooker situation and the way he wins matches with suave and grace, even better than his predecessor, who the same people say relinquished captaincy cos he wasn't strong enough mentally and  couldn't bat well. This is absolutely ridiculous and unwarranted.

It leads to two questions

 Is Dhoni a better captain than Rahul Dravid?

I feel we are drawing early conclusions about Dhoni's captaincy and are hailing him as the next big thing to Indian cricket after S.R.Tendulkar. I just want all of you to remember that we made rapid strides under Dravid in his first season as captain in the aftermath of Ganguly era. In fact we even made a record for winning 16 consecutive times chasing. But I guess there's a lot more time before we answer this question and even debate about it.

The second one is even more appalling;

Is Dhoni a better player or finisher(Test/ One Day...I don't consider Twenty20 as cricket) than the man regarded as The Great Wall of Indian cricket?

This one is synonymous to asking if Himesh Reshamiya is better than A.R.Rahman. Himesh Reshamiya is no doubt a great talent but would he match the greatest of them all-The Mozart of South Asia who has been churning tunes with his keybord  giving us classic after classic for more than a decade(Roja to Jodha Akbar).

Similarly Dhoni, who according to me has played few match winning innings and fewer under pressure,  can and will never become a Rahul Dravid. Don't get me wrong, Dhoni is a good player with excellent temperament but that does not make him a Dravid or Tendulkar, who have and are playing with doggy ruthless determination of a Muhammad Ali and  the fineese of Federer.

Dravid has sculptured many match winning innings and bailed India out of trouble,  with his bat using it like a paint brush few times and like chisel and saw innumerable number of times. I would not dwell into the statistics here as almost all Dravid's masterpieces are etched in the memories of everyone and more importantly in the folklore of Indian cricket. People say Dhoni is flamboyant, stylish, suave, urbane. Does this make him a better player than Dravid? The qualities mentioned here are more needed for becoming the next Jamed Bond but definately not for a great cricket batsman. If these were the characteristics of  a great player then wouldn't Mark Waugh have been 13584297 times better than that Stephen Rodger Waugh whom every former and current player regard highly as batsman and as a captain?

Give Dhoni his due, he deserves it but at the same time don't tarnish the greatness of Dravid. Its a cliche that Dravid has been the pillar of strength around which the Indian cricket has renovated itself after it's dismal 90's. Dravid is the like 510hp, 9000rpm, V8 engine of the F340 Scuderia. People looking at it will never admire the Ferrari for its power but for the sleek, posh scarlet red exterior finish, as we admire Dhoni the brand more than Dhoni the cricketer and get confused between them both.

Just answer this and you can come to a conclusion about the Dravid-Dhoni debate.

 Can Slim Shady be ever better the 5Th symphony?

Did I label Dravid as Beethoven and Dhoni as Eminem?

U Bet...

PS: Inspiration have been drawn from the style of writing of Nirmal Shekar and Brain Glanville of Sportstar.