How Sachin Destroyed My Life: but gave me an All Access Pass to the world of Cricket

by Vikram Sathaye

  99 percent of betting and spot fixing happens on bowlers. After all this, one wonders why we still call it a batsman’s game.

  India must be the only country in the world which wanted them to wear clothes. I feel bad for the girls because despite not having anything to do with big money, auctions, teams or FERA violations they were the ones who suffered the most! They just came here to be cheerleaders. This was one of the only industries where India was hiring foreigners instead of exporting our workforce. It was a matter of pride. The courts however didn’t like cheerleaders and the BCCI was asked to justify their presence.

  The cheerleaders helped players in more ways than one by distracting the crowds and taking the pressure away from the players. There were times in the IPL where a player had dropped a catch and no one even noticed it because the crowd was busy ogling at the cheerleaders.

  While match fixing has been a constant menace that needs to be dealt with strictly, one also needs to seriously consider the option of legalising betting at least during the IPL.

  Since the IPL is all about entertainment, the BCCI should legalise betting during the event and take it one notch higher with innovations like mic-linking the fielders directly to the bookies instead of the commentators. It would be so much fun. Actually commentators should be replaced by bookies.

  “Agli gaind, rate 5:1, accha shot, abhi rate 50:40.” Would be far more entertaining than some of the old school commentators. We always complained about subjects in school not having any practical application. I think the study of probability was one of the best examples of applied mathematics and our teachers who taught us that subject were the original bookies. Besides bookies, the only other people who made a career out of probability were those working at the MET department. Bookies should be actually given awards for taking math to a new level. A hard working math teacher would only make about Rs 10,000 per month, but a bookie…any guesses?

  I’m not surprised that betting is rampant. We have speculated on everything in life. For God’s sake even our education system was based on 21 Probable Question Sets for board exams. If we can speculate in education why can’t we speculate in sport?

  It’s interesting that 99 percent of betting and spot fixing happens on bowlers. After all this, one wonders why we still call it a batsman’s game.

  18

  Are Women Responsible For The Sporting State Of Our Country?

  Australia was playing Sri Lanka in the summer of 1999. A Lankan batsmen went the aerial route. Steve Waugh ran towards the ball and so did Jason Gillespie. A few seconds later there was a collision between the two. Everyone ran towards them to see what happened. Blood oozed out of Waugh’s face and he was holding his nose with pain. The story goes that the moment Ponting reached there, Steve Waugh told him, “Cover my face mate, I don’t want my wife to see me in this state on TV because if she does she may not allow me to play again.”

  See the link between a man’s sporting career and his partner’s attitude? If you ever chat about cricket on a date, the chances of the girl wanting to meet you again for another date are next to nothing. And God alone can save you if your passion is Greeko Roman wrestling. Girls! You need to understand this. Guys will do anything to be able to spend more time with you. So, if you don’t discuss sports with men, then how would Indian men be motivated to become champions?

  Once, ten of my college friends joined a French class because it had all the pretty girls. They had nothing whatsoever to do with Napoleon and they didn’t even eat croissants or foie gras back then. So you have to understand that if you want to encourage men to take up sports, you need to start giving more bhav to young sportsmen and maybe take up a sport yourself.

  Everybody says India doesn’t have a sporting culture. I am a firm believer that only women can change this sad state of affairs and the least they can do is to take sportsmen seriously.

  So college going girls, for heaven’s sake please don’t fall for those sweet talking guys on expensive bikes with funky hairdos because then we’ll end up creating a nation of losers. If the hottest girl in college starts dating a Kho Kho player, no matter how “verny” he is considered, trust me, the biggest sporting league in this country will be the Indian Kho Kho League.

  The next time a guy gives you an expensive gift, flip it back on his face, and tell him that if he really wants to date you he needs to do a minimum discuss throw of 62.5 metres else he disqualifies himself. Needless to add that if boys channelise their energies in sports, it would keep them away from eve-teasing, spitting competitions and random chest thumping.

  Take the bold and the beautiful women in the eras gone by, say Goddess Sita. She made Purshottam Ram not only lift one of the heaviest bows, but also shoot arrows accurately if he wanted to win her hand in the swayamvar. This means that she not only wanted to test him in archery but also in weight-lifting. These are the kind of benchmarks present-day women need to set for men.

  Draupadi, another spunky woman, made Lord Arjuna not only shoot arrows but also do it by looking at the reflection below in the water. Parents of girls shouldn’t hesitate to ask potential grooms to run 100 metres in under 11 seconds along with having their Engineering-MBA degrees and jobs in the US.

  Only when you have women who raise the bar will you produce a Lord Ram or a Lord Arjuna or a good high jumper. Unfortunately whenever you ask any actress or model about the kind of man she fancies, her typical answer will be, “He has to be this prince, who’ll make me feel special and give me surprises.” Imagine if Sita would have told Lord Ram, “I’ll marry you if you give me surprises everyday!” Women should shout out loud and say, “I will feel special only when he beats Serge Bubka’s 53rd World Record.” Set standards like these and there will be a change like never before. If men can go to war over women, then trust me pole vaulting is nothing.

  Another benefit of building an interest in sports is that you can easily manipulate your man and make him do things that you want. So if you get up in the morning and tell your husband that Virat Kohli is great to watch, especially “off his legs” he will start pressing your legs that very moment. At a time when divorce rates have shot up drastically due to incompatibility and disagreements between couples, a survey report on divorces in India says that watching cricket features amongst the least of the problems. Counsellors are of the opinion that often the only thing that couples agreed on was that Sachin is the greatest batsman in the world. A well-informed woman will ensure that her priority list of demands will directly coincide with moments of the Indian team’s success because those are the few moments when you can predict your man’s mood.

  Though many women still complain that their husbands are forever watching cricket, there is a deeper philosophy here that you need to understand. Men need a high to survive. They were hunters and killed animals to satisfy that high. Killing animals is illegal now and going to Godrej Nature’s basket and buying methi and flax seeds doesn’t give us that high. Till recently, the urge was satisfied because there were so many wars and skirmishes. Now the only battle we fight is with our wives and we can’t win those in the interest of maintaining peace. So the testosterone urge remains unsatisfied which men try to address by watching high intensity sport because after a certain age sex is not an option. So by supporting India in cricket or cheering their favourite IPL team, we try to achieve this through surrogate means.

  Women also need to understand that retired men are prone to losing the plot. They have an intrinsic need to advise and if left unsupervised, they would want to apply management theories to even your menstrual cycle. Therefore I advise women, that it is in your interest that your husband is busy watching cricket than trying something embarrassing. The moral of the story is that if you don’t want your husband to play games with you, allow him to watch a game.

  The best option of course, would be for all women to take up sports themselves. This would also change the benchmarks for the entire family. India being a patriarchal society, the man of the house alwa
ys wants to dominate. So if his wife runs 100 metres in 11 seconds, he will want to better that just to prove his superiority. Now imagine 500 million men wanting to do this, wouldn’t we create at least one Usain Bolt and a couple of P.T. Ushas?

  There are a lot of advantages of having women actively involved in sports. Imagine having Mary Kom as your mother. Besides the level of security, taking her to a PTA meetings would be a different experience altogether. Imagine a teacher saying, “Mrs Kom, your son is useless, he doesn’t study at all,” and Boom!!! One would never be scared of small things like “he gets 3/100 in Maths”. I’m not saying Mary Kom would behave that way, but the possibility was entertaining for someone like me who dreaded accompanying my mom to these meetings.

  Stop Dowry And Indian Men Will Start Winning Gold Medals

  One of the worst advices trotted out in Hindu homes is that winning is not important, participating is. As a result, no one wants to achieve anything in sport, they just want to participate. For years India has just been a participating nation in many international events, rarely winning a medals. No wonder then that most of the Olympic contingents from India have had more administrators than sportsmen.

  I wish my mother was Mary Kom, then I would never be worried about attending PTA meetings.

  One of the drawbacks is the lack of excitement Indians have for that small piece of yellow metal. India imports almost 50 percent of its gold in the form of jewellery. We buy gold for everything from celebrating the birth of a child to when we have extra cash lying around. We even have a festival called Dhanteras which is considered auspicious for buying gold. For years dirty Indian men have been accepting tonnes of free gold in the form of dowry from their wives and in-laws. Do you think any Indian man would work hard for 4 years to win a gold plated medal at the Olympic Games? Especially since the gold medals awarded consist of 80 percent silver. It just doesn’t make sense for Indians.

  Most sportsmen do not get much respect in Indian society. Imagine you go to a wedding and you are standing next to a doctor and suddenly there is an introduction parade. The host will say, “Meet Mr Ranade, he is an orthopedic surgeon and meet Mr Sathaye, he plays some game, what is your game? Ya ya malkhamb, Ya. He won the bronze medal in the Bangladesh Malkhamb Asian Cup.” Do you think anyone would even nod in appreciation?

  Unfortunately we cannot convince the IOC to change the chemical composition of medals at the Olympics just to motivate Indian sportsmen. The only other solution is for the government to enforce stronger anti–dowry measures thereby limiting the easy supply of gold and creating a genuine need to work hard for it.

  Why Is Sports Not A Major Part Of The Education System?

  When most developed and developing countries have a systematic sports talent spotting programme, we are still debating whether sports should be part of the school curriculum. I think educationists need to understand that apart from teaching Trigonometry and Tropic of Capricorn, the most important quality to inculcate in students is how to become a good human being which can only happen when they know the values of integrity, teamwork and leadership. A team sport is one of the best ways to teach these values in an interesting manner. This is the best case study method of teaching students the core values of life and that too without any pressure. Organisations spend lakhs of rupees to invite eminent sportsmen to speak to their senior management about lessons in sport but schools are still trying to figure out if sports makes any sense.

  Every now and then there is a diktat from some education board that grace marks for sports in school will be cancelled. For those of you who don’t know, students in school get 25 marks if they have represented their state in any sport. I am not sure that this is the best idea to encourage sports in school. Would they say, “I am going to score 100 runs today because I’ll then use my grace marks to pass my geography exams.” A better option would have been if they allowed the kids to skip Geography because that would probably encourage them to score 3 centuries in a row! For some strange reason the system believed that all sportsmen get 31 percent marks and they need 4 percent to get through.

  The worst thing is that it is called grace marks!

  “By the Grace of God, I bestow upon you 25 marks for your progress.”

  The term “Grace” means “Favour” and sportsmen are made to feel like they have been granted a favour! That’s what sums up the state of sports and its importance in Indian schools. The other students therefore look upon the guy as someone who is good for nothing and has only managed to get through because of some charity granted to him in the form of marks! Only when the system starts referring to these marks as “Achievement Marks” will India produce a regular stream of badminton champions.

  I remember the sheer disrespect one had for sports in school. None of my teachers had ever visited a gymnasium. The PT teacher was someone who was the lowest in the value chain in terms of qualification, pay as well as physical stature. He or she was selected more out of PITY, than any knowledge of PT. The most significant thing they did was to check whether our white shoes were white or not. One would never want to emulate them. The reason most people want to look fit today is because they are inspired by celebrities like Salman and Hrithik. Now try remembering your PT teacher and see if you ever aspired to be like him.

  Why Breaking Window Panes Is Important To Be A Better Batsman

  For years we took pride that Gavaskar could play the straight drive well because in the bylanes of Girgaum there was no other place he could hit the ball. Really? Should we be proud of this? If he had adequate access to infrastructure wouldn’t he have played more strokes and maybe made 20,000 runs instead?

  It is not at all easy to play cricket or any other sport especially in a city like Mumbai where most of us live in apartment complexes the size of matchboxes or where schools and colleges have play areas the size of play schools. Some of us found our way to cricket grounds even if they were way too far away from where we lived but the rest of us tried to create a sporting venue wherever we were and these included lobbies, drawing rooms, corridors and adjoining balconies.

  The point was that everyone in India wanted to play cricket and in the absence of any decent facilities managed do with whatever place we could find. Looking at the infrastructural situation and the builder lobby, I doubt whether we will ever produce any sportsmen from the cities anymore. Where one would see a cricket ground, a builder would see a colony of skyscraper buildings with super built up area and an FSI of 3. Our vision is also restricted to not more than 5 yards because of the number of buildings around us and therefore there is no batsmen coming out from cities like Mumbai because if you have never seen beyond 5 yards how will you see a ball coming from 22 yards at 140 kmph?

  Unfortunately playing within building compounds is the single reason that we did not have big hitters for the longest time in the Indian cricket team. Indian batsmen couldn’t hit freely because if they did, 3 months of their dads’ salary would go in repairing broken window glasses in the vicinity.

  Once someone had broken a glass in the building, playing cricket would automatically stop for around 2 weeks because every kid would be scared of the sports hating uncle who would come down and create a scene because invariably it was either his bedroom window or the mirror of his motorcycle that broke. But yes, every time such an incident occurred, the game suffered. It was similar to the shradh period after the death of an elder. Once this period was over things were back to normal.

  Unlike Sunny, Sehwag played the way he did because he lived in Najafgarh and there was no concept of repaying the cost of breaking anyone’s window glass in the vicinity. If some kid had broken your window, so be it. That was the law of the land and resulted in Sehwag being fearless and smashing a ball to midwicket even if it was an outswing delivery meant to be nicked towards second slip.

  Today’s city kids have dumped the play ground for the Playstation and if the child is truly adventurous and ambitious it would be Bowling or Pool. But years back when there wa
s limited access to gaming technology there was a genius who realised that staying away from cricket for an entire 13 days was like really testing a cricket lover’s patience and this is where he smelt a business opportunity. To fill this gap of “How to play cricket at home without breaking anything” at a time that there was no Brian Lara’s Cricket or Playstations and one wanted to evolve beyond book cricket, he devised a game aptly called “Table Cricket”.

  What a work of art it was. It had to be the work of a lazy Indian who didn’t like to run or sweat, but it was truly effective. One of the most amazing things about this game was the “cloth ground”. The same kids who got punished at school for wearing un-ironed uniforms, very meticulously ironed this piece of cloth to ensure a suitable wicket. Unfortunately the maker of the game had not figured a foolproof mechanism for folding this cricket ground because most of the time the crease would be in the centre of the pitch due to which after the game was about 2-month-old, it became a turning wicket, making batting very difficult. Interestingly, fast bowlers got more turn out of such pitches than the spinners. After months one could see the ball drifting away towards 4th slip and that’s the time we knew the game was up. The marketers were a sharp lot and they never sold the loose cloth grounds separately, you had to buy the whole set again.

  The cricket balls used in table cricket were ball bearings and there was never a shortage in those days as most kids had cycles and these were easily sourced from local cycle shops. You could simulate an entire India vs Pakistan series in Table cricket without worrying about diplomatic issues. The only problem was that everybody wanted to be India and therefore once you solved who would play as India, things would go on smoothly. The fielders were the best because they caught the ball between their legs. So essentially unlike conventional cricket in those days when a batsmen would get out if he tried playing lofted strokes, in this format he would get out only when he played ground strokes. We however never complained about things like these because we knew there wasn’t a better option.