tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-268272412024-03-18T20:46:44.889-07:00ramRamnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.comBlogger71125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-2880986297747523702007-10-28T05:07:00.000-07:002021-02-24T18:31:01.250-08:00Cricket, lovely cricket<p style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin-bottom: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:date day="1" month="6" year="2006"><span style="color: grey;">Thursday June 1 2006</span></st1:date></span><span style="color: grey; font-size: 100%;"> </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:time hour="18" minute="9"><span style="color: grey;">18:09</span></st1:time></span><span style="color: grey; font-size: 100%;"> IST</span><span style="font-size: 100%;">
Sunday Express
<b><span style="color: red;">
</span></b></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman";"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype id="_x0000_t75" coordsize="21600,21600" spt="75" preferrelative="t" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" filled="f" stroked="f"> <v:stroke joinstyle="miter"> <v:formulas> <v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"> <v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"> <v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"> <v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"> </v:formulas> <v:path extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t" connecttype="rect"> <o:lock ext="edit" aspectratio="t"> </v:shapetype><v:shape id="_x0000_i1025" type="#_x0000_t75" alt="Ciive Lloyd" style="'width:167.25pt;height:225pt'"> <v:imagedata src="file:///C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\msohtml1\01\clip_image001.jpg" href="http://www.newindpress.com/sunday/Images/jun06%5C4sports1.jpg"> </v:shape><![endif]--><span style="font-size: 100%;">Proudly wearing the rosette
of my skin I strut into </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><st1:city><span>Sabina</span></st1:city><span>,
</span><st1:country-region><span>England</span></st1:country-region></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> boycotting excitement
Bravely, something badly amiss.
Cricket. Not the game they play
at Lord’s, the crowd (whoever saw
a crowd at a cricket match?)
are caged, vociferous partisans
quick to take offence. </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;">
sixtyeight for none at lunch.
‘What sort o battin dat man?
Dem caan play cricket again, praps
Dem should a borrow Lawrence Rowe!’
This poem, At Sabina Park by Stewart Brown, poet and professor of </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><span>Caribbean</span></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> studies, is a sample of the joyous impact of West Indian cricket on its crazy, partisan spectators. But long before Geoff Boycott and Dennis Amiss had arrived on the scene, to appear wooden by unfair comparison with the gifted Lawrence Rowe, thousands of fans had been hooked. By the three Ws, Sonny him Ramadhin and Alf Valentine, Garry Sobers and Rohan Kanhai, Denis Atkinson and Clairmonte Depeiza (if only for one heroic stand that went into the record books), Wes Hall and Lance Gibbs.
The first time I followed a Test series involving the </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><span>West Indies</span></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> was when </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>Australia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> toured in 1954-55; Clyde Walcott lit up </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><st1:placename><span>Sabina</span></st1:placename><span> </span><st1:placetype><span>Park</span></st1:placetype></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> with two outstanding innings of 155 and 110, yet </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>Australia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> had won by an innings and 82 runs. That was the fifth and final Test, and Walcott had made 110 and 39 in the first Test too, on that same, lightning-fast pitch, against the pace of Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller and the wrist spin of Richie Benaud. Incredibly, Walcott also scored a century in each innings at </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:city><st1:place><span>Port of Spain</span></st1:place></st1:city></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> (with Everton Weekes contributing 139 and 67 not out), amassing 827 for an average of 82.7 in the series. Still </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><span>West Indies</span></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> lost 0-3. It was at </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><st1:city><span>Bridgetown</span></st1:city><span>, </span><st1:country-region><span>Barbados</span></st1:country-region></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;">, that Atkinson and Depeiza put on 347 for the seventh wicket to force a draw.
A young left-hander named Garfield St. Aubrun Sobers also made 35 not out and 64 in the final Test, compiling in all just 231 runs and taking six wickets in the series, in what was a modest beginning to the greatest all round Test career of all time. Notice of his greatness had already been served, the very first time he batted against the Aussies. Benaud was to recall years later that, fielding at gully, he had to run for cover, seeking protection from Sobers’s fierce square cuts!
Those were still the Dark Ages of West Indies cricket: no dark-skinned player could captain the team. That had to wait until Frank Worrell was handed the reins for the 1960-61 tour of </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>Australia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;">, a historic series that brought the crowds back to Test grounds, after controversies and dull county cricket had driven them to other sports.
Worrell and Benaud were the rival captains involved in what was to be a major diplomatic victory for cricket — for the spirit in which the series was played, but also in the game’s first tied Test at Brisbane. The </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><span>West Indies</span></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> were gallant losers of a closely fought series and might have fared better but for a contentious umpiring decision that cost them a victory in the fourth Test. </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>Australia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> scraped through with a two-wicket margin in the final Test, to emerge as a 2-1 winner of the series.
Two grand innings of 125 and 168 confirmed Sobers’ burgeoning stature as the world’s leading batting talent, after his world record 365 against Pakistan, but he was yet to achieve the phenomenal success that prompted John Arlott to declare: ‘‘No aspect of his cricket has been more amazing than his capacity for combining quality and quantity of effort; it is as if a single creature had both the class of a Derby-winner and the stamina of a mule.’’
Sobers was also still some distance from burying the ghosts that haunted him after his dear friend and co-cricketing star Collie Smith had died in a car accident with Sobers at the wheel. In his autobiography, Sobers confessed that after that shocking loss, he steeled himself to bat and bowl and field for both of them. How the cricketing nations of the world had to pay for that resolve!
Worrell was the great binding force, the calming influence on a team of brilliant but mercurial individuals. He took Sobers under his wing and groomed him to be his successor. By the time Sobers led his team to </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> in 1966-67, he had been unofficially crowned the greatest all rounder, and we in </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> were treated to some wonderful samples of his genius. Hall was a fading colossus, and so was Charlie Griffith, but Gibbs was still a force to reckon with. Basil Butcher, Seymour Nurse, David Holford — Sobers’s cousin and partner in a couple of historic rearguard actions — Clive Lloyd and Jackie Hendricks made up a powerful batting combination.
Another crowd favourite in </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> as elsewhere was Rohan Babulal Kanhai, the man who matched Sobers knock for knock in daring strokeplay that disguised technical excellence of the highest order. There was a keen rivalry between these two heroes of West Indian cricket, but it was tempered by a chivalry natural to both of them. It helped them to come together to make common cause on several occasions. If Sobers’ run as captain came to an unhappy end after his sporting declaration resulted in a series defeat against a touring </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> in 1972, Kanhai’s reign began with a series defeat to </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>Australia</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> despite great personal form, aided by the brilliance of Lloyd. One Garfield Sobers was sorely missed, though, as he was out of the series, mysteriously injured.
Sobers and Kanhai combined briefly to post huge personal and team totals in the 1973 English summer, but the new generation was already upon them, with the elegant left-hander Alvin Kallicharran playing several delightful innings and the ursine Lloyd launching murderous assaults against the world’s best attacks.
The Indian tour of 1974-75 was Lloyd’s first as captain. A batting sensation answering to the name of Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards was unveiled on this tour, and Lloyd himself gave evidence of his enormous power in the final Test at </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:city><st1:place><span>Bombay</span></st1:place></st1:city></span><span style="font-size: 100%;">. The </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><span>West Indies</span></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> won 3-2, but not before </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> put up a hard fight, levelling the series 2-2 at </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:city><st1:place><span>Madras</span></st1:place></st1:city></span><span style="font-size: 100%;">. None noticed yet, but the greatest battery of fast bowlers in the history of cricket was in the process of being assembled. It took an abject whitewash in Australia — after Roy Fredericks played a pulsating innings in the Perth Test, the only one West Indies won on that tour — and a magnificent win by India chasing 404 at Port of Spain the following season, for Lloyd to marshal his fast bowling resources into a fearsome quartet, an unprecedented combination in Test cricket.
It is precisely the manner in which the fearsome foursome was developed that took away for me the lustre and gallantry of </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><span>West Indies</span></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> cricket. Michael Holding, Wayne Daniel, Bernard Julien and Vanburn Holder unleashed a barrage of short balls on the hapless, helmetless Indian batsmen, often bowling round the wicket on a ridge around leg stump and traumatising them with viciously intimidating bowling. The tactics showed Lloyd in a poor light, desperate to maintain a winning record.
It was also the start of the total dominance of world cricket for over a decade by Lloyd and his men, the great fast bowlers backed by the greatest batsman in the world, Richards, and the captain himself, still as destructive as ever. Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Kallicharran, Larry Gomes, Derryck Murray, Jeffrey Dujon, Malcolm Marshall, Andy Roberts, Joel Garner, Colin Croft and Keith Boyce were some of the names to etch themselves permanently in the memory of the </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><span>West Indies</span></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> cricket fan.
An ugly side of West Indies cricket was revealed, at least in the eyes of ‘‘the victim’’, when Kerry Packer’s coup d’etat in 1977 resulted in all the leading West Indies players joining his ‘‘circus’’. Kallicharran refused to toe the Packer line and was rewarded with the </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><span>West Indies</span></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> captaincy, but he was unceremoniously axed when Lloyd and the other Packerites returned to official cricket. Kallicharran cried foul and even claimed that his Indian origin worked against him in the inter-island politics of </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><span>West Indies</span></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> cricket. Similar murmurs had been made by the other great East Indian icon, Kanhai, in his playing days. During the Richards era, the murmurs were louder and clearer, with the captain charged with racial prejudice in the team composition he favoured.
This was a far cry from the early days of </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><span>West Indies</span></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> cricket, when it was a disadvantage to be black, as in West Indian society. According to C L R James, for the dark man, ‘‘the surest sign of…having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself.’’
To me, the golden period of West Indies cricket was not the era of Lloyd, Richards and the four-man pace battery, but the journey that began with Worrell’s historic tour of Australia with his gallant men, and ended with Kanhai and Sobers (almost) bowing out in style with individual scores of 157 and 150 not out in the Lord’s Test of 1973. (The next series was their last together — at home — an anticlimax for both.)
It was a time when the team was united as never before, and it set the pattern for Lloyd and Co. to follow. Under Lloyd too, </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><span>West Indies</span></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> played their cricket fair most of the time, though harder than any team before or after. The blot on their record of sportsmanship was provided by that ugly Test at </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>Jamaica</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> against </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>India</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> and the tantrums of their bowlers in the face of poor umpiring in </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>New Zealand</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;">.
Richards ranks with the best batsmen of all time, as does Brian Lara; while Richards was part of a champion side, Lara belonged to a struggling, loose conglomeration of no-hopers most of the time. As captain, neither has succeeded in inspiring the </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:place><span>West Indies</span></st1:place></span><span style="font-size: 100%;"> to great heights. That honour must go solely to Worrell, Sobers and Lloyd.
And on it goes, the wicket slow
as the batting and the crowd restless.
‘Eh white bwoy, ow you brudders dem
does sen we sleep so? Me a pay monies
fe watch dis foolishness? Cho?’</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" face="times new roman"><span style="font-size: 100%;">So I try to explain it in my Hampshire
drawl about conditions in </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:country-region><st1:place><span>Kent</span></st1:place></st1:country-region></span><span style="font-size: 100%;">,
about sticky wickets and muggy days
and the monsoon season in </span><span style="font-size: 100%;"><st1:city><st1:place><span>Manchester</span></st1:place></st1:city></span><span style="font-size: 100%;">
but fail to convince even myself.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-size: 100%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-1164271093437374722006-11-23T00:36:00.000-08:002021-02-03T04:08:32.070-08:00Kalanidhi<span style="font-size: large;"><em>Madurai T N Seshagopalan is this year’s Sangita Kalanidhi, to be crowned by the Music Academy, Chennai in December 2006. This is what I wrote about him 23 years ago.
</em>
<strong>T N Seshagopalan: Mirror to his audience</strong>
<strong>(Excerpts from a profile by V Ramnarayan, Sruti, December 1983 (Issue no. 3)</strong>
Madurai T N Seshagopalan is confidence personified; he possesses the quality in abundance. He exudes it in every word he utters in conversation just as he does in every syllable he renders in concert. He is thirty-five, a man of conventional good looks, sharp intelligent eyes that can assume a certain dreaminess on occasion, cherubic countenance, long hair, often rather unkempt, medium height and an apparent propensity to put on weight, an ease of manner and friendliness, and an active mind which seems to tick all the time. His Tamil betrays his background, which is non-metropolitan; it is therefore a chaster brand of the language than most Madrasis can achieve. A ready humour, sometimes mischievous but without malice, a quick sense of repartee and a degree of articulation proclaim straightaway that here is an unusually cerebral young musician, who knows where he is heading and will do everything in his power to make sure he will reach there.
Seshagopalan might well have been lost to the world of classical music but for some chance encounters with men of foresight and forethought at a crucial period of his life. He appears to have been singularly fortunate in his schoolteachers. Many of them were musically inclined and saw in Seshagopalan an unusual talent, which needed care and nourishment.
Seshagopalan was born on 15 September 1948 at Nagapattinam. His father Nambi Iyengar was then employed as a drillmaster in a school there. His father and mother both hailed from Tirunelveli district. While mother Tiruvenkatavalli belonged to a village called Anantakrishnapuram, Nambi Iyengar was from the village Tirukkarunkudi, the home of the famous business house of T V Sundram Iyengar and Sons, whose headquarters were located in Madurai. TVS & Sons helped Seshagopalan’s father to set up a business at Madurai to which place the family moved in 1952, when TNS was four years old. Around this time it was that
Seshagopalan first showed musical promise.
There was no doubting Seshagopalan’s talent even as a child; he gave it expression through singing semi-classical bhakti verse, but not until his sixteenth year did he have his first lesson in classical music. The boy Seshagopalan was quite famous in Madurai and other district centres as an accomplished lead performer in devotional music concerts in which he sang verses from Tiruppugazh, Tiruppavai and Tiruvempavai, the devarnama of Purandaradasa and so on. Even before he was ten years old, he was a supplementary breadwinner of his father’s household.
In Seshagopalan’s own words from that profile:
The person whose deeds and words had the most far-reaching effect on my life was Kodoor Rajagopala Sastri whom my father had befriended when I was about eleven. This gentleman from Rameswaram was not only a music lover but counted among his personal friends such giants as Ramnad Krishnan (vocal), Lalgudi Jayaraman (violin) and C S Murugabhoopathy (mridangam)—the trio who performed at his wedding. Rajagopala Sarma was mainly responsible from my changeover from devotional to classical music. The man had foresight; he was a deerghadarsi. He was the first man to suggest I be given formal training to become a concert vidwan of Carnatic music. He predicted a bright future for me. Another person who had some inkling of the future was Sri V Pushpavanam, headmaster of the Sethupati High School where I studied from Form I to Form VI. He was a source of encouragement, offering me every chance to go on stage and parade my talent while at High School. He would sometimes wonder aloud if I would become famous one day as Madurai Seshagopalan just as Madurai Mani did. In fact Sri Pushpavanam who belonged to the Koteeswara Iyer parampara was distantly related to Madurai Mani. Our drillmaster Paramasivam also took a great deal of interest in my music. He and my schoolmates always had a good word for me and were proud of my singing ability. Quite often I wrote songs myself on national figures and the freedom movement of the past, set the songs to some familiar tunes from films as bhajans, and sang them on the stage. There was a song on Nehruji which I sang to the tune of a very popular song from the Hindi film ‘Madhumati.’
My guru (C S Sankarasivam) knew how to bring out the best in you. No doctrinaire approach governed his teaching. His was a voice that was not amenable to brikas. It was best suited to slow elaborations, a solid rock-like voice. But this didn’t prevent him from helping me exploit and develop my natural capabilities. He was quick to assess your plus and minus points and work on their improvement or diminution as the case may be. He never curbed your originality.
I owe all my proficiency in chowka kala to him.
Seshagopalan’s early apprenticeship in music, in the time-honoured gurukula tradition, is amusing to recollect. Here was this vidwan who was a friend of his father’s, their fondness for betel-chewing bringing them together. During one of these sessions of mastication, the vidwan suggested Gopu (Seshagopalan) be put in his care to be groomed as a musician. Soon the boy was packed off during the summer vacation to the Vadyar’s house. There, his duties consisted mainly in running errands, washing clothes and pressing his poor, tired master’s feet as he reclined on his favourite easychair. Seshagopalan wasn’t quite insightful enough to understand the significance of these aspects of the gurukula system—not quite unique by any means—and so he decided to find his way out diplomatically. He told his father that his throat hurt a great deal from constant singing, something with which he had very little to do at the guru’s house. This ruse worked like magic, for Gopu’s father felt the boy’s health was paramount and terminated the arrangement, although the chewing sessions continued.
There is in this youthful veteran the kind of narcissism one often associates with the artists, but attenuating this is his informed appreciation of the several giants who preceded him in this field as well as his own peers and seniors, and ready to acknowledgement of help and encouragement received from various persons at different stages of his career. He goes to any length of trouble to mention every one of them by name, however far removed from the limelight they may be. There is no mistaking his guru bhakti and the depth of his gratitude to his master. Again, there is no deliberate show of becoming modesty, no pious self-deprecation, no pretence of running down his own achievements; nor is there any obvious lack of humility. His assessment of his own ability and successes seems realistic without giving rise to serious suspicion of an excessive self-love.</span>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-5179833125106099792021-01-30T17:46:00.002-08:002021-01-30T17:46:39.522-08:00THE PONGAL MATCH<p> </p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="letter-spacing: -0.25pt; text-align: justify;">The Presidency
Match of Madras, played at Chepauk between 1915 </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.3pt; text-align: justify;">and
1952 was born of one Indian's desire to meet the Englishman on equal </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.25pt; text-align: justify;">terms on the cricket ground, and try to vanquish him. As
it turned out, the </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.05pt; text-align: justify;">Indians won
substantially more matches than the Europeans, and these </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.3pt; text-align: justify;">were the two protagonists of this Pongal festival of
cricket that drew large, </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.15pt; text-align: justify;">enthusiastic
audiences, in the days before Test matches.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">It was Buchi
Babu Nayudu, known as the father of Madras cricket, </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">who conceived the idea of the Presidency Match, angered
by the apartheid </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">practised by the Madras Cricket Club,
which required Indian players to </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">sit
under the tree and eat their lunch in the shade, while the Europeans </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">enjoyed the comfort of the club's pavilion. It was this
democratic and </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">patriotic impulse that drove Buchi
Babu to found the Madras United Club </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">(MUC),
and dream of an annual fixture between the rulers and the ruled.</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .45pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Unfortunately,
Buchi Babu died </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">before the first Presidency Match in
1908. </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The match was organised by his trusted
</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">lieutenant B Subramaniam and the Indians </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">were led by B S Ramulu Naidu. The MCC </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .4pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">President, P W Partridge of King & </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Partridge, captained the Europeans, but the </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">match had to be abandoned after a few </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">hours as it rained heavily.</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The Presidency Match was resumed <span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">only in 1915, this time R D Richmond and </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.3pt;">B Subramaniam leading the two rival teams. </span><span style="letter-spacing: .1pt;">The big-hitting R B Carrick, R K Green, </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">R D "Denny" Denniston, C G Plumer and </span>E
K Shattock were among the prominent <span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt;">Europeans,
while besides Subramaniam, C Ranganathan, C R Ganapathi, </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">N N Suvarna and the brothers Baliah, Bhat and
Ramaswami, the sons of </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">Buchi Babu,
were the Indian stars.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The first
match was drawn, the Indians making 199 and 304 for 7 </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">and the Europeans 296 and 53 for 1. The successful
players of the match </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">were N N
Suvarna (70), C R Ganapathi (57 not out), M Baliah (70 not out), </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">R D Richmond (74) Plumer (66) and W O Newsam (54).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">C Ramaswami,
one Madras cricketer of yore who wrote extensively </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">of his cricketing days, recalls that </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Richmond was an astute captain </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .6pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">who often trapped Baliah and </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Ramaswami, by inviting them to loft </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .45pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">the ball, something neither left hander could resist.
Both were </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">known to hit sixers and both tended </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">to get out caught in the deep.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: 116.15pt; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .35pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Ramaswami
</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .65pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">rated </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">C R
Ganapathi as "one of the best </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">bowlers
in India of the right arm </span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">medium paced type."
"Immaculate <span style="letter-spacing: .2pt;">in length with a good nip
off the </span><span style="letter-spacing: .1pt;">pitch, he always kept the
batsman </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt;">guessing since he could turn
the ball both ways." This intriguing reference </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">to the turn obtained by a bowler described as a
medium pace bowler is a </span>recurring theme, not only in Ramaswami's writing
but also other cricket <span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">writers of the day.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">About his
brother Baliah's batting, "Ramu" says: "What <i>a </i>graceful
and attractive left handed batsman! During my cricketing career of well </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">over forty years, I had seen many left handed batsmen,
but I have not </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">come across one who could be
compared with my late brother in the finer </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.4pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">points
of batsmanship — grace, power and style. I found only Frank Woolley </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">of Kent equally attractive."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">According to
Ramaswami, the first five years of the Pongal match </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">were dominated by B Subramaniam, C Ranganathan, C R
Ganapathi, </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Thangavelu and "we three
brothers" on the Indian side, and Richmond, </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Carrick,
Denniston, Green and Shattock among the Europeans. "Young </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Thangavelu, poor in constitution, was a good left hand
all rounder with a </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">sound defence
and of medium pace. "On him and C R Ganapathi, the Indians depended for
their attack."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">To continue
with Ramu's narrative, "The Presidency Match of 1917 </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">was of special interest to me. A student of the
Presidency College, I was </span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">participating for the second year in
<span style="letter-spacing: .05pt;">a representative match. A medium </span><span style="letter-spacing: .7pt;">fast right arm bowler from </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">Bangalore who had a reputation for </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">accurate bowling — Captain Britton </span><span style="letter-spacing: .2pt;">Jones —had arrived to assist the </span><span style="letter-spacing: .3pt;">Europeans. Even though we had </span>never heard of
such terms as swing bowling, cutters etc., Britton Jones <span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt;">must have bowled swingers with the </span><span style="letter-spacing: .1pt;">new ball and in this match, he had </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">created a sensation by disposing of </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.3pt;">a few of the Indian batsmen for small </span><span style="letter-spacing: .5pt;">totals in quick succession. The </span><span style="letter-spacing: .6pt;">skipper B Subramaniam had </span>withstood the
onslaught of Britton <span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">Jones and I joined him
at the wicket </span><i><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></i><span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">at a critical stage. My concentration</span></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">and determination enabled me to
assist </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .35pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">my skipper to score between us a </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">hundred runs for the fifth wicket, my </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">contribution being 92. I was a victim of the R D
Richmond-R B Carrick </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">combination. I
traced my way back to the </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.4pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">pavilion when
with my score at 92,1 lifted </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">the wily
delivery of the European skipper </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">as
planned by him into the safe hands of </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .35pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">R B
Carrick at long-on boundary </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">promptly to be
neatly held. That day was </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">a proud day for
me and for the valuable </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">innings I had
played in the match, I was </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: 1.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">presented with
a silver cup by </span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Sri P S Muthu Mudaliar, who was the <span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt;">captain of the MUC then." The Indians won
that match by five wickets.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">C K Nayudu
played for the Indians in 1920-21, and made a </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">spectacular
128. In that match, the Colonel was reported to have hit a ball </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">so far that it landed in a coconut grove some 50 yards
from the Chepauk </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">ground, a distance in all of 150
yards from the crease. Nayudu completely </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">eclipsed
C K Krishnaswami Pillai who made 120 in the match and was </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">involved in a big partnership with him.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">In 1922
arrived Oxford Blue H P Ward, whose "hearty hits to the </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">squareleg and the long-on will ever </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">remain in the memories of those </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">who played with and against him </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">and also watched him score heavily </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">for the Europeans." Ramaswami </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.4pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">also found him to be a wicket keeper </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">unequalled in his time. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .65pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Penfold was
another </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Englishman who arrived in Madras </span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">hereabouts
and with considerable <span style="letter-spacing: -.45pt;">help from Ward,
became an accurate </span><span style="letter-spacing: .25pt;">medium pacer, to
have quite an </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">impact in the
Presidency Matches. </span><span style="letter-spacing: .75pt;">His inswingers
often trapped </span><i><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></i><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">Nayudu in the legslip<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>area, </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.3pt;">something Ramaswami attributes to </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">Ward's shrewd captaincy.</span></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Ren Nailer was
perhaps the </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.35pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">most exciting batsman to turn out
for </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">the Europeans in the Presidency </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">match, though of Eurasian descent. </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">"Unorthodox in his execution of the </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .5pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">shots, his keen eyesight and </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">powerful wrists enabled him to play </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .45pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">with consummate ease shots to </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">cover and extra cover. When he </span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">played
against Gilligan's team for Madras and hit Maurice Tate and <span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">other bowlers of repute all over the </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">field, Tate ventured to remark that Nailer's runs
were lucky to be got </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">and that they
were not the result of good hitting. Tate was also confident </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">that Nailer would not be allowed to score even a
single in the second </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">innings. Ren
however proved to Tate that his judgement was wrong and </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.25pt;">proceeded to hit him all over the field in the
second innings also. Medium </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">paced
bowling had given him quite a bag of wickets in the Presidency </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt;">Matches. Nailer minus his batting and bowling
would have found a place </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.4pt;">for his
fielding alone in any representative side. Ren had kept up his interest </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.3pt;">in the Presidency Matches by playing for the
longest period — twentynine </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">years in
the series."</span></span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">C P Johnstone,
a senior of Ramaswami in Pembroke College, a double Cambridge Blue in cricket </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">and golf, and a Kent cricketer, came </span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">to
Madras in 1925 from Calcutta. <span style="letter-spacing: .3pt;">According to
Ramaswami, if </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">Johnstone had not
chosen to come </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.25pt;">away to India, he
might have played </span><span style="letter-spacing: .35pt;">for England, even
become the </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">captain, so highly did he
rate his all </span><span style="letter-spacing: .25pt;">round ability. "He
signalled his </span><span style="letter-spacing: .7pt;">appearance in the Madras
</span><span style="letter-spacing: .05pt;">Presidency Match in 1926 with a </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.3pt;">score of 135 runs."<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Ramu, like many
others who played with Johnstone, described him </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">as a
grand batsman to watch, a fine left handed opener with a penchant </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">for cover drives, once he got over his nervous starts. He
was a magnificent </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">slip fielder, too, and a more than
useful "off spin" bowler. (This is again a </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">confusing categorization, as Johnstone often opened the
bowling). </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">According to Ramu, "his wickets
were bagged by clever changes of flight, </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">pace
and length."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">"During
his stay at Madras for well over twentythree years, </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Johnstone had endeared himself to all the cricketers and
cricket enthusiasts of Madras because of his genuine interest in the
improvement of the game </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.4pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">in Madras. As
the President of the Madras Cricket Association for a number </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">of years, his ardent enthusiasm enabled him to
contribute not a little to </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">the
organisation of the cricket programme in Madras."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Johnstone it
was who decided that young M J Gopalan's was a </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">precious
talent worth nurturing and appointed him as an employee of </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Burmah Shell, so that he would enjoy the job security
that would enable </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.35pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">him to play cricket without a worry.
Gopalan made his Pongal Match debut </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.4pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">in 1927
and took ten wickets in the match. An aggressive batsman, Gopalan </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">could hit sixes at will, according to Ramaswami, bowled
a good length and moved the ball both ways. Partnering him from the other end
for the next four years was the steady C K Lakshmanan.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Like Johnstone
an MCC president, C N Reed played for the </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Europeans
from 1938 till the last Presidency Match in 1952. He was an </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">attractive batsman whose off drives were his trade mark.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">A G Ram Singh
played his first Presidency Match in 1931. In </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Ramaswami's
words, "Till he got set, he always preferred to get most of his runs
behind the wickets, and with his eye in, hooked and drove hard. </span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Bowling
medium slows, his clever change of pace, flight and length <span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">obtained him many wickets. Like Vinoo Mankad of
the present day, he was a great trier who could be relied on to go on bowling a
number of overs without giving away many runs."<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">A V
Krishnaswami was a right handed opening batsman whose 71 </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">and 100 in the 1937 Presidency Match gave him a star
status in the series. </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.4pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">He was a
consistent batsman who combined a sound defence with judicious </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">aggression but often complained of poor health. According
to his </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">contemporaries, it did not seem to
affect his cricket overly. He was known </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">for
his "crisp cuts and leg glances."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">From 1937 to
1941, the Presidency Match was illuminated by the </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">delightful presence of that entertaining all rounder G
Parthasarathi, "GP" </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">to everyone.
"He believed in using the long handle and particularly </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.35pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">delighted in scorching hits to the onside. Using his
height to advantage — </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">the high
trajectory of his bowling was an additional force to encounter for every
batsman—this very good right arm spinner mixed his googlies with </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">his leg breaks and made the ball come off the pitch
sharply. On a turning </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">wicket, his
bowling was a potential danger and many a time has he run </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">through sides without giving away runs."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The express fast
bowler from Triplicane who went on to tour </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.4pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Australia
with Lala Amarnath's Indians, C R Rangachari, had a memorable </span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Presidency
Match in 1941, when he took eight wickets in the match. <span style="letter-spacing: -.4pt;">Rangachari was a tireless fast bowler, who also took brilliant catches
close-</span><span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt;">in and could bat obdurately on
occasion at No. 11. His round arm action </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">caused the ball to keep low and facilitated late outswing.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">S V T Chari and M O Srinivasan were
good wicket keepers like <span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">H P Ward. Chari
"would have gone very high and played for India if he </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt;">had not given up cricket as soon as he passed out
of Medical College, to devote attention seriously to his profession.
"MO" was quiet and stylish, </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">useful
as an opening bat." Both played for India in unofficial Tests.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The advent of
the Ranji Trophy, and the exodus of Europeans from Madras as independence
approached, meant the gradual decline </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">in the
popularity of the Presidency </span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Match. The younger Englishmen, <span style="letter-spacing: .05pt;">who arrived in Madras in the late </span><span style="letter-spacing: .15pt;">thirties and early forties, did not </span><span style="letter-spacing: .5pt;">show the same enthusiasm for </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.3pt;">cricket as their predecessors. By the </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt;">time the fifties rolled in, the Pongal </span><span style="letter-spacing: .5pt;">festival match was close to </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.25pt;">extinction. The last match, in 1952, </span><span style="letter-spacing: .15pt;">was “an apology for the genuine </span>spirit of
this contest." Neither side <span style="letter-spacing: .25pt;">was fully
representative and the </span><span style="letter-spacing: .05pt;">match never
rose to great heights. </span>Thus ended a glorious chapter of<i><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></i><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">Madras
cricket. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Sir Robert
Denniston, an MCC president who played cricket and hockey with great
enthusiasm, recalls his experiences in the Presidency </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Match with fond memories:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">"I have been browsing among the
score sheets of old Presidency Matches <span style="letter-spacing: .1pt;">and I
find that I have seen almost every ball bowled in every match but three. And
every one of these 75 happy days in the sun and the pavilion </span>holds a
memory.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Let us go back
to the early days of the contest and recall the innings of some </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">of the old stalwarts. Of old Subramaniam who always
seemed to have a cracked bat, which did not prevent him from being a thorn in
the flesh of the Europeans for many a year. How difficult he was to get out!
His best </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">performance was probably in 1919 when
he carried his side to victory with </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">an
innings of 104 not out. The Indians wanted 210 runs to win, and got </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">them for the loss of 6 wickets — perhaps the best
performance of the series. </span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The following year, the tables were
turned, and Parsons of Warwickshire, <span style="letter-spacing: .1pt;">cricket
professional, soldier, and clergyman, improved the shining hour </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.35pt;">pending his demobilisation by taking 12 wickets
for 115 runs — a performance </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">only
beaten by Ganapathy and Ram Singh in later years. The year 1921 saw </span><span style="letter-spacing: 1.05pt;">the first of a number of joyous innings by C K
Nayudu, and </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">C K Krishnaswami — a
delightful offside player — also got a century, and </span><span style="letter-spacing: .05pt;">the Indians won in an innings.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">I remember the next match because
the day before, an acquaintance came <span style="letter-spacing: .2pt;">to see
me and said, "Here's a bat for you to make 100 with tomorrow." </span>I
opened the innings, was caught at the wicket first ball and given not out <span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">by a friendly little man in a turban, and was not
out at lunch time. Alas! The </span>magic properties of the bat had vanished
and that hundred still eludes me. <span style="letter-spacing: .1pt;">The game
ended in a rather tame draw.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">A low scoring match in 1923 was
memorable for Ganapathy's 11 wickets <span style="letter-spacing: .25pt;">for 70
runs and the Indians won by 10 wickets. The following year, </span><span style="letter-spacing: .1pt;">Ganapathy, besides taking 8 wickets, blossomed
forth as a batsman and </span><span style="letter-spacing: .2pt;">made 75 runs,
mostly of the Chinese variety, and the Europeans were </span><span style="letter-spacing: .05pt;">overwhelmed. They came into their own the next
year in spite of a first </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.3pt;">innings
score of 66 (Ganapathy 7 for 15) and a fine recovery, in which Carrick </span>scored
98, enabled them to win by 125 runs. The Europeans won again in <span style="letter-spacing: .15pt;">1926, thanks to centuries by Johnstone and Carrick
and some splendid </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">bowling by Penfold
who took 8 for 43 in the second innings. A magnificent </span>catch by
Summerhayes settled the issue for C K Nayudu, having made 89 <span style="letter-spacing: .05pt;">in the first innings was batting with the utmost
confidence in the second, and drove a ball hard to Summerhayes at wide midoff,
and he took a fast </span>travelling, swerving ball with supreme confidence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The next year
saw a high scoring match left drawn. H P Ward made a superb </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">173 towards the Europeans' first innings which remained a
record for </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .4pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">precisely twentyfour hours,
Sivasankaran obliging with an equally </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">admirable
174. Johnstone's 6 for 65 in an innings of 485 was notable. Another </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">drawn match followed, Ward scoring 90 and 99, the latter
innings containing </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">five sixes.
All round work by Gopalan saved the Indians from defeat. A low </span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">scoring
match in 1929 was won by the Europeans, with Ward, who about <span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">this time could do nothing wrong, being top scorer
with 80. Penfold took 5 </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.25pt;">wickets for
13. The next match saw the closest finish of the series, the Indians </span><span style="letter-spacing: .15pt;">winning by 10 runs. Venkataramanujulu and Suvarna
made 76 and 82 </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">respectively and
Jagannathan took 11 wickets for 88 runs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The year 1931
saw Ram Singh's first appearance, when he gave little </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">indication of the menace he was to prove in later years.
The Europeans </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">made the huge score of 570 for 7
wickets and won by an innings, the Indians </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">twice
scoring 282, Suvarna playing a couple of fine innings and the </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Maharajkumar of Vizianagaram playing a plucky second
innings of 66. This </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">was J W A
Stephenson's first appearance for the Europeans and he made </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">117 and took 6 wickets. Stephenson subsequently did
great things in county </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">cricket in
England, and I saw him captaining Essex in 1939.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The European batting strength about
this period was most formidable and <span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">in 1932,
Ward and Nailer scored hundreds in a total of 425. Palia produced </span>what
is almost the best all round performance in the series and was on the <span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">field almost throughout the three days of the
match, which ended in a draw. After bowling 45 overs for 7 wickets and 109
runs, Palia proceeded to make </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">65 and
143. The next year, it was Shahabuddin's match and the Europeans </span><span style="letter-spacing: .5pt;">were overwhelmed by an innings, C K Nayudu scoring
139 and </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">Shahabuddin taking 13
wickets for 63 runs. There was little of outstanding </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt;">note in the 1934 match which the Europeans won by
31 runs, but Ram Singh </span><span style="letter-spacing: .2pt;">gave signs that
a valuable all rounder was in the making. This fact he </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">demonstrated to the full the following year when
he contributed towards a </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">European
rout by making 70 and taking 13 wickets for 48 runs. Hereabouts </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">the Europeans were not a strong side and a
further defeat awaited in 1937, </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">A V
Krishnaswami playing two solid innings of 71 and 100. A high scoring </span><span style="letter-spacing: .1pt;">match next year was left drawn, Nailer, Reed, and
Ram Singh scoring </span><span style="letter-spacing: .05pt;">hundreds. Gopalan
and G Parthasarathi, in a splendid sixth wicket stand, </span><span style="letter-spacing: .1pt;">saved the Indians when all seemed lost. In 1939,
the Indians won by 4 </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.25pt;">wickets, thanks
to admirable all round play by Ram Singh, and despite skilful </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">bowling by Spitteler, who took 9 wickets for 82
runs. A similar result was </span><span style="letter-spacing: .35pt;">seen the
following year when a century —his first in the series —by </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">C Ramaswami and two glorious innings by Nailer
were the chief features. </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">Ram Singh
took his usual ten wickets and Spitteler again bowled well. The </span><span style="letter-spacing: .05pt;">Indians won again in 1941, but there were no
special features except that </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">there
were ten wickets once more for Ram Singh, and Vesey-Brown bowled </span>equally
well for the Europeans.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">In 1942, with
the majority of their young men on active service, the Europeans </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">were unable to raise a side, but at the end of the year
it was found possible </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">to play a
two-day match, and though the Europeans won it in the end by </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">the comfortable margin of 8 wickets, it was a match of
strange fluctuations </span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">of fortune and the time factor added
to the excitement. The Indians made <span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">268,
with M Swaminathan — quick on his feet —Ram Singh and Gopalan batting well for
56, 54 and 89. The Europeans replied with 242 which might </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt;">have been more had Johnstone not been run out for
75. De Kretser, Robinson </span>and Mischler scored usefully. In the second
innings the Indians collapsed <span style="letter-spacing: .2pt;">before Robinson
(slow leg breaks) and Blunt (fast medium) and the </span><span style="letter-spacing: .1pt;">Europeans looked to be winning easily, but
Srinivasan and Parankusam </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">put on 47
invaluable runs for the eighth wicket, "Pincushion" batting like a </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">No. 1 batsman. They were both victims of superb
fielding, Nailer throwing Parankusam's wicket down from the long field, and
Srinivasan falling to an </span>astonishing catch by Lindley Jones on the
square leg boundary. He ran 20 <span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt;">yards or so,
took the ball low down, turned a somersault or two and managed </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">to retain the ball. The Europeans had to hurry,
and at one time were behind the clock, but after Johnstone and Edge had put on
57, Robinson and Nailer </span>came together and by the brightest cricket in
the match added 48 runs and <span style="letter-spacing: .05pt;">won the match
with about 3 minutes to spare.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Whether a
Presidency Match will be possible this year remains to be seen, </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">but if so, numerous changes are likely in the European
side, since army </span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">cricketers are birds of passage. Perhaps by the end of
next year we shall <span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">once more be enjoying a
peacetime Presidency Match. I have a feeling that </span>Indian cricket in Madras
is rather standing still, but once we can get a full <span style="letter-spacing: .1pt;">season's cricket unmarred by war conditions young cricketers will have
their opportunity."<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">According to S
K Gurunathan of The Hindu, writing in 1955, "The </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">standard of cricket witnessed in these matches was very
high — sometimes </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">higher than the present day Test
matches —and we had on both sides </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">players
whose skill would shine in the highest company in any part of the </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">world. This series of matches was in those days looked
upon as the biggest </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">event of the
year and the goal and ambition of every budding cricketer </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">was to play in these matches some day. The Presidency
Match necessarily </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">played a great part in the
development of the game in Madras."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Gurunathan calls the years between
the two great wars the most <span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">decisive period
in the history of the MCA. He connects the formation of </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.45pt;">the Board of Control for Cricket in India to the
1926 tour of India undertaken </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.35pt;">by the
A E R Gilligan-led official Marylebone Cricket Club team. The team </span>played
three matches at Madras, in which veteran C R Ganapathi and <span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt;">young M J Gopalan showed glimpses of the past and
the future with their </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">sparkling
performances.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">At the end of
that tour, Gurunathan says, Gilligan suggested that a </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Board of Control for Cricket in India be formed so that
organised cricket </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">might come to India. His suggestion
was immediately accepted and the board was formed with R E Grant-Govan and A S
de Mello at the helm. </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Soon member
associations were formed in various provinces.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.4pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The Madras
Cricket Association, formed in 1930, had three members: </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">the MUC representing Indian clubs, the Anglo-Indian
Sports Club, and </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">the Madras Cricket Club, the
"European" club. Sir Daniel Richmond of </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">MCC was the first president of the MCA — and this
practice of the MCC </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .35pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">president heading
MCA continued into independent India —while </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">B
Subramaniam and Buchi Babu's son M "Bhat" Venkataramanujulu </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">were members.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">MCA then came
to life only </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">at the time of visits by touring </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">teams like Douglas Jardine's MCC </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.4pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">in 1938 and Jack Ryder's Australian </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.65pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">XI in 1935.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The Presidency Match was <span style="letter-spacing: -.2pt;">conducted under the joint auspices </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.4pt;">of MUC and MCC, and when gates </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">were collected for the first time in </span><span style="letter-spacing: .35pt;">1921, the two clubs shared the </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.15pt;">proceeds.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">As<i> </i></span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">the Indian team for the Pongal match
was selected by MUC and </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">South India
Athletic Association (SIAA) "without consultations with the </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">other Indian clubs, there was widespread
dissatisfaction."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">This
dissatisfaction led to the formation on April 10, 1932, of </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: .35pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">the Indian Cricket Federation (ICF), embracing 20 clubs.
Their </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">representatives assembled at
Emmanuel Club and at a meeting chaired by </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Prof. C
K Krishnaswami Pillai —the C K Krishnaswami whose offside </span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">batting Sir Robert Denniston describes as delightful —
the following were elected to office:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">President: Dr
P Subbaroyan</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Secretary &
Treasurer: T Govindarajulu</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Asst.
Secretary: C D Parthasarathi<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">MCC, MUC and
SIAA abstained and did not join ICF, promoted with great zeal by Govindarajulu
of Emmanuel Club.</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The first
league championship of Madras was instituted by ICF. The</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: 52.3pt; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.4pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">18
teams</span><span style="color: black; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: -.1pt;">that participated in the first season were:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; margin-left: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: 55.7pt; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 0in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Triplicane
Cricket Club (Winners)</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; margin-left: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: 55.7pt; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 0in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The Madras
Emmanuel Club</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; margin-left: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: 55.7pt; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 0in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The Mylapore
Recreation Club</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; margin-left: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: 55.7pt; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 0in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; letter-spacing: -.95pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The Minerva
Cricket Club</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.95pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; margin-left: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: 55.7pt; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 0in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The Chepauk
United Club</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; margin-left: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: 55.7pt; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 0in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">6.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The Madras
Eastern Club</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; margin-left: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: 55.7pt; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 0in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">7.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The
Nowroji-Gokhale Union</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; margin-left: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: 55.7pt; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 0in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; letter-spacing: -.95pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">8.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Mambalam
Cricket Club</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.95pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; margin-left: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: 55.7pt; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 0in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">9.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The Madras
Aryan Club</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; margin-left: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: 55.7pt; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 0in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; letter-spacing: -.95pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">10.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Progressive
Union</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.95pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 130%; margin-left: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: 55.7pt; text-align: justify; text-autospace: none; text-indent: 0in;"><!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; letter-spacing: -1.05pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">11.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The City
Central League</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -1.05pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.2pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The Mars Union</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.95pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.25pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Trades Staff
Club</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -1.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The Royapettah
Students' Club</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -1.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Perambur
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.15pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Corporation
Sports Club</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.95pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The Postal and
RMS Recreation Club</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -1.1pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -.3pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">The B & C
Mills Athletic Association</span><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -1.0pt; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-71260745511152260172021-01-18T01:14:00.001-08:002021-01-18T01:14:50.138-08:00Arnab Goswami WhatsApp Chat Leak | Explained by Dhruv Rathee<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/TyAmoIeaN9E" frameborder="0"></iframe>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-17898280471357700042021-01-16T00:29:00.000-08:002021-01-16T00:29:05.656-08:00R. Ashwath Narayanan, at The Music Academy, 25th December 2020<iframe width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/DL3jdCnwNKk" frameborder="0"></iframe>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-12820553431517647102015-04-29T21:34:00.003-07:002015-04-29T21:37:27.932-07:00A PEARL FROM TAMRAPARNI<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span lang="EN-US">Triveni, October 1955</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">By K. V. RAMACHANDRAN</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Among our rivers, the
Tamraparni is said to be the home of pearls, of a kind considered priceless, in
ages when the pearl was greatly prized. Among the human pearls that emerged
from its banks was Nammalvar in the remote past, and the late Sri V. Narayanan
in the recent past. Nammalvar had to wait for centuries before one who had
poetry in his soul and was thus uniquely endowed to interpret him, came along
in the person of Narayanan. In the neighbourhood of Tamraparni, is the sacred
mountain from which arose the father of Tamil, the sage Agastya. Narayanan
resembled Agastya not only by his stature, but also by repeating Agastya’s feat
of drinking up the twin oceans of Sanskrit and Tamil. Venkatanatha (Vedanta
Desika) who hailed from the banks of the Vegavati, paid his homage to Nammalvar
when he named him <i>the Muni </i>and his work the <i>Dramilopanishad </i>and
ranked it higher than the Veda; and lest anyone should perversely dispute his
opinion, well on to add that “when a puny cloud threatened a pompous downpour
over Agastya, who had drunk the sea dry, the river Tamraparni broke into a
pearly smile.”<sup>1</sup> Venkatanatha was one of the intrepid defenders of
the ‘Divyaprabandha’ and he helped to give the Tamil language its place in our
life and culture. But his approach was religious and philosophic. Narayanan,
whose approach was artistic, discovered Nammalvar quite independently; and he
made his own significant contribution to Tamil letters when he undertook to
interpret the Tamil classics, for which his gifts and equipment so eminently
fitted him. He loved Tamil and wooed her like a lover. But like the fabled
Chakora that subsisted on moonbeams, and Parikshit who took no other food than
the ambrosia of Saka’s words, Narayanan drew his nourishment from Valmiki and
Nammalvar almost exclusively. One may say that he had dedicated himself to
these so wholly, that he outgrew his taste for anything else.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The only son of his
father, he married the only daughter of the late Justice P. R. Sundara Iyer, a
recollection of which he has preserved in the wistful reverie ‘Ayyarval’s
son-in-law’ after he had lost his wife and become ‘visarada’. The saintly lady
passed away in 1936, and till then she had taken sole charge of the family and
the domestic responsibilities, relieving Narayanan completely and leaving him
free to his harem of books and dream-children. At the time, Narayanan was such
a stranger in his own house and was so seldom seen, that his children addressed
him as ‘Sir’ when he did appear. But when she passed away, he replaced her,
playing the role of Tayumanavar (Matrubhuta) so wholly and tenderly that the
children never missed the mother, and when they were a little older, he
combined the role of father and mother like Siva Ardhanariswara. In the reverie
referred to above, he relates how he handed over his marriage invitation to his
teacher, who did not even remember his name and who was greatly surprised to
learn that his humble pupil had been chosen as the son-in-law of a High Court
Judge. One can imagine the young Narayanan, diminutive and demure, with felt
cap on big head and a pair of goggly spectacles, chuckling to himself at the
teacher’s discomfiture. It was a habit so characteristic of him; he would express
the most devastating opinions in a grave and apologetic manner, laughing in his
sleeves all the time.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">He had already taken
his M. A., and M. L., with distinction after a brilliant academic career. He
practised law for some time rather perfunctorily. I remember him in his legal
garb with watch and chain, turban and brief-bag, appearing in a literary case
where a copyright was involved; but I do know Narayanan got far more deeply
involved in the labyrinth of Kadambari. His heart belonged to literature and
not law. When years later he joined the Tamil Lexicon, he got work that found
an outlet for his knowledge of languages. Sri N. Raghunathan justly praises his
accurate scholarship and appreciation of the nuances of meaning and overtones
of suggestion, that found full play when Narayanan played the role of Dr.
Johnson, for a while, at the Lexicon. The Tamil Lexicon was one of the sagas of
our time and had a long and chequered history. But that portion of it with
which Narayanan was connected, bears the stamp of his genius and learning.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I also remember his
depredations of the <i>Hindu </i>office, annexing an enormous booty of
miscellaneous books, which he would review with the patience and fortitude of a
Job. He loved the dingy old <i>Hindu </i>building of which he had very pleasant
memories; one of the reasons why he joined the <i>Indian Express </i>later was
perhaps because it was located in that dear old building. But he did not admire
the then new sky-scraper of the <i>Hindu, </i>which he considered lofty and
American. In those days, I was one of those who considered, early rising
immoral. Narayanan, an authority on the ethics and aesthetics of early rising–<i>vide</i>
his discourses on Palliyezhuchi–and the sacred month of Marghazhi, was a
confirmed early bird. Almost every day Narayanan would arrive on his bicycle
and, with an agility worthy of a better cause, clear the stairs at one bound,
accompanied by his war-cry ‘C-M’ (an abbreviation of my
nickname–Caveman–because I always kept indoors) and be at my bedside, leaving
my wife to scamper off as best she could–a heroic attempt on the part of
Narayanan to set our crooked habits straight, though not a very successful one.
The bicycle was his favourite vehicle and his daily routine (which was of
course subject to variations) was to inject Prof. K. Swaminathan with his
theory about the text of the Ramayana, because he was his neighbour and nearest
to him; then invade Perungulam House at Elliot’s Road and spar with Sri
Anantanarayanan, I. C. S., over his father-in-Law’s Ramayana theories and exchange
compliments with M. Krishnan who was just winging for the stellar height where
he now is; drop in at Prof. Kuppuswami Sastri’s for a sloka or two; hold up Sri
N. Raghunathan for at least half an hour before he left for office; and to peep
in at the ‘Asrama’ to clear his accounts of the funds of the Sanskrit Academy
of which he was the Treasurer. The beach and the evening he reserved for Tamil
and friends like Somasundara Desikar, Pundit Rajagopala Iyengar, who edited
‘Ahananooru’, and Sri Vayyapuri Pillai. In between he used to look up his
relations, of whom there were quite a number, irrespective of their worldly
success and importance, and attend to their wants, as in duty bound.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Besides the literary
page of the <i>Hindu, </i>he was a prolific contributor to the ‘Everyman’s
Review’, ‘Triveni’, ‘Journal of Oriental Research, ‘Vedantakesari’,
‘Bharatamani’, and ‘Silpasree’. He also gave some very valuable talks under the
auspices of the Archaeological Society and the Sanskrit Academy. Prof. K.
Swaminathan said that “about a dozen associations and two or three dozen
journals exploited his goodness and learning”. But Narayanan never considered
himself so exploited. Out of his innate goodness, he scattered the gems of his
thoughts far and wide to whoever wanted them, and even to those who did not
want them. If I may be permitted to say it, the late Prof. P. T. Srinivasa
Iyengar, who was himself a very good scholar, was not above borrowing ideas
from Narayanan. Narayanan was therefore a scholar sought out by other
scholars–the scholars’ scholar, so to say. He gave cheerfully and he gave
lavishly without any motive of gain or fame. Equally disinterested was his
pursuit of knowledge. He threw himself heart and soul into the functions of the
Sanskrit Academy, and was ebullient and beside himself with happiness when
scholars of the stature of Pundit Raghava Iyengar, the Elder, were honoured.
For Raghava Iyengar whose outlook was very similar to his own, and who was the
one man who could understand his own work, he had genuine affection, which he
has given expression to in an essay describing a visit to him. Once he sat up a
whole night to prepare a Tamil version of ‘Swapna-Vasavadatta’ because the All
India Radio wanted it urgently. It can never be said that Narayanan was a
recluse who kept to himself; not only did he take considerable interest, but
also participated with gusto in contemporary life. He was never idle, but was
always reading or writing or discussing literature and art.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">In the make-up of
Narayanan was an excess of modesty <i>(vreeda) </i>which ripened and mellowed
into a saintly humility as he grew older and which completely masked the
prodigious range of his attainments. He had so much to say and said so little
of it, that I gave him the nickname ‘Iceberg’ which was mostly submerged under
water, the top alone being visible and a month before he passed away, in a
tragic flash of illumination, he wrote to me that the ice was thawing and on
its way to join the ocean. If ever there was a man without trace of vanity, it
was Narayanan; he never talked about himself nor allowed others to talk about
him. Even the little appreciation he did get appeared to delight him, as though
he had partaken of a banquet. Rich in contentment and equipoise, he never
seemed to regret the lack of recognition, and went about his work as cheerfully
and nonchalantly as ever. He wrote just to disburden himself of some divine
discontent and not to canvass for fame and name. He had a genius for friendship
and a good assortment of talented friends. He took pleasure in reading poetry
with friends; and some poems he was never tired of reading again and again.
Needless to say that I learnt a good deal from his readings and conversation.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">It was Sri Aurobindo
Ghose who thought that the ‘Uttarakanda’ was a late addition and pleaded for
its exclusion from the Ramayana, as also the other patent interpolations in the
other ‘Kandas’. But it was Narayanan who studied the Ramayana in close detail
and tabulated the various species of interpolations that the Poem invited in
the course of ages from various agencies. Relying on the Alvar he would quote ‘<i>Uruttezhhli
vali Marbil Oru kanai Uruva otti</i>’<i> </i>and make out that in the Ramayana
known to the ALvar, Vali rose against Rama and was quelled by a single arrow.
From the beginning of the ‘Aranyakanda’, the theme, according to Narayanan, was
the prowess and heroism of Rama which rose in a crescendo and reached its
climax in the defeat and destruction of Vali. What a pity that before he could
restore the pure gold of the quintessential Valmiki, Narayanan was snatched
away! How invaluable would have been <i>his </i>masterpiece on the masterpiece
of Valmiki, had he been spared to write it! His favourite passage was Sita’s
message to Hanuman, in the course of which she breaks down in a hallucination
and addresses Rama in the first person, as though she saw him bodily there.
When Narayanan read it, his voice would falter and choke, and tears flow down
his cheeks.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">
In a moving narrative Narayanan has recounted how his deeply religious father
and mother came under the spell of Sarada Devi, wife of Sri Ramakrishna
Paramahamsa, whom they actually entertained in their house and from whom they
took lessons in spiritual discipline. Later Narayanan made a pilgrimage to the
village where the lady was, near Calcutta, along with his mother; and there he
was fascinated by an image of Rama. The saintly lady, reading his unuttered
thoughts, bathed him in the nectar of her eyes and initiated him into the
worship of Rama. The incident throws light on Narayanan’s subsequent outlook
and development. He was an intimate devotee of Sree Rama; and it was his faith
that sustained him in his hour of trial when he lost his wife, and forged a new
link between him and the Ramayana. In an early essay, he speaks of the sacred
ladies of his harem. As<i> </i>one who understood him, may I take the liberty
of unveiling the principal Goddess there–his <i>Bhakti. </i>The other Goddess
who was part of him–Modesty–I have already uncovered. In another mood he
described “the solitude of star-lit nights on seashore with the billows
sweeping over the sand, while the immensity beyond glowed in the phosphorescent
curl of the wave where he met infinity face to face”. So this shy young dreamer
saw the Pilot face to face even before he had crossed the bar! How tellingly he
expresses himself and his exaltation! Delicious are some of his early essays,
revelling in the impish perversities of paradox caught from Chesterton, as in
his plea for the cult of unintelligibility and his defence of failure, and the
one on the folly of wisdom. In the last, he tilts against Tagore whom he had
seen at ‘Santiniketan’, Mylapore, decked out all in velvet. In another piece he
rewrote the map of the world, replacing the geographical features with the intellectua1
and spiritual creations of the respective regions. One of the most charming was
his dissertation on ‘the lamp’ in the course of which he compared the
light-house to the “one-eyed Cyclops rolling his big eye round the broad sea at
his feet”. All this was excellent writing,–‘angelic’ as Sri K. Chandrasekharan
calls it, from a young man just out of college. If Narayanan had stuck to
English, he might have achieved distinction as a master of the personal essay.
But the lure and challenge of Tamil and Sanskrit proved irresistible and he
turned his back on English to seek his fulfillment elsewhere. Such a step was
in harmony with our own outlook and tradition, which reckon achievement as
something impersonal and work as higher than the man. But it did deprive him of
his share of contemporary appreciation to an extent.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Narayanan had the
capacity to do easily what others found it difficult, and attempt things that
no one had attempted before. Like Arjuna he was ambidextrous and could
formulate with one hand a new approach to the problems of Federation and throw
off a formidable thesis on Ramanuja’s indebtedness to ‘Tiruvoymozhi’ with the
other. He could hold forth on the doctrinal differences between Kumarilabhatta
and Prabhakara Misra and pile Ossa on Pelion to scale the Upanishads. Among his
papers are excellent studies of the early Alvars and expositions of the various
facets of the Ramayana and the moods of Subrahmanya Bharati. Essentially a
thinker, his approach was fresh and original always.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Take his thesis on
‘Chola Polity’, of unique value to those who wish to read and understand
history aright. He begins by criticising the method of reconstructing history
from the records of foreign travellers and cross-sections of dynastic lists and
lexicons, without taking account of the basic concept and philosophy of life of
the people. The Solar Race was the ideal of the Cholas; if Bhagiratha brought
down Ganga from heaven, so did Kavera bring down Kaveri; the Cholas were
‘Adityas and Vijayalayas and resembled Vishnu; likewise did the eyes of the
Chola Kochenganan tinged red with grace resemble Vishnu’s; if Dasaratha went to
help Indra, so did the Chola Muchukunda; Raja raja (a title of Kubera) not only
resembled Kubera by his boundless riches, but also by his devotion to Siva;
Karikala bore the name of Siva who tore asunder the elephant and did not get
his legs burnt to a cinder in an attempt at firewalking. The line<i> </i>in the
Chola inscription <i>‘Kanthalurchchalai kalamaruttaruli’ </i>is responsible for
a number of amusing deductions on the part of the professional historians.
‘Kalam’, according to the Tamil dictionary, means a boat or ship or eating
vessel; and ‘chalai’ is a road or Oottupurai. One school of historians claim
that the Chola smashed a fleet of ships in the harbour of Kandalurchali; the
other claims that the Chola broke all the eating vessels in the Oottupurai.
This is history indeed with a vengeance! If Mohamed Ghazni smashed images, the
noble Raja Raja smashed pots and pans in a hospitable eating house! Narayanan
said that the Chola, like Vishnu, got rid of the pest of wicked men (khala) and
established Dharma in that region, especially because in the first two lines ‘<i>Thirrumagal
polap perunilach chelviyum thanakkeyurimai poondamai Manakkola</i>’<i> </i>the
Chola is said to have made the wide earth, along with Lakshmi, his very own
like Vishnu. The word ‘aruli’ denotes an act of grace and the historians,
unaware of the poetic approach of the king to his duties, not only miss the
significance of the reference, but misread and distort it. What a vista of
happy circumstances does the title ‘Sungamthavirthapiran’ of Rajendra, evoke!
But it has meant nothing to the historians, because they are not students of
literature and fail to read the overtones of the poetic title. Besides, the
Vaishnava commentaries of the middle ages represent untapped sources for
reconstructing social history, which no historian seems to have utilised.
Narayanan concludes, “Every brick in the edifice of history must be
truth-moulded and put in proper place with utmost care, or the edifice will
tumble down. This is specially so in Chola history, as Chola Polity was
suffused with poetry and philosophy which moulded the life of the people of
that great epoch.” His incursion into historical research was not unlike the
advent of the bull in a China shop. But what a valuable lesson he taught when
he said that history, no less than literature, needs men of creative
imagination and taste! How one wishes that the research scholars benefit by his
suggestion and realign their enquiry from the new angle, however unsweet the
taste of his rod.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">His note on ‘Tamil
Civilisation’ in ‘Triveni’ was a closely reasoned argument. Beginning with a
reference to the late R. Swaminatha Iyer’s thesis that the peculiarities of Tamil
grammatical form and construction were features common to most prakrits, and
that the early Tamil vocabulary bears close affinity to Vedic vocabulary and
that of the early prakrits of the Punjab, Narayanan passes on to explain the
co-existence of Vedic and Agamic forms of worship in the same community; and
after examining certain crucial words, concludes that the evidence only
reinforces an identity of culture throughout India–a conclusion on which the
new State of India and her policy are based.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">His interpretation of
the word ‘Sanga’ as the variant of ‘Sanghata’ <i>i. e. </i>Anthology, and his
suggestion that many of the poems” of ‘Purananooru’ represented the speeches of
characters from old Tamil dramas playing the parts of poets and kings, started
a new era in the understanding of Tamil poetry and chronology, and were as
sensational in their own way as Prof. Dubreuil’s discoveries in Pallava
history. According to him the Sangam Anthologies represented a literary dialect
like Sanskrit, that found favour at Royal Courts and was confined to a specific
literary group that adhered to a specific set of literary conventions; it was
therefore but a segment of the Tamil literature. There must have been and were
other groups earlier and later who did not conform to the conventions, or chose
themes with which the conventions did not fit in, or chose a different diction
altogether. Indeed there was more than one school of literary conventions that
flourished side by side when Tamil was a creative language. Narayanan therefore
thought that an intensive study of Tamil literature as a whole was more
immediately needed than deductions based on a segment of it. I am yet to find a
scholar who studied Tamil as Narayanan did, or summed up his findings as neatly
and succinctly. Whether it was history or literature, his standard of truth in
investigation was very high. Unfortunately for him, the world of Tamil was more
bleak and lonely than history; and where he expected a multitude of voices for
and against him, he was disconcerted by listening to just one voice and that
was his own.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">Besides, he had an
original explanation for the female icon interposed between Krishna and
Balarama in the Puri temple, and he derived Narasimha from the sculptured
pillar. His essay on the interplay of arts gives an insight into the inwardness
of his knowledge of art. He was the first and only one to interpret the
significance of the dances described in ‘Silappadikaram’.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">When I started
‘Silpasree’ in 1937 Sri Y. Mahalinga Sastry hoped that even as ‘Sree’ (Lakshmi)
chose Narayanan in the primeval Swayamvara, ‘Silpasree’ would choose Narayanan.
So she did. During the two years of its existence, it was Narayana who
sustained and kept the journal going. He wrote on how to rejuvenate Tamil and
prescribed some ‘kayakalpa’ treatment for it. Out of the many fine things he
wrote, I would single out the Playlet ‘Natakavataram’ portraying the origin of
the drama under the guidance of Bharatamuni, in which Krishna plays the part of<i>
</i>Rama, and Rukmini and Satyabhama contend for the part of Sita, as something
entirely original.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">Towards the end of his
career he was attracted by the hymn literature in Sanskrit of which he gave
some very readable translations.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">I hope I have given an
idea of the work Narayanan was doing which called for talent and capacity of a
very special kind. It is one thing to have merit and quite another to get it
recognised. The latter demands faculties of an entirely different order. No
wonder that Narayanan found himself quite alone in his pursuits. He was indeed
the stone rejected by the builder, though to us, his friends, it seemed that
his place was as the headstone of the temple. If, according to Ibsen, the
strongest man was he who was most alone, Narayanan may be said to have achieved
that ideal, closely followed as he is in his spiritual isolation by others,
among whom I include myself. Did not Cassandra stand most alone, though she
spoke nothing but the truth?</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent">
<span lang="EN-US">Sri N. Raghunathan has said that
ink was in Narayanan’s blood; I am Sure that at least some of that ink was of
the indelible kind–the kind that survives, unlike that which vanishes. Sri
Raghunathan hit him off when he said that literature was his passion and that,
once started, his non-stop discourses delighted more prosaic souls by the
serenity with which he ignored the importunities of the clock! And who does not
share his regret that Narayanan is not here to waste one’s time by his genial
buttonholing way? The late K. S. Venkataramani wrote that “in the last five
years Narayanan was ripening so perfectly that every hour I spent with him was
a great fertiliser to me. In any other society he would have been gratefully
used for a higher purpose and honoured and recognised as a dynamic hermit, a
Karma Yogi saturated in the culture and traditions of our life”.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">We all remember the
story of how music was buried in the time of Aurangzeb and how Aurangzeb asked
the musicians to bury her deeper. Some ages happen to be uncongenial and
unpropitious for certain causes and ideals. The time-spirit had undoubtedly its
share in denying collaboration to people like Narayanan. If a complacent and
self-sufficient society that had no use for the thinker and dreamer,
notwithstanding pious professions to the contrary, kept aloof, no wonder that
though Narayanan had plenty to give and gave freely, he did not give of his
best. Clearly the society did not deserve it. The infant mortality of journals
like ‘Everyman’s Review’ and ‘Silpasree’ and the lifelong martyrdom of
‘Triveni’ are eloquent of a malady for which no treatment has yet been devised.
The romance of archaeology ought to tempt people, but at the Society where
Narayanan lectured, the audience consisted of about seven people, of whom two
must have been the peons waiting in impatience for the speaker to cease, so
that they may close the doors the sooner. The following epitaph by Emily
Dickinson seems to have a topical appropriateness for the circumstances of our
own time and place:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">“I died for Beauty, but
was scarce</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">Adjusted in the tomb</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">When one who died for
Truth was lain</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">In an adjoining room.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">“He questioned softly
why I failed</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">‘For Beauty,’ I
replied.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">‘And I for Truth; the
two are one,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">We brethren are,’ he
said.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">“And so as kinsmen met
anight </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">We talked between the
rooms</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">Until the moss had reached
our lips </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">And covered up our
names.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">To us his friends, however precious the
pearl-like hours spent with him, the recollection of them is but a poor
substitute for the real pearl of peerless sheen–the pearl from
Tamraparni–irretrievably lost six years ago.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">“Oh for the touch of a
vanished hand</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">And the sound of a
voice that is still!”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-align: justify;">
<sup><span lang="EN-US">1 </span></sup><span lang="EN-US">That
is to say, the river with its myriad pearls seemed to laugh at those who, with
a little knowledge of Sanskrit, looked down upon Tamil.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-7950242715555277912012-09-05T00:53:00.002-07:002014-05-05T21:55:27.756-07:00Jayanti Lakshminarayana<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">"God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master." These are words a young student, Taplow, hitherto unsuspected of such hidden depths, inscribes in a copy of <u><span style="color: blue;">Robert Browning'</span></u>s translation of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u><span style="color: blue;">Agamemnon</span></u></i><u><span style="color: blue;">,</span></u> which he gifts his retiring teacher Crocker-Harris in Terence Rattigan’s play <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Browning Version. </i>During my years teaching at the Asian College of Journalism, I often shared an audio cassette of the play with my students (The Winslow Boy by the same playwright was another), eliciting heartwarming responses, I like to believe.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Crocker-Harris is deeply moved by this unexpected show of affection and gratitude, but there is a twist in the tale, quite a few twists, in fact, before the surprise ending, but I always find the pathos, bathos even, of the hurt and humiliation life deals an unattractive, plodding schoolmaster completely devoted to learning and teaching, profoundly moving.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">In real life, I came across such an iconic teacher 45 years ago, when desperate to catch up after letting cricket distract me from academics for nearly three years I joined Jayanti Tutorial Cllege at Egmore, Chennai. Jayanti Lakshminarayana, the principal and possibly the owner of the college, was by no means physically unattractive, but he was unconcerned with social niceties, or the impression clothes or style made on students and visitors, totally dedicated as he was to his mission in life: that of turning poor students into performing ones.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Lakshminarayana was perhaps in his late 40s or 50s then. His hair was black and he was quite well preserved. He had a gravelly voice so typical of his Telugu genes (or so I believe). He always had on a full-sleeved bush shirt, which he wore out rather than tuck in to his trousers. He taught chemistry and physics—he really taught us every moment he was with us, not stopping for idle conversation of any kind. He loved chemistry and knew the subject inside out, but also the lives of the great scientists of the 20<sup>th</sup> century and before. These stories he related to us with the excitement of a child, excitement that was infectious and captivating. He literally jumped up and down, thrilled to the core of his being when he described to us how Kekule dreamt of a serpent swallowing itself leading to his discovery of the structure of the Benzene molecule. He made Mendeleef’s periodic table into a suspense thriller<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and taught us to how to draw it up by logical steps in the examination paper to impress the examiner (I actually did that in the exam). He used pens, foot rulers and dusters to explain atomic configurations and the behaviour of subatomic particles, thus making the unavailability of models a non-issue. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Lakshminarayana had a constant cough, sometimes going into paroxysms, which he fought manfully in the classroom. To him, each student was important, and he did not want any slackers in the classroom. Most of the students had failed the examination and were making a second attempt, and he was constantly concerned about the anxieties and aspirations of their parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I learnt my lesson very early in his class. Though thoroughly enjoying his lectures in his crowded classroom—we used to joke that each of us had only room for half a bum on the packed bench—I was still nervous and diffident, so I bunked the first test he had for us. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">The next day, Prof. Lakshminarayana refused to allow me to enter the class. He gave me such a fierce tongue-lashing as I had never received in my life. Why are you wasting your parents’ money? Did they send you here to cut class and go to the movies? When are you ever going to grow up? The questions flew fast and thick, and I had to really grovel before he let me in, with a stern warning that the next time I missed a test, I would be sent home with a letter to my parents. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">I never missed another class or test, and I never looked back. The professor’s explanations of the most complex lesson were so good that we never needed to refer to a textbook He promised us that our notes taken in his class were all the study material we would need and he was absolutely right. He advised each of us to buy a slate and use it to work out all our problems, and that was a brilliant suggestion too. I followed his advice implicitly, and never needed to look at any of my textbooks. Sure enough, in the university examination, there was a question relating to the periodic table in theoretical chemistry and I proudly drew up the whole table. My performance that year was easily my best in science subjects. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Throughout the months I spent at Jayanti, Prof Lakshminarayana never once referred to the unpleasant incident, nor did he dish out any praise for my consistent performance in his tests. He was probably waiting to see if I would maintain my form into the exams. When I went back to Jayanti Tutorials after doing well in the university exams—I finished highest among his students—to thank him, he was teaching a class. I tried to leave quietly, but he stopped his class to invite me in and proudly declare to the students how well I had done. That was my first experience of applause outside a cricket ground.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">PS: Despite all my effort, I had been so nervous on the morning of the university examination that my parents must have decided I needed some external help. When I reached the college, I was surprised to see my old history teacher from Vidya Mandir, Srinivasan Master, waiting there for me. He slapped me violently on my back as was his wont, and said, “I know you will do brilliantly! (Nee jamaichuduve enakku teriyum)! I couldn’t have asked for a better omen or morale booster. He was another great teacher that generations of students worshipped. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Please also read<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span> <o:p></o:p><br />
<a href="http://abhorigine.blogspot.in/2006/05/srinivasan-master.html">http://abhorigine.blogspot.in/2006/05/srinivasan-master.html</a></div>
Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-85430120814253043882012-08-29T21:07:00.003-07:002012-08-29T21:21:22.547-07:00My name is Vidya<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The autobiography of a transgender<br />
Living Smile Vidya<br />
Translated by V Ramnarayan<br />
Price Rs. 100<br />
Buy at <a href="http://www.nhm.in/">www.nhm.in</a><br />
<br />
Chapter 1<br />
<br />
NIRVANAM<br />
<br />
I love the window seat in trains. Stretching my legs, I enjoyed the landscape, the trees and plants, the houses, as they flashed past me outside the window. It was a pleasure much like the first lazy cup of coffee on a holiday.<br />
<br />
'Where are you headed?' <br />
<br />
The unexpected question woke me from my reverie. I looked up. It was a rozwala, a regular commuter on that train. One look at my ordinary clothes and he must have decided that I did not belong in the sleeper compartment, that I was perhaps a ticketless traveller. You wore the most basic clothes on your way to the operation we call nirvanam. The same applied to jewellery. That's why I had on the oldest sari I had, a white one with blue flowers on it. My tiny nose stud was all the gold I wore. I must hand it over to Sugandhi Ayah after the operation tomorrow.<br />
<br />
'Baithoon idhar?' <br />
<br />
The rozwala was asking if he could sit down beside me. I was pretty sure he thought I didn't have a ticket. Still, his manner had been polite, so I made room for him by shifting my legs. I went back to looking out of the window.My train reservation from Pune to Cuddapah had been done at the Lonavala station the very day after Nani agreed to send me for my nirvanam. That day, I didn't go to work-to do my dhandha of begging. <br />
<br />
The whole thing was surprisingly different from the norm- usually no Nani planned a nirvanam a month in advance, down to the last detail. And no Tirunangai or transgender made advance train reservations to go for the operation."You have to be discreet in such matters, observe great secrecy." Sugandhi Ayah was in a plaintive mood, complaining non-stop. "Girls nowadays don't listen to their elders; they do exactly as they please." She was constantly comparing and contrasting transgenders of past and present, adding to the pathos by relating some personal experience from her own past. <br />
<br />
Sugandhi was the matron for hundreds of doctors. Of massive physique, she wore her salt and pepper hair in a tight bun. The two-rupee-coin sized kumkum bindi on her broad forehead instilled awe in onlookers. Her mouth constantly chewed paan. Her bell-like voice matched her impressive physical appearance. Sugandhi Ayah looked formidable. Satya and I sometimes took the liberty of teasing her, calling her grandma, and she indulgently allowed us. . Today she was taking us and Nagarani, our next door neighbour to our nirvanam.Sarada Nani was an important person in the Pune locality where transgenders lived in substantial numbers. I was one of the chela daughters of one of her chela daughters Aruna Amma. Satya was older, my senior in the transgender group. She was of swarthy complexion, solidly built like Sugandhi Ayah. She had a voice to match, and long, thick hair. She was an excellent cook. She was so senior to me in the group, still her operation was only now about to take place. That my nirvanam was scheduled along with hers was a big step for me. My hair then was still short to tie up in a bun.<br />
<br />
Satya did not show as much interest as I did in nirvanam. It wasn't clear who would accompany her and so I reserved only my train berth. All that was not so important, though-any old ticket would do for Sugandhi Ayah and Satya. They sat on a newspaper they spread near the compartment door and answered the TTE's queries. Nagarani huddled close to them and they managed to stay there till morning. I got up after a while and joined them. The old woman continued to tell oft-repeated tales of woe from her own life, her trials and tribulations. To all three of us, they assumed new dimensions that evening. As she went on with accounts of nirvanam and its after-effects, we listened in terror. I went to my berth when Ayah was overcome by sleep. <br />
<br />
Just one more night. Tomorrow would dawn the fruition of my desires, the fulfilment of my dreams. The night was long. I tossed and turned. I woke up and looked around. <br />
<br />
The whole train was asleep. Very few were awake-the engine driver, a few policemen on patrol duty, and I.Nirvanam! How long I had waited for it! What humiliation I had suffered! Obsessed with it, I had mortgaged my pride, my anger, my honour-even begged on the streets to achieve that end. How could I sleep now, with my dream about to be fulfilled tomorrow?Morning at last. I welcomed the new day eagerly, with not a trace of fatigue even though I had kept awake all night. I drank a cup of coffee. Sugandhi Ayah had warned me to take only fluids in preparation for the operation. <br />
<br />
It was the most important day of my life. Autorickshaws mobbed us as the four of us emerged from the railway station. It was 26th April. "Naganna or Bapanna?' the hordes of drivers pounced on us with their incessant questioning. We managed to stave off the competing marauders, and negotiating the fare with one of them, got into his autorickshaw. "Ayah, how do they know we are going to one of those doctors?" I asked Sugandhi."Even the newborns here know our kind come to Cuddapah for the operation,' Nagarani said."Right down to the doctor's name? Tell me Ayah, which doctor are we going to?"There was no reply from Sugandhi Ayah."Why are you so glum, Ayah?""Shut up."I had no option. I kept watching the Telugu film posters.As we got off the autorickshaw, I was filled with happiness that we had arrived in Cuddapah and reached the nursing home."Hurry up." All of a sudden, Ayah rushed us in. <br />
<br />
The nursing home was right on the street. Though not a main road, it was a busy street. The cinema theatre across the road displayed a poster of the film, Chandramukhi.The hospital was abuzz with activity. We were herded upstairs through what was evidently a rear portion. A nursing home attendant accompanied us, talking all the while in Telugu to Sugandhi Ayah. She must be a frequent visitor here, I said to myself. The attendant left us in a room. There were three steel cots in that room which had a bathroom next to it, with a solitary bucket. The cot was bare, with no mattress or sheet on it. Many female names were scrawled on the wall, some in ink, others in charcoal. The room seemed to be reserved exclusively for transgenders. Our predecessors in the room had scribbled their names on the wall, presumably because they feared they could die on the operation table. That was their way of ensuring the survival of at least their names after the hazardous operation we called nirvanam. "Write your name on the wall, if you like," Sugandhi Ayah said.I didn't feel like doing so. I was certain I would live. Hadn't I struggled all the while just for that? <br />
<br />
I was hungry. Sugandhi alone had eaten since last night. The three of us had obeyed her instructions to fast."Go to the bathroom now if you must. Once in the operation theatre, your stomach should be completely empty." Sugandhi Ayah warned us. Nagarani looked scared. I watched Satya. She looked grim as usual. I was all aflutter. "When? When?" The tension was palpable. None of us minded the strange odour in the room. Tension gripped us.We waited for a while. A male attendant came to Sugandhi. He said something to her and went away. We were watching all the while. Ayah then took all three of us downstairs. They took blood from each of us for a blood test in one of the rooms there."We'll get the blood test report in half an hour," Sugandhi Ayah said. "They will do the operation once the report shows you are HIV negative. The operation won't take more than half an hour."Would there be no more tests? Wouldn't they test us for BP, blood sugar? Only AIDS? Nagarani asked, "Why, won't they operate if we have AIDS?""Do you see Janaki in the next room? She has AIDS, they say. They collected an extra 2000 rupees from her to do the operation." <br />
<br />
Only after Sugandhi Ayah pointed her out did I see the woman lying there post-operation. I went in and saw her. She was from my own street. Though she had been in Pune for many years, she still retained the flavour of the village, her language had remained unchanged. She had lived in Mumbai and Pune for five years or so, but couldn't speak a whole sentence in Hindi. I didn't know her very well, but I had seen her being heckled while walking on the street. It was a rude shock to Satya and me to know she had AIDS. The three of us chattered nervously for a while, anticipating the moment with suspense."Who's going first?" Sugandhi Ayah asked. I couldn't bear it any longer."I'll go first Ayah!" I shouted, "Let me go."Ayah came to a decision. "Satya is your senior, let her go first, you go after her," she said. No one replied. It was frustrating to know we had to wait longer."Akka, let me go first Akka, please.""Ok, go. I don't mind. Ask the hag."Sugandhi Ayah was particular about seniority. There was no point in pleading with her.The blood test results were out by then. Ayah handed over the report to each of us, asking us to keep it carefully. Thank God, none of us had AIDS.Speaking in Telugu, a hospital attendant called Satya, asking Nagarani and me to wait. He asked us to change, wearing only skirts, and be ready.Ayah had already got us ready. They took Satya away. <br />
<br />
"When will the operation be over? How long will it take?" I kept asking Ayah.I wasn't prepared for the speed of the operation. I expected an operation to take at least an hour, and a vital one like ours at least two hours. In barely twenty minutes, a man and a woman wheeled Satya out. It was all over. Neither attendant looked like a nurse or a hospital worker. You'd think they belonged to some completely unrelated profession.They lifted Satya from the wheelchair (stretcher?), and, spreading a couple of newspapers on a steel cot, dropped her unceremoniously on it. Their unsafe, unhygienic approach made me nervous. There was no time to worry. They whisked me away immediately after dumping Satya on the cot. "Keep repeating the name of the Mother during the operation," Ayah told me before I entered the operation theatre. <br />
<br />
It was no operation theatre, I realised as soon as I entered the tiny room. It was like going into a slaughterhouse. "Mata, mata, mata," I repeated to myself. In the room was a solitary cot. A masked doctor stood by its side. His eyes were those of an old man. Two more people, a man and a woman, filled the minuscule room. There was no way another person could enter.I wanted to talk to the doctor, but the environment silenced me. They removed my skirt and made me lie down on the cot, and helped me overcome my embarrassment. They made me curl into the embryonic posture, and gave me a spinal injection. It hurt. I lay down straight and was given glucose drips through a vein in my right arm. I was able to cooperate with the staff as Senbagam who had undergone the surgery a few months ago had given me a detailed account of the various steps. She had warned me that the spinal shot would anaesthetise me below the waist, so I was quite brave.Only when the surgeon made the first incision on my abdomen with his scalpel did I realise I hadn't quite lost sensation altogether. Another spinal injection followed my screams of pain. <br />
<br />
The pain subsided but did not disappear. I couldn't move my hands and legs, but I felt the movements of the surgeon's knife and my pain quite clearly. I cursed and swore. "I can't bear the pain, let me go," I screamed at them constantly. I wanted to run away. I wanted to kill the doctor and his helper. Desperate with pain, I repeatedly called out to Mata following Ayah's advice, reaching a crescendo screaming, "maaaaa...aaataaa." As the operation reached its climax, the pain rose to unbearable heights-as if someone was digging deep into my innards with a long rod and removing my intestines.Yes, what I saw in that instant was death. They had removed that part of me over which I had shed silent tears of rejection from the time I could remember. I saw that my penis and my testicles had been excised.I was sutured and applied medication after that. I could feel all that very distinctly and bear the pain.<br />
<br />
Ah! Nirvanam. The ultimate peace!My operation took all of twenty minutes. They put me on a stretcher, writhing in pain, and carried me down a ramp accompanied by violent jerks, causing new pains and aches. They dumped me on a newspaper-covered steel cot just as they had dropped Satya. In the bed next to me, I could hear Satya crying and moaning. Even though I was in great pain, I was able to bear it. Soon, to my surprise, Satya began to sob uncontrollably. <br />
<br />
Was it really Satya crying, unable to bear her pain? She had been an elder sister to me in Pune at the place where we had sought refuge. She was a strong person. Thrashed by Nani after an occasional drunken bout, she used to lie down absolutely still and quiet. I couldn't believe that she was crying in pain now. Or that I was able to stand the pain better.Inside, I was at peace. It was a huge relief. I was now a woman. Mine was a woman's body. Its shape would be what my heart wanted, yearned for. This pain would obliterate all my earlier pains. I wanted to thank everyone, cry out loud to the doctor, his assistants, Sugandhi Ayah, express my gratitude to them to my heart's content. I couldn't move my lips or open my mouth.I thanked them silently. "Thank you for removing my maleness from my body, thank you for making my body a female body. My life is fulfilled. If I die now, I'll lose nothing. I can sleep in peace," I told myself.The intensity of the pain grew with the hours. My abdomen seemed to be afire. I couldn't move my arms and legs. The pain was unbearable, however hard I tried to bear it. <br />
<br />
Amma, Amma, I have become a woman. I am not Saravanan any more. I am Vidya. A complete Vidya. A whole woman. Where are you, Amma? Can't you come to me by some miracle, at least for a moment? Please hold my hand, Amma. My heart seems to be breaking into smithereens. Radha, please Radha, I am no longer your brother, Radha. I am your sister now, your sister. Come to me, Radha. Chithi, Manju, Prabha, Appa... Look at me Appa, look at my dissected body. This is a mere body. Can you see that I can bear all this pain? I can take any amount of pain, Appa. Look at me Appa. Look at me as a woman. Accept me as a girl, Appa.Only I could hear my screams.<br />
<br />
<strong>Chapter 2</strong><br />
<strong>APPA</strong><br />
<br />
When I was born the first time, my parents named me Saravanan. I was their sixth child, born after years of prayers for a boy child. In fact, their first had been a boy, unfortunately still born. Four girls followed, two of them succumbing to unknown diseases. In the circumstances, I realised pretty early in life what joy my arrival must have brought my parents.<br />
<br />
My family wasn't exactly well off. My father Ramaswami was known as Nattamai or chieftain in Puttur, next to Tiruchi. The title must have been somebody's idea of a joke, for my father was hardly any kind of chief, certainly not the kind immortalised by Tamil cinema. He was a municipal worker of the lowest rung, a sweeper. He married my mother Veeramma in 1973. They started life together in a small hut they built on an unoccupied piece of land on Attumanthai (flock of sheep) Street.<br />
<br />
My mother was someone special. Her name meant a brave woman, and she was every bit that. Brave and hard working, sweet tempered. She was also a typical Indian wife, who submitted to her husband's tyrannical ways. She died in an accident when I was eleven.<br />
<br />
The pain and awareness of their oppression on the basis of their caste haunted my parents all their lives. Their intense yearning for a son must have sprung from their desperate hope that he would change the course of their abject lives.<br />
<br />
Appa, my father, was at first in the business of milk supply. I remember that he had job opportunities in the police and Southern Railway. He was not too keen on such careers; he perhaps believed he must do his own business, however small. Making both ends was never easy. His relatives were determined he must find employment. They repeatedly counselled him, persuading him to join the Tiruchi Refugee Camp as a sweeper.<br />
<br />
My father's life was one of frustration. Frustration that his lack of formal education beyond Class 8 had landed him in a lowly sweeper's job, for all that it was a government job. He constantly dreamt of his son growing up to be a district collector, surely the top job in India! His dreams, desires, ambitions all centred on his son of the future. <br />
<br />
When these dreams were shattered, and his first child to survive turned out to be a daughter, Appa accepted her cheerfully. <br />
<br />
Appa adored MG Ramachandran, the famous film star popularly known as MGR. Who wasn't an MGR fan those days? Appa named his first daughter Radha after the leading lady in an MGR movie. Manju, his second daughter too, was named after a co-star of MGR.<br />
<br />
My father was hoping the next baby would be a boy to make up for the loss of his first born and the next two being girls, but that was not to be. The next two were girls, Vembu and Vellachi, and both succumbed to mystery ailments. This was a turning point in Appa's life which had plumbed the depths of despair. <br />
<br />
For long years he had practised his own vague brand of atheism, but now he made an about turn and visited temple after temple. Landing finally at the Vayalur Murugan temple in Tiruchi, he vowed to name his next child after Murugan, the presiding deity there, if he was a boy. He would also shave his head in pious offering of his locks to the lord.<br />
<br />
I was born on 25 March 1982. My parents named me Saravanan in fulfilment of my father's contract with Murugan. Saravanan is one of Murugan's many names.<br />
<br />
My parents had been married in 1973 and I was born nearly ten years later. What challenges they encountered during the period! Their surroundings had undergone considerable change. Vacant land belonging to the government is known as poramboke land. Squatters often occupy such land and eventually occupy it permanently. The poramboke land on Attumanthai Street, where Appa and others had built their huts was now a full-fledged neighbourhood, Bhupesh Gupta Nagar, in memory of a revolutionary of that name. My father, the nattamai, was responsible for the name change. <br />
<br />
The street had grown. So had our town. The whole city had been transformed in that decade. Only we were poor as ever. My father continued to be a municipal conservation worker, a sweeper. He was eternally running from pillar post to apply for an electricity connection for our street. At home, my mother and my sisters took care of me, spoiled me. By the time I was ready to go to school, my father had made preparations on a war footing.<br />
<br />
I was a privileged member of the household. Of the three children, I was the one person who didn't have to do any work at home. That was the unwritten law. I enjoyed every kind of concession.<br />
<br />
"The only work we want you to do is study," Appa said. "Remember, it's your job to study." He was quite the dictator when it came to my education, allowing no discussion.<br />
<br />
"If any of you dares to give him work that interferes with his studies, I'll kill you," he warned us.<br />
<br />
My two sisters, ten-year-old Radha and six-year-old Manju were so terrified of Appa's threat that they never let me do any household work. I was the male heir of the family and that was reason enough to exempt me from work of any kind! My doting mother carried me around until I was five years old. When he came back from work in the evening, Appa usually brought us sweets and snacks, and you could bet he slipped in something extra for me every time.<br />
<br />
I don't remember my sisters ever being jealous of me. They showered me with love. From the time she was born, Radha had grown up amidst my parents' constant prayers for a male child. From a tender age, I remember her as a second mother to me. When Amma died, Radha took over altogether as my mother.<br />
Radha was a goddess to all of us. She took charge of the house as soon as my parents went to work everyday. She could cook when she was barely ten. Sweeping and swabbing the house, washing the dishes and our clothes, storing water-she took care of it all. We should in all fairness have treasured her, treated her like royalty. We did not. I became the sole beneficiary of all the love and affection at home by virtue of my being a boy.<br />
<br />
Amazingly, not once did I hear my sisters criticise this overt partiality. Neither Radha nor Manju did that. I think they came to believe in time that looking after me was the very purpose of their existence. <br />
<br />
On my part, I studied well, to Appa's great joy. My academic excellence in contrast with my sisters' unschooled ways gave him immense pride. I was ranked first in my class in the first grade. When Appa came home and heard the news, he carried me on his shoulders and went round and round Bhupesh Gupta Nagar, broadcasting the news to the world. "My son got the first rank," he announced again and again.<br />
I remember the day so clearly. Appa loved me but he had never carried me or fondled me before. His public demonstration of his love for me that day was the best reward I could have asked for. My stock in the neighbourhood shot up. I was the boy who was ranked first in his class.<br />
<br />
My academic feats complicated life for my sisters. When Amma left for work at five o'clock in the morning, it was Radha's duty to wake me up to make me study. She had no escape from that responsibility. If I did not study, Radha or Manju would be spanked even more than I. <br />
<br />
Up at that early hour, I studied for an hour. Manju went out at six o c'lock to buy tea and porai biscuits. Radha swept the house and started cooking by then, while Manju cleaned the vessels. I had to continue studying until 7.30, when Appa woke up. The girls then had to ensure I bathed, ate my breakfast, got ready and dashed off to school.<br />
<br />
Appa gave Radha our daily allowance of one rupee every morning. My share was 40 paise while my sisters each got 30. They could not go to their classrooms without depositing me at mine. As soon as I came home, I had to do my homework. After that started Appa's lessons for me.<br />
<br />
Appa made me do third grade exercises when I was still in the first grade. He made me do the multiplication tables-from one to 20-ten times everyday. "Do you know Abraham Lincoln studied under the street light and became president of America?" he repeated constantly. He made me believe that studying hard in the light of a hurricane lamp would one day make me the district collector.<br />
<br />
I had a natural aptitude for studies, and I was an eager student. I was doing quite well at school, but as time progressed, I began to resent Appa's constant harassment, both mental and physical. I knew he was only doing what was good for me, but my loss of the simple joys and freedom other children of my age enjoyed was an irritant. Was a childhood without games worth living? Home was a virtual prison. Even the love of my mother and sisters could not make up for that.<br />
<br />
My father never allowed me to play with boys and girls. I could not understand this blanket ban. I didn't know if it was because the kids in our neighbourhood were poor students. Our neighbours did not give education a great deal of importance. My father was very different in this aspect from all of them.<br />
<br />
It was my sisters' responsibility to prevent me from giving Appa the slip and going out to play. Radha and Manju kept a constant vigil over my movements, fearful of what Appa might do if I did get away. Sometimes they scolded me and even slapped me playfully if I tried to step out of line. They were so fond of me that they never let me down by carrying tales to Appa, though. <br />
<br />
When I came home form a school exam, Appa conducted the same test at home all over again. I was not allowed to go out to play even during vacations. Preparations for the next examination started right then and there.<br />
<br />
This was all on top of the demands of my school teachers who made me answer all the question papers at home without omitting a single question even in multiple choice papers. I had to do five question papers in a single day. Invariably, just when I breathed a sigh of relief at completing them, Appa's home lessons started. If I slowed down my home work to avoid Appa's exercises, he thrashed me. My body would be bruised black and blue with belt marks all over. If Amma or my sisters tried to stop him, they got belted too. <br />
<br />
"Weren't you expected to ensure he did his home work?' he screamed at them. I regularly wetted my shorts in fear and shock.<br />
<br />
It was around this time that my mother died in a road accident. I was eleven. My grief was immeasurable, indescribable. I had been my mother's little boy, always at home, always protected by her. It was hard to come to terms with her absence all of a sudden.<br />
<br />
Appa made matters worse by remarrying. Lata aka Thangammal, who was younger than Radha, was our new stepmother.<br />
<br />
I was too young then to know if what Appa had done was right or wrong. Luckily, Chithi was a good person. She treated me with love. And my sisters were a great consolation, too. The wounds of losing Amma slowly healed. Gradually things changed for the better. Except for Appa's watching over me. As his dreams for me grew, his oppressive ways too kept increasing in intensity, even though I continued to do well at school. God knows what fears and anxieties troubled him, but he never allowed me a normal childhood. <br />
<br />
I remember this incident. I came second in my class in the sixth grade exams. I was scared beyond description that evening. I didn't sleep a wink that night, afraid of the consequences of showing my report card to my father next morning. When I finally drifted into sleep, I dreamt of Appa belting me. I wetted my bed that night.<br />
<br />
As the day dawned, I had no choice but to show Appa my report card, trembling with fear. I received the cruellest punishment of my life that morning.<br />
<br />
Remember how Appa carried me around Bhupesh Gupta Nagar the day I was ranked first the first time? Today, unable to bear what he saw as the first crumbling of his dreams, he lifted me much the same way again. Only, this time he dropped me forcefully from a height. He then kicked me in my stomach. I was terror stricken.<br />
<br />
He picked me up and thrashed me wildly. My chithi and sisters who tried to protect me got thrashed too. Our pain and tears and screams made no impression on him.<br />
<br />
Second rank! Something he had never imagined I would get. It made no sense to me. How could I explain to my father that not much divided the first and second ranks?<br />
<br />
He would never understand. He did not. He smashed me around until he got his fury out of his system. <br />
<br />
I was a complete mess, beaten black and blue. With no strength left in me, I sought refuge in my sister's lap. <br />
<br />
Why didn't I have a loving father like other children? The question comes back to haunt me even today, every time I see loving men.</div>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-45234219747364081412012-03-11T07:58:00.006-07:002012-03-11T18:00:24.609-07:00Ramani, RIPToday, at 8.30 am, Rajan Ramani, my friend of nearly five decades, passed away. He was 62, a man at the height of his career as a legal expert at India Cements. Diagnosed with cancer three and a half years ago, he tried to lead a normal life till almost the very end, staying in touch with his many, many friends, enjoying evenings at the club, though less and less able to get a round of his beloved golf.<br /><br />It was Ramani’s move from tennis to golf about a decade ago that reduced the frequency of my contact with him. He had made me a member of Besant Nagar Club in the 1980s and bulldozed me into overcoming my inhibitions enough to become a decent club level player despite my late start, well into my thirties. His love of golf soon turned into an obsession and eventually left him with no time or inclination for tennis. His golf circle grew and grew until in time a whole gang of players began to call themselves Ramani’s team. <br /><br />Ramani was still a schoolboy when I first met him. A couple of years older than him, I was already in college. When I started playing competitive cricket, it became impossible for me to continue neighbourhood cricket, in which my brother Sivaramakrishnan and Ramani were prominent. Later, when Ramani joined Law College, he became active in politics and actually became a member of the CPI (M). It was only in the 1980s that he slowly weaned himself away from leftist ideology, and started a career in the private sector, looking after the legal affairs of a company associated with the India Cements group, which he was eventually to join and become an important part of.<br /><br />Ramani was a natural ball player. In tennis, he had a superb top spinning service which he sent down from a considerable height, obtaining impressive bounce and swerve. We loved playing together as a doubles pair, and thanks to his dominance of the court, did not do too badly, in our sometimes raucously competitive recreational tennis. On the few occasions we played against each other he used to get irritated with my high, lobbed returns of serve, not realizing I knew no other way of handling his service. He loved talking tennis as much as playing tennis (even when a game was in progress) and loved telling his opponent what his brilliant shot would have done to him had it landed inside the court! (Despite his best efforts to convert me to golf—he even made me a member of the Tamil Nadu Golf Federation—I never took to the game and so have no way of knowing how he entertained his friends on the course, but I have no doubt that entertain them he did). <br /><br />Ramani’s sense of humour and penchant for repartee and spontaneous jokes were the stuff of legends. Once he and I were part of an anxious threesome waiting for a fourth to start the morning’s first doubles game. “Let’s hope and pray it is not Sankaran,” Ramani said, referring to a late friend of ours whose tennis was about as exciting as tennikoit. Who should walk in then but Sankaran? Ramani’s response to this setback to our plans for some good tennis was to burst into song. “Ninaithen vanthai, nooru vayathu” he crooned, the first line of a famous film song, which translates to, “I think of you, and here you are! You’ll live to be a hundred!”<br /><br />Ramani also had a rich collection of jokes and anecdotes, and a phenomenal memory for old real life incidents, strange and funny. He was particularly fond of recalling a moonlight dinner he and a number of our common friends including my brother had at Elliot’s Beach, days after my wedding—the reason why I had excused myself from the fun and games. The party returned well after midnight and realizing they had forgotten a thermos flask at the beach, they decided to enlist my help, because they did not want to walk all the way back to the beach from Shastrinagar, Adyar, and because I was the only one in the gang who could drive a car. So, to the complete amazement of my wife of less than a week, I dashed out of the house along with nine others packed into my father's Standard Herald car, on our mission to recover our lost treasure. Ramani loved to recall how, returning triumphantly from our adventure, we decided to have some tea, knocked on the door of Chandran Tea Stall, woke up Chandran and got him to make us ten cups of tea, with a promise to pay him on the morrow.<br /><br />Yes, Ramani’s sense of humour made him the hugely popular person he was, but he was also a gregarious and helpful man. I have been the beneficiary of his acts of kindnesses, and so have many other friends I know. He sailed through life’s ups and downs, including his battle with cancer, with a smile on his lip and hope in his heart. Rajan Ramani was truly one of a kind—brilliant, well read and informed, witty, generous, warm and cheerful. A true sportsman on and off the field.Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-48215430402435856482012-01-31T06:59:00.001-08:002012-01-31T07:01:18.965-08:00FriendsThe friends you make during childhood, boyhood and adolescence are the best, and those friendships are the longest lasting. Right? I must be a particularly lucky bloke, because friendship keeps coming my way even in my dotage. In the recent past, not only did I make a new friend, I also renewed contact with one who had been my mate back in 1960, all within a couple of days. <br /><br />The moment I learnt that the Asian College of Journalism—where I teach Language and Style—was sending one batch of students to Thoothukudi as part of the Covering Deprivation project under which ACJ’s students travel to different parts of the country in some five or six batches, I eagerly volunteered to go there with the students as faculty supervisor. I had been a student of Subbiah Vidyalayam there in the year Flying Sikh Milkha Singh ran a brilliant 400m race at the Rome Olympics, with my father posted there as Agent of the Indian Overseas Bank. That is when I spent my idyll in the sun—literally—with our neighbours’ kids Subash, Nargunam and Ravi. The first two were brothers and Ravi was their cousin, and they were my and my brothers’ constant playmates. <br /><br />Subash Hall Sargunaraj, for that was his full name, was a somewhat squat, solidly built athlete, around my age, which made him 13 or 14 that year. I came from a cricket family, with father, uncles, cousins and brothers as seriously interested and talented in the game as I was, most of them more gifted than I, though in the long run, I perhaps made better use of my resources. <br /><br />Subash introduced me to the joys of track and field. For that golden year I learnt to long-jump, high-jump and triple-jump longer and higher than I could ever have imagined. I was still a distant second to Subash, but my distances/ heights were fast becoming respectable. Our house was within walking distance of the famous VOC College, though it was a really long walk, and we spent a vigorous couple of hours every evening on the sands bordering the college’s grounds. We followed the Rome Olympics with passionate interest, and were sorely disappointed when Milkha Singh so narrowly missed a medal at the Games. <br /><br />The idyll came to a premature end when my father moved to Delhi to start a new job there and all of us went with him. I had to say goodbye to all my friends in Thoothukudi, including Ganesh, my classmate, his brothers and sisters, his parents Delhi Mama and Delhi Mami, Uday Shankar, son of sub-judge Bhavanishankar, another classmate NS Radhakrishnan, and most important of all Subash, his brother and cousins. Radhakrishnan moved to Madras soon afterwards and we remained in touch for a number of years, but I met Subash only once afterwards. It was probably in 1965 or so, when I was playing a match for Presidency College on the Marina grounds. He was in the city on a brief visit and he ran up to me fielding near the boundary and we exchanged a few words. I have yet to meet him since then, but I was able to trace him and he called me from Coimbatore where he lives when I was at Thoothukudi. It was quite easily the high point of the trip.<br /><br />I also managed to locate the two houses at Chidambaranagar where we lived during our brief Thoothukudi sojourn in 1960-61, stare at Delhi Mami’s house, actually go to Subbiah Vidyalayam’s present school premises and meet the Headmaster and APC Shanmugham, Correspondent of the School—the latter a son of APC Veerabahu who had been my father’s friend—and even catch a glimpse of the old Indian Overseas Bank building on whose first floor my family spent a few days and nights before we moved to our residence at Chidambaranagar back in 1960.<br /><br />All this was made possible by my new friend—Sriram, perhaps the most successful auditor in Thoothukudi, whose incredible affection and hospitality it was my privilege to enjoy during my visit to the pearl city.I have been in touch with Sriram through email over the past few years—ever since his daughter and my former student Harini told me in class that she was from Thoothukudi. Sriram has a phenomenal memory and appetite for making connections with people, digging into their family histories and bringing people together. Over the years I have known him, he has become an expert on my own family history, with probably a deeper knowledge of the various branches of my family than I have. <br /><br />Even before I met Sriram—whom I telephoned on the first morning of my weeklong stay at Thoothukudi—he started sending goodies tro my hotel. On that first day, it was two large cakes, which I shared with the whole tour party. The next day, it was an enormous quantity of Tirunelveli halwa, followed on the morrow by some special Thoothukudi mixture, and then by some deilicous macaroons another pearl city special, so on and so forth. On top of all this I also had coffee and snacks at his place and lunch at a nearby mami’s mess as his guest. Thank you, Sriram for an unforgettable experience.<br /><br />The Thoothukudi trip was also made memorable by a visit to my ancestral village Perunkulam, which happened to be right in our path, as we set out to study the problems faced by farmers depending on Tamraparani water for their irrigation, as a result of diversion to big industries and damage caused by effluents. My students were able to interact with Mr Ramanujam, who was once caretaker of our property, now gone, at Perunkulam and learn about his own experience as a farmer looking to the Tamraprani for water. But Perunkulam is quite another story, for another day.Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-17839210264059566772012-01-30T03:32:00.000-08:002012-01-30T03:33:09.412-08:00Music keeps him alive“Look up the meaning of the Tyagaraja kriti Sangita gnanamu in the book there ,” the frail old man bundled up and blanketed in the chair in front of me said, a minute after I entered his bedroom in his nephew’s house inside Sankarnagar, Tirunelveli, when my friend Sampathkumar and I visited him earlier this month. <br /><br />Near-nonagenarian and confirmed bachelor Tanjavur Sankara Iyer may be a very sick man today, needing the constant care of a loving nephew, his wife and his daughter, but his musical creativity and devotion to past masters including the Trinity remain undimmed. True to the words of Tyagaraja, he still pursues sangita gnanamu with fervent devotion, still composes his own bhava-rich compositions and still sings and teaches everyday. The object of his love and affection and guru kripa is his 12-year-old granddaughter Aparna, on whom he pins his hopes for the future.<br /><br />For those unfamiliar with Sankara Iyer’s contribution to Carnatic music, I reproduce below a brief extract from a Sruti (issue 195) profile of the vidwan by Lakshmi Devnath:<br /><br />Sankara Iyer is a highly respected vaggeyakara. His compositions have been a source of delight both to the vidwans and to the general public, but he himself speaks with great modesty about his works. “I should not be bracketed with the Trinity or other famous composers of the past. But I can say my compositions are rooted in sampradaya, as theirs are, while they cater at the same time to evolving needs without being light. Shall I say, my compositions are a bridge between the old and the new!” <br /><br />Anyone who has listened to Sankara Iyer’s vocal concerts, lec-dems and his own compositions, will readily agree that he is indeed a bridge between the old and the new.<br /><br />My planned interview with Sankara Iyer never took place, because, thrilled to meet visitors from Chennai, he was keen to demonstrate his granddaughter’s singing, and more important her ability to absorb his lessons on sruti suddham, raga lakshana, and clear enunciation of sahitya. He stressed the vital importance of the last of these aspects of music, but was quick point out that on his list of priorities, the raga overrode the Bhakti emanating from understanding of the lyrics. “The lyrics could be about Rama, Krishna or Karuppannasami; it’s the musicality that matters.”<br /><br />We were fortunate to catch glimpses of his highly evolved sense of aesthetics through his profound enjoyment of the beauty of both verse and tune, whether by the Trinity, Sankara Iyer himself or Kalki Krishnamurti, whose Poonkuil koovum pooncholaiyil orunal, he taught Aparna with obvious relish. “What a wonderful poet!” he exclaimed. <br /><br />When I reminded him about a T Viswanathan concert he had attended more than a decade ago at my Chennai home after which I dropped him home, he instantly recalled, “Muktha was in the audience, wasn’t she, and I remember she joined Viswa in a song whose words he momentarily forgot. In the car, you asked me if I would perform at your residence. What happened to that offer?”<br /><br />That was indeed a doosra from the veteran. I had no answer to that.Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-65568104332282422952012-01-19T22:10:00.000-08:002012-01-22T21:37:41.994-08:00Networked societyYesterday, I received a phone call from Hyderabad on my mobile phone while having lunch at Maris, next to our office. Hari Mohan Paruvu, former Hyderabad medium pacer and author of a couple of bestsellers, wanted to know why I hadn’t replied to his email of a couple of weeks ago. Though I am rarely guilty of such bad manners, I had not even acknowledged receipt of his message. It was all the more unpardonable, as he had wanted some help from me. <br /><br />This is what happened. I was travelling on vacation and had deliberately left my laptop behind. Though I did check my email on my phone, I forgot all about Hari’s missive at the end of the vacation. In the days before email, Hari’s handwritten letter would have awaited my arrival back home and I would have probably replied to him at once.<br /><br />Things have changed, haven’t they? Everyone is so much more accessible, through email and text messages, conference calls and googlegroups. But do we really communicate? Do we remember birthdays, unless Facebook reminds us? Can we cut through the clutter and attend to the really important letters? <br /><br />When I was a college student, I tried to write letters full of descriptions and anecdotes, humour and human interest. This was a valuable legacy I inherited from a family whose elders prided themselves on writing regularly to their loved ones and investing their letters with warmth and love. <br /><br />One of the nicest compliments I received came from a friend, then a student at JIPMER, Pondicherry. He said that not only he, but also all his friends in the hostel eagerly awaited my weekly letter full of stories real and apocryphal. This good habit stayed with most of us before the communication revolution towards the end of the last millennium. I lived in Hyderabad and my brother in New Jersey, but my parents at Madras could count on both of us writing them every week. <br /><br />9 December 1973. I was a 26-year-old bank officer, but still did not have a telephone at home. Suffering an acute toothache all night, I waited impatiently for dawn to break so that I could go out and find a drugstore to buy a painkiller. As I tried to start my Rajdoot motorcycle, the machine decided to punish me for not looking after it well and gave me a violent “kickback”-for want of a better word—opening up the back of my left foot. <br /><br />Later in the morning, after a quick visit to the dentist, I rode to the Lal Bahadur Stadium where my team, State Bank of India, was playing a match, to inform my captain (he too did not have a telephone connection) that, with my already swelling foot, I could not play that day. Unfortunately, we had only eleven men at the ground, and I was forced to take part in the match. In excruciating pain all the while, I fielded near the boundary (you would have gathered by now that I was not the captain’s pet) all day long. <br /><br />When I returned to the dressing room, it took me a good half hour of effort to take off my left boot, because my foot had swollen so much. I somehow managed to ride my bike back home, with changing gears proving a most painful exercise. I was furious with the game of cricket, Rajdoot, traffic police, dentists—in fact all of humanity, as I dismounted my steed. <br /><br />“Congratulations,” the voice of my 2nd floor flat’s neighbour boomed, much to my annoyance. Even as I was mulling a caustic retort like “Thank you for enjoying my misery,” came his next words: “You are the proud father of a little daughter. We opened a telegram meant for you.” I hobbled upstairs, unable to contain my excitement, to a hero’s welcome at my neighbour’s, with his wife and kids greeting me with a delicious cup of payasam that Mami had made on receiving the good news from my in-laws at Bombay, where my wife had gone to deliver our first child.<br /><br />For at least a couple of decades more, telecommunication continued to be grossly inefficient and inaccessible to most Indian citizens. I had to wait for nearly ten years after applying for a residential telephone connection. I remember the ridiculous scene of two different gangs of Indian Telephones employees descending on my seaside home in the distant suburbs one afternoon in the mid-1990s to install two different phones. One was my humble NOYT (Non Own Your Telephone!) and the other an OYT connection my employer had granted me. This seachange had come about largely as a result of the efforts of the dynamic Sam Pitroda who revolutionized Indian telecommunication.<br /><br />Sorry, I must leave this story here. I have an urgent message from my next-door neighbour—who lives alone and has a chronic medical condition—asking me if I can get her a hard-to-find drug ASAP. I messaged her back a promise to look for it immediately. At the pharmacy, I will be stumped when the druggist asks me for the patient’s name. I have to text a message asking for her name, because I have it saved on my phone as “Neighbour1.”Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-30317482731552565102007-10-31T05:07:00.000-07:002007-10-31T05:19:35.735-07:00If you can't get them, beam them!<blockquote> <p> <span style=";font-family:Verdana;color:black;" ><big><b></b></big></span><br /> <span style="color: rgb(128, 128, 128);font-family:Verdana;font-size:78%;" >Sunday Express</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(128, 128, 128);font-family:Verdana;font-size:78%;" >January 27 2006 </span><br /> <br /></p><p align="center"><img src="http://www.newindpress.com/sunday/Images/jan06%5C29sports1.jpg" alt="" border="1" /><br /><br /></p> <span style="font-family:Verdana;"><small>Curse, crib, chatter, chuck, claim for everything — that seems to be the order of the day in international cricket. Cricket, that game of infinite complexity, heroism and high drama, power, precision and artistry can slide into ugly gamesmanship, downright cheating and abysmal behaviour if the protagonists forget the unwritten tenets of the game. When misplaced machismo becomes more important than achieving excellence on the field, it degenerates into a crude circus. The Australians, for instance, set new records in aggressive appealing in their recent Test series against South Africa. The South Africans, needless to say, retaliated in kind.<br /><br />It was hardly a couple of years ago that Australia made a conscious effort, under new captain Ricky Ponting, to improve their image. The Ashes defeat suffered at the hands of a rejuvenated England changed all that pretty rapidly, even if the series itself was fought in the best of spirits — until Ponting stormed off after being brilliantly run out by a substitute fielder. He made a hue and cry about England seeking undue advantage by resting tired bowlers and replacing them with athletic substitute fielders. Former Australia captain Bobby Simpson describes his compatriots' on-field behaviour thus: ‘‘It’s exactly how toddlers behave in an effort to tide over their shortcomings.’’<br /><br />There are more recent examples closer to home. In the Lahore Test, Pakistani pace bowler Rana Naved sent down three bouncers in a row, and Virender Sehwag followed each like a mesmerised victim of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Third time round, wicketkeeper Kamran Akmal went up in celebration, the bowler died a mini war-dance, and the rest of the Pakistani fielders joined in the frenzied celebrations.<br /><br />At that time, a Rip van Winkle who slept through the first four days of the Lahore Test might be forgiven for imagining that Sehwag had made next to nothing or that India was off to a poor start. But a look at the scoreboard would have had him rubbing his eyes in disbelief. It read: India 410 for 1, Sehwag out for 254, Rahul Dravid 128 not out. This is in reply to an imposing total of 679 for 7 declared, no doubt, but the Pakistani bowlers had been put to the sword, subjugated in a manner unknown to them, not even when Sehwag made 309 on the last Indian tour of Pakistan.<br /><br />Sehwag toyed with Pakistani pace as though he were playing tennis-ball cricket in a gali back in his hometown Najafgarh. The Rawalpindi Express hardly posed any danger to him, while Mohammad Sami and Rana Naved were made to look rather silly ball after ball, as three boundaries per over became a constant refrain through his rollicking innings. Sami and Akhtar looked ludicrous when they tried to unsettle Dravid and Sehwag with some crude aggro, the Indian skipper choosing to ignore their taunts with disdain and his partner imperiously waving away the offending pacemen.<br /><br />And what of the hype that preceded the ongoing series? ‘‘Beware of Shoaib’’, screamed the headlines. ‘‘He has this deadly new slower one that rang the death knell for England’s Ashes-conquering batsmen.’’ ‘‘Pakistan are favourites at this time of the year,’’ warned the pundits. ‘‘The ball will dart around and the wickets will be fast and bouncy.’’ Danish Kaneria was a potent new threat, according to others, and he would prove a handful for the Indians. Commentator after commentator pontificated that genuine pace could work wonders where seam and swing might struggle. ‘‘Shoaib’s explosive pace will be the difference between the two teams,’’ they confidently predicted.<br /><br />And what happened? Shoaib, unfortunately, has at the time of writing taken exactly one wicket in the series, at a cost of nearly 200 runs. The wickets have been sleeping beauties, and the Indian batsmen have made merry, undaunted by the hype surrounding Shoaib and Co., and the huge totals Pakistan have posted.<br /><br />Almost the first thing Bob Woolmer did on arrival as Pakistan’s coach a little over a year ago was to take steps to tame Shoaib. Soon he had the spoilt brat transformed into a disciplined soldier who, in a couple of bursts of fast bowling, turned the England-Pakistan series on its head. The ICC’s new ruling on chucking made it easy for Shoaib, whose action is now legally above board, thanks to what Pakistani cricket writer Osman Samiuddin calls an inherent kink in his body, as in the case of Sri Lanka’s Muttiah Muralitharan. Samiuddin, in fact, demands to know why Shabbir Ahmed, another Pakistani quick now banished for a year for the third time by the ICC for chucking, should be penalised for not suffering from such an inherent kink in his body.<br /><br />Shoaib can offer no such kinky explanation for his tendency to let loose beamers at innocent batsmen. Ask Ian Bell of England, Jacques Kallis of South Africa or Ramesh Powar of India how it feels to have a ball right directed at their heads. The answer can be no different from that of one of Brett Lee’s victims. At least the Australian has apologised every time he has come close to decapitating a batsman. New Zealand coach John Bracewell said, ‘‘It’s very hard to pick Brett Lee’s bouncer. It’s even harder to pick his beamer. It’s the fourth time this season (after Lee nearly guillotined Brendon McCullum) that he has beamed one of our guys, and he’s been apologetic every time he has done it. That’s a lot of apologies.’’<br /><br />Shoaib has no such qualms. After hitting Bell, thankfully not on the head with a beamer, he went down to the crease and calmly inspected the damage, not showing the slightest remorse. The Pakistanis claimed it was a slower delivery that slipped out of his hand, and the media lapped it up, conveniently forgetting earlier occasions when the ball had ‘‘slipped out’’ of Akhtar’s hand — just as it did out of Waqar Younis’ during the 2003 World Cup, whizzing past Andrew Symonds’ head.<br /><br />Under the present law, what we used to call chucking is legal — well, it is no longer chucking by the ICC’s definition, as long as the bowler has a congenital or acquired physical defect, or flexes his arm below an ICC-approved angle. Firing head-high full tosses is legitimate too, as long as you can imply to the world that the ball slipped out of your hand.<br /><br />Of course, it is also perfectly acceptable for you to question a batsman’s parentage, insult his ancestors or girlfriend or wife, run down the wicket and glare at him, curse, point the way to the pavilion — if you can manage to do all that unnoticed by the umpire, TV cameras or the match referee, or if you happen to be Australian, to go by reports from their rivals on the field. To celebrate a dismissal in a manner that would shame a primitive reveller at a human sacrifice seems to be the birthright of every bowler, even if the scoreboard reads 500 for 3. Holding a half-volley and appealing for a catch is perfectly normal; just remember to add a touch of drama by running up to the batsman and waggle your finger at him. Demand that he walk on the strength of your word, as Michael Slater did to Dravid, and follow up that exhibition of arrogance with histrionics directed at the umpire. Make a desperate dive at the boundary line and wait for the third umpire to adjudicate on whether it was a boundary or not, even if you know for sure it is one.<br /><br />Bad behaviour can be curbed by statute. Better still, selection committees the world over can pick men of character to be captains and role models. Rahul Dravid and Inzamam-ul Haq are examples of nice guys who don’t finish last. They set great personal examples, both in terms of their conduct on and off the field and the consistent excellence of their performance. They are also firm with their men, without crushing individuality. Michael Vaughan is another excellent man manager who has inspired his team to great eights of performance as well as sportsmanship.<br /><br />Such traits can be infectious and spread around the cricket world. But the greater menace is the tampering with rules that has sought to change the very nature of the game. If dubious bowling actions are allowed to flourish and dangerous offences such as the bowling of head-high full tosses at velocities approaching 150 kph are overlooked, cricket will undergo a transformation in its fundamental nature. It will no longer be the spectator sport that generations of lovers of the game have enjoyed watching. It will became a gladiatorial contest, bereft of finesse and beauty. It just won’t be cricket any more.<br /><br />The one bright spot in the ongoing chucking controversy is that bowlers with suspect actions, who have been handed reprieves under the new ICC rule, seem to be becoming less and less successful as batsmen learn to cope better with their bowling or as age catches up with the bowlers. Captains around the world tend to support such bowlers as long as they tend to win matches with them, but not a moment longer.<br /><br />You don’t have to be a statistical expert, then, to come to the conclusion that the bowlers under the microscope over the last few seasons are no longer the match-winners they used to be. Maybe this is the time for all parties concerned to come together to review the whole situation without nationalistic fervour clouding the issue and come up with a definition of throwing that makes sense.<br /><br />The present law does not. Beamers, intentional or otherwise, have no place in the game. Bowlers should be mercilessly outlawed if they indulge in that vile practice. And as for bad behaviour on the field, it will die a natural death if the cricket-lovers of a country come down heavily on their heroes, as Australian spectators have in the recent past. They have made their protest vocal and strong, and the administration is finally sitting up and taking notice.</small></span> </blockquote> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr> <td valign="top"><br /></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="right" valign="top"><span style=";font-family:Verdana;color:blue;" ><b><small><a href="javascript:openWindow('http://www.newindpress.com/sunday/send/index.asp?id=SES20060127120503');"><img src="http://www.newindpress.com/newImages/send1.gif" alt="Send this story to your friend" border="0" /></a></small></b></span></td></tr></tbody></table>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-43838477321539155152007-10-31T05:17:00.000-07:002007-10-31T05:18:12.649-07:00Back to basics<p class="news-date">Cricinfo</p><p class="news-date">July 25, 2001</p> <p class="news-body"> The Ranji Trophy has undergone numerous changes since its birth way back in 1934, when it was a knockout tournament all the way with the champion of each zone taking on the other zone winners. There were only 15 teams in the fray in the first season. In the South Zone for instance, there were only three teams, Madras, Hyderabad and Mysore. Teams were added year after year and now we have 27 teams in the competition. The league-cum-knockout format was introduced in 1957-1958 and it continues to this day, except for the brief superleague interlude. </p><p class="news-body"> Until 1970-1971, only one team from each zone qualified for the knockout phase. During my playing days, two teams did, and this still ensured a reasonable level of competitiveness, because each zone had at least two good teams. We still faced some very easy opposition in our own zones, though the pursuit of bonus points made for some exciting cricket against the weaker teams. We had to be at our best, however, against the stronger teams to have any chance of appearing on the national scene. For individual players too, this was important, as there was no other way we could catch the selectors' eyes. </p><p class="news-body"> I believe the championship was really devalued when the three-team formula was introduced. Even in a zone where there are three quality teams, the intensity of the contests gets reduced considerably when a team knows it had done well enough to enter the second phase of the tournament. </p><p class="news-body"> For decades now, concerned cricket observers have been calling for some real reform in the structure of domestic cricket, so that India will stand a better chance of doing well on the world stage. There finally seems to be a very serious intention on the part of the BCCI to pay some attention to this problem. We hear talk of a two-tier system being introduced, with promotions and relegations between the two divisions. The idea is intrinsically sound in that it will make for more competitive cricket in both the first and second divisions, as the teams should be evenly matched. However, for the competition to be really meaningful in the higher division, all Test players must take part. </p><p class="news-body"> But aren't we creating a class system in Indian cricket, which may deny opportunities to deserving players, because they belong to teams in the second division? And how do we prevent abuses of the system to engineer promotions and relegations? These are questions some senior cricketers raised when I sought their views. </p><p class="news-body"> My own view is that every step should be taken to make domestic cricket more competitive and raise standards. A two-tier system may be an inevitable outcome of such an attempt, but more important is the need to prepare sporting wickets all over India and inculcate proper cricket values in our youngsters. Unless greater attention is paid by our coaches to basics like good running between the wickets, improving fitness and fielding levels, batting technique that can stand up to international conditions, and positive thinking in the team's cause, our domestic cricket is unlikely to throw up world class players. </p>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-45244663551190680932007-10-30T10:31:00.000-07:002007-10-30T10:32:50.220-07:00The dark prince<b>Wisden Asia Cricket</b><p class="news-date">July 11, 2003</p><p class="news-body">Batting for the Empire by Mario Rodrigues systematically demolishes the once-held notion that the celebrated cricketer Ranji was the finest ambassador India ever sent to England. With its striking cover photograph of Ranji at the batting crease, the book is sure to attract even the casual cricket lover, but it is meant really for an altogether more cerebral readership. It is a painstaking attempt to de-mythify Ranji the man, and a near-scholarly work. </p><p class="news-body">Hardcore cricket followers and cricketers with an interest in the history of the game, if such a breed still exists, are rarely swayed by the larger-than-life personae the media creates around cricketers. To them the appeal of Ranji would be based on his feats on the field - that he played for England, scored a hundred on Test debut and captured the imagination of critics and fans alike with unequalled artistry at a time when his countrymen were a subject race and treated as such. Their respect for Ranji the player may not need the buttress of admiration for Ranji the prince, but even they will find disillusionment in the image of their hero - as despot, buffoon, schemer, spendthrift, unreliable borrower, and despicable toady of the British empire - that emerges from Rodrigues's hard-hitting biography. </p><p class="news-body">Another category of readers likely to find the book illuminating is followers of recent Indian history, especially scholars with a deep interest in the affairs of the princely states, in particular the politics of the western Indian region of Kathiawar. </p><p class="news-body">It is the sophisticated reader of recent vintage, owing much of his appreciation of cricket and cricketers to an increasing body of work by experts in fields other than cricket, who may actually read it from cover to cover, for readable the book surely is. This elite readership, familiar with the writings on Ranji of such reputed authors as Simon Wilde, Mihir Bose, Ashis Nandy and Ramachandra Guha, already knows that the 'Black Prince' was one of the greatest players the game has known but not quite the white knight that his hagiographers, English and Indian, make him out to be. Rodrigues's work offers them a wealth of information that will strengthen such an impression. </p><p class="news-body">Rodrigues has succeeded in revealing Ranji in his true colours in his role of Jamsaheb of Nawanagar. It is obvious his research has been extensive, ranging from purely propagandist literature - both for and against - including the vernacular press and official mouthpieces of the state, to the more objective writings of cricket writers and historians. While we can hardly fault the systematic way he has gone about his job, we do get the impression sometimes that he takes a spade to a soufflé, piling on the evidence long after the jury have decided to return a verdict of guilty. And, while his acceptance of adverse criticism of the Jamsaheb by his detractors is generally unquestioning, he displays a constant streak of skepticism towards any praise of him or statements made by Ranji himself that show him in a good light. </p><p class="news-body">Ranji's unswerving loyalty to the Empire, his total faith in hereditary rule and suspicion of democracy, his opposition to the freedom movement led by fellow Kathiawari MK Gandhi, his desperate attempts to perpetuate the Indian princely order, his claim that he and his nephew Duleepsinhji were "English cricketers", his refusal to play an active role in Indian cricket - all these and worse are pitilessly exposed in the book. </p><p class="news-body">The last chapter includes this defence by Mihir Bose: "So if Ranji did not do much for Indian cricket it is because he did not think of India as a cricketing nation. He did not think of India as a cricketing nation because he could not conceive of India as a political nation. India as a political nation was born fourteen years after Ranji died and, had he lived, as his successors' actions show, he would have undoubtedly opposed it ... Had Nawanagar managed to get together a Test team then, I am sure, Ranji would have advised Duleep to play for Nawanagar. For inasmuch as a king is ever a nationalist, Ranji was a Nawanagar nationalist. He was, perhaps, a Rajput nationalist, if that term can have any meaning ..." </p><p class="news-body">Rodrigues does not endorse this view. He refuses to give Ranji the benefit of doubt. His biography is an indictment that allows for few grey areas or bright spots, while painting a vivid picture of a dark prince. </p>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-25691133978393577682007-10-30T09:28:00.000-07:002007-10-30T09:31:21.471-07:00India's non-playing captain<p class="news-body">Cricinfo<br /></p> <p class="news-date">February 22, 2002</p> <p class="news-body"> Sourav Ganguly is a puzzled man. He does not know why India loses the crucial matches. By his own generous admission, he would have won more such matches for India if he knew the problem. Our satellite channels faithfully telecast the Indian captain's wonderfully humble attempt at self-analysis, as if to acquit him of all charges of repeated failures as captain and player. </p><p class="news-body"> <table style="width: 150px; height: 43px;" cellpaddding="3" align="right" bgcolor="#efefef" border="0" cellspacing="3"><tbody><tr><td style="vertical-align: top;"><br /></td></tr><tr><td> <span style="font-family:Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Sans Serif;font-size:-2;color:#000000;"> <b><br /></b> </span></td></tr></tbody></table> To be fair to him, though, the Prince of Calcutta was a little more forthcoming than that. He wondered aloud if inexperience was the root cause of India's continued inability to win matches, even against Nasser Hussain's scratch combination - though they were made to look like world beaters in India - under home conditions, with the help of incompetent umpires whose mistakes came in handy when the hosts were down. He was a trifle disappointed - and he said this with the appropriate expression of condescending indulgence towards the newcomers in the Indian eleven - that, after he had brought the side to the threshold of victory in the final one-dayer, the rest of the batting simply folded. </p><p class="news-body"> There was, thus, no hint of regret that he had thrown his wicket away playing a loose, even arrogant lap-shot instead of staying at the wicket until victory was achieved. How smug and selfsatisfied he looked, absolving himself of all guilt while putting his younger teammates on the mat! The selectors too seem equally smug. </p><p class="news-body"> Ganguly had not done badly, actually, according to chairman of selectors Chandu Borde. After all, he had won the Test series and drawn the one-day rubber against England. The captain's almost total capitulation as a batsman, especially in Test match cricket, does not seem to have worried him unduly. </p><p class="news-body"> The selectors must be pretty sanguine that the forthcoming Zimbabwe series will not tax the Indian players' technique or temperament unduly. One neat series win later, all will be forgotten and forgiven in the euphoria of victory, they seem to be reassuring themselves, to offer the least offensive explanation of their penchant for the status quo.<br /></p>Not too long ago, there was some much-publicised rhetoric by the BCCI president declaring that those in charge of Indian cricket would be held accountable for the results they produced. In hindsight, it seems to have been no more than an attempt to get rid of John Wright and Andrew Leipus, the unwanted 'foreigners.' The captain, in contrast, seems to be immune from any such requirement. After all, was it not suggested by many, just prior to his sensational return to Test cricket in 1996, that Ganguly was Jagmohan Dalmiya's boy? <p class="news-body"> But Indian cricket has a way of making fools of everyone. For all we know, an Andy-Flower-inspired Zimbabwe could still spring a surprise or two, and by the end of the series, the selectors could face pretty much the same situation as they face today. And once again, they will decide to let sleeping dogs lie and play it safe with the selection of the captain and the team for the West Indies tour. </p>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-7790289916635162842007-10-30T08:38:00.000-07:002007-10-30T08:40:30.266-07:00A diet of fishCricinfo<br /><p class="news-date">October 23, 2001</p> <p class="news-body"> Bertie Wooster thought his manservant Jeeves owed his brains to a regular diet of fish. But the super-valet also possessed a surfeit of gall, and I always believed that eating fish had something to do with that aspect of Jeeves' personality as well. Proof, if I needed any, of the merit of this theory was recently provided by the turn of events in Indian skipper Sourav Ganguly's cricket career. </p><p class="news-body"> <table cellpaddding="0" align="left" border="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td align="center"> <img src="http://content-ind.cricinfo.com/perl/picture.cgi/023824/inline?alt=1" alt="Ganguly" /><br /><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,Verdana,Sans Serif;font-size:-2;color:#000000;">© CricInfo</span></td></tr></tbody></table>The Prince of Calcutta is perhaps the last man to win a popularity contest, especially if the electorate were to consist of rival cricketers or the foreign media. (Of course, he also enjoys a special relationship with match referees, just in case you thought I had overlooked that minor detail.) His poor personal form against Australia did nothing to dilute his brash rejoinders to probing media men, who were seemingly bent upon showing him in a poor light. But that was probably helped by the fact that, under him, India won the series in one of the greatest fightbacks in recent Test history. </p><p class="news-body">In Sri Lanka, Ganguly seemed to have been overwhelmed by events. As the Indians floundered and struggled in the absence of key players, the captain appeared to be deflated by adversity. His head dropped, and he had begun to mumble his replies towards the end of the tour. </p><p class="news-body">But what followed soon after was sensational. The captain went home after the series, where I am sure he waded into home cooking; home being Kolkata, his diet was no doubt dominated by different varieties of fish, a Bengali's idea of a vegetarian diet. Well-rested, and buoyed up by the love of his near and dear, the skipper arrived in South Africa and straightaway demonstrated, by his utterances to the media, that he was back to being his best, cocky, confident self. The South Africans are not a hotshot team, he announced. He also hinted that India's spinners might pose a problem or two to the Proteas. </p><p class="news-body"> <table cellpaddding="0" align="right" border="0" cellspacing="0"> <tbody><tr> <td align="center"> <img src="http://content-ind.cricinfo.com/perl/picture.cgi/012184/inline?alt=1" alt="Ganguly" /><br /><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,Verdana,Sans Serif;font-size:-2;color:#000000;">© CricInfo</span></td></tr></tbody></table>Ganguly did not stop with mere talk. He carried his arrogance into the matches. He belted the South African speedsters as if they were club bowlers rolling their arms over at Kalighat or Mohun Bagan. He was particularly severe on his rival number; rarely has Shaun Pollock been treated with such contempt. The numerous sixes that he has already taken off the South African captain's bowling are a clear message to him and his cronies, past and present, Pat Symcox and Allan Donald, who have been exhibiting clear symptoms of foot-in-mouth syndrome in their columns. Unfortunately, Ganguly's thrilling counterattack has been more than nullified by the poor performance of his team. </p><p class="news-body">I was asked to compare Ganguly the captain with some past greats like former Hyderabad captain ML Jaisimha and his buddy MAK Pataudi. They were both remarkable captains, with a fund of cricket knowledge, and both were capable of acute strategic thinking. They were undoubtedly in the forefront of the 60s movement to rid Indian cricket of its colonial hangover, and they showed their fellows that India could actually defeat its former rulers on a cricket field. </p><p class="news-body">Ganguly may still have some way to go before he can acquire the finesse and technical acumen of some of these past masters, but for sheer audacity and irreverence, he is streets ahead of any of his predecessors. Even skeptics like this writer, who came to scoff, cannot help but admire his refusal to be cowed down by opponents and critics alike. </p>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-55103708942829217032007-10-28T03:38:00.000-07:002007-10-28T03:39:29.575-07:00Will chucking become legal...?<p class="news-author">First published Cricinfo<br /></p> <p class="news-date">August 22, 2001</p> <p class="news-body"> It was in the sixties that the chucking controversy first erupted in Test cricket. Not many tears were shed when Ian Meckiff and Gordon Rorke of Australia were dubbed chuckers by players and press alike. What happened to Geoff Griffin of South Africa was somehow more tragic, because the young fast bowler's career was cut short by umpire Sid Buller calling him repeatedly in a Test at Lord's in 1960, as also the exhibition match that followed it. The tragedy could have been avoided if the fast bowler had been called early in domestic cricket and given a chance to correct his action before he came to international cricket. </p><p class="news-body"> Contrast the no-nonsense attitude of those times towards bowlers with illegal or doubtful actions with the softer approach today, especially on the parts of the cricket boards to which the bowlers in question owe allegiance. Umpires who call them are subjected to the minutest scrutiny, even closer than the bowler's action is. A big hue and cry is raised by both officialdom and fans of the bowler's country and the matter is turned into an international issue. All kinds of explanations are offered for the optical illusion that millions of viewers simultaneously experience, from the bowler being dropped on his head as an infant to speculation as to whether or not every bowler that was ever born chucked the odd one, so what's wrong with a few throws once in a while? </p><p class="news-body"> The topic of chucking is an intriguing and entertaining one, the subject of many a lively discussion among cricketers, cricket-fanciers and that strange animal, the cricket writer, to whom a bent arm is worth hundreds of words of undying prose. At just such a debate the other day, some of us wondered aloud whether chucking would be legalized soon. All kinds of new scenarios were visualized. A new type of dismissal was envisaged: Batsman A run out by Bowler B. Another speculation was the possibility, mooted by the baby of the team of journalists in conversation, of new legislation that would permit one throw per over. </p><p class="news-body"> All this reminded me of a simple stratagem through which captains of yore protected their precious strike bowlers (read chuckers) from umpires hellbent on calling them. They simply brought the called bowler on from the other end in the hope the umpire there would take a lighter view of the offending action. And they often got the desired result. Even if the bowler never again played another first class game, he had by then won at least one match for you. </p><p class="news-body"> I was also reminded of a one-man crusade against chucking launched in the seventies. Indian umpire Piloo Reporter made it his mission to eradicate chucking from Indian domestic cricket. He called quite a few bowlers bowlers everyone knew were chuckers but none dared to call - in the Ranji Trophy matches in which he stood. And the trick of changing the bowler's end did not work with him, because he was perfectly capable of no balling a bowler from his position as straight umpire, if the square leg umpire chose to ignore an illegal action. While I can promise you none questioned Reporter's integrity for taking that courageous step, I am not sure he would get off so lightly today. </p>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-41843644854922787072007-07-21T17:36:00.000-07:002007-09-13T02:23:22.151-07:00Star-Crossed: An Excerpt<strong>Star-Crossed<br />A novel by Ashokamitran<br />Translated by V Ramnarayan<br />An excerpt<br /></strong><br /><strong><u>Price: Rs. 150</u></strong><br /><strong><u>ISBN: 978-81-8368-283-1</u></strong><br /><strong><u>To buy online, click below</u></strong><br /><a href="http://indiaplaza.in/search.aspx?catname=Books&srchkey=title&srchVal=star-crossed">http://indiaplaza.in/search.aspx?catname=Books&srchkey=title&srchVal=star-crossed</a><br /><br />One of the vehicles returning to Chennai from the Mamandur outdoor shooting stint came to a halt outside the Army recruitment office at Teynampet. Sampat got down and said to the driver,<br /><br />‘You carry on, I’ll be at the office in just ten minutes.’ ‘The assistant director is saying something to you,’ Munuswami alerted him.<br /><br />‘Yes sir?’ Sampat asked Rajgopal.<br /><br />‘Do you know we are going straight to the studio?’ Rajgopal spat the words out, gnashing his teeth.<br /><br />‘I will join you there sir. I’ll have a word with some of my relatives who have come from my home town.’ He turned to Munuswami and said, ‘Please inform Boss as well.’ The car then resumed its journey.<br /><br />Sampat turned into the lane next to the peanut shop and reached home. Workmen were replacing the tiles on the roof. A scorpion fell from the roof with a thud. Immediately, one of the work smashed it. It was a house of mud walls. The 33 residents shared one common courtyard open to the sky. That was their only source of light.Parvati was out there, tying a plastic ribbon to her hair. ‘Where’s your mother?’ Sampat asked her.<br /><br />Parvati sweated profusely. ‘She’s gone to the Alangatha temple,’ she told him.<br /><br />‘You are all coming to watch the film shooting today, aren’t you?<br /><br />‘We’re coming, we’re coming. She’ll be back soon.’<br /><br />Just then, Parvati’s elder brother Umapati entered, his hair all oiled and plastered.<br /><br />‘When did you come? When did you come sir? Have they already finished shooting? You promised to take us to watch the shooting.’<br /><br />‘Come on, I have come here to inform you about it. Where’s Thangavel? I asked him to bunk school today.’<br /><br />‘It’s he who has taken Amma and the others to the temple,’ said Parvati.<br /><br />Sampat told Umapati, ‘Look here, as soon as Thangavel returns, you leave here so that you reach the studio at 12.30 sharp. Thangavel knows the place. Today’s shooting is only for half an hour. If you tarry to measure the height of the buildings on the street, we’ll have finished shooting, packed off and gone home to sleep.’<br /><br />‘Don’t worry, we’ll be there on time,’ Umapati assured him.<br /><br />‘Will Jayachandrika be there today? Parvati asked.<br /><br />‘How does it matter who’s there? All we want is to watch a film being made before we go back home, that’s all,’ said Umapati.<br /><br />Sampat warmed to Parvati. ‘Only Jayachandrika will be shooting today.’<br /><br />Parvati broke out in a sweat again. ‘I’m off’, Sampat said, ‘Make sure you leave exactly at twelve o’clock and come to the studio.’ He stopped in his tracks and addressed his next remarks to Umapati. ‘Hey listen, try and put on some decent clothes when you come to the studio. Keep your red linen shirt for after you go back to your village.’<br /><br />In his anxiety to return quickly to the studio, he saw a taxi in every car that passed by. He spotted Madurai standing under an acacia tree. Sampat walked past him hoping he would see him.<br /><br />‘Sir, you are going past me, not even looking at me?’ Madurai said.<br /><br />‘I am in a hurry. I’m looking for a taxi.’<br /><br />‘Why do you need a taxi, brother? Get into my car.’<br /><br />Madurai’s car, which he ran as an unmetered private taxi, was a 1949 Ford. Sampat got in. After the car had gone some distance, Madurai said, ‘Why don’t you hire my car for a week or ten days?’<br /><br />‘We complete this month’s shooting schedule today. I’ll arrange for the company to hire your taxi for next month’s shooting,’ said Sampat.<br /><br />‘Pay me Rs. 25 per day and I’ll happily sign a receipt for Rs. 30. Please recommend me to Iyer.’<br />Madurai dropped Sampat near Vinayaka Studios, gave him a big salute and left. Sampat went past the reception area of the studio and entered the last room of the asbestos building. That was the room Vinayaka Studios had let out to Chandra Creations. Das was sitting there in the midst of a table, ten folding chairs, steel trunks, a variety of aluminium tiffin carriers, some brass vessels, a small basket of rotting apples and oranges. When he saw Sampat, he said,<br />‘Manager sir wants you to bring him lunch.’<br /><br />‘Is there a car available?’<br /><br />‘Syed’s car. Murugesan went to the heroine’s bungalow immediately after he came back from outdoor shooting.’<br /><br />‘Did the manager give you any money for the lunch?’<br /><br />Das handed over fifty rupees to him. Sampat put the money in his pocket, arranged the car, and told Das, ‘Put the tiffin carrier in the car. I’ll come back after I finish my work at the studio office.’<br /><br />‘Isn’t your family visiting the studio today?’<br /><br />‘Yes, they are all going back to the village tomorrow.’<br /><br />‘I forgot to tell you. The dance master is using Syed’s car.’<br /><br />‘Who gave him the car?’<br /><br />‘He has informed the manager. Said he would return in ten minutes.’<br /><br />Somewhat mollified by this statement, Sampat went to the programme office.<br /><br />The programme room was all cramped and stuffy like programme rooms everywhere. Employees and visitors alike had to twist their bodies and find a seat somewhere within it. Three spears and four swords leaned over a wall in a corner.<br />Sampat peeped in, opening a spring half door.<br /><br />‘Who are you? Don’t you dare enter here,’ the programme manager shouted.<br /><br />Sampat overcame his hesitation. He said, ‘Why are you losing your temper, sir?’ and went and stood close to the manager.<br /><br />‘How could you take away glass tumblers from this cupboard without my permission, that too in my absence? Out of the four glasses you removed you broke four. I am going to report the matter to your Mr Nataraja Iyer.’<br /><br />‘It was he who asked me to borrow the glasses from your office.’<br /><br />‘You don’t return empty glasses when you borrow glasses, do you?’<br /><br />‘Now, you are talking…’<br /><br />Natarajan came in. He nodded his head and started dialling a number with a great show of purpose. He just then noticed Sampat.<br /><br />‘Haven’t you left yet to buy food?’ he asked him anxiously.<br /><br />‘I’m going in a moment sir. It seems you let Ramlal take Syed’s car. I’ll go as soon as he comes back sir.’<br /><br />‘It’s already 12.’ Natarajan could not get through to any of the numbers he was trying to contact.<br /><br />‘Who is it, Jayachandrika?’ the programme manager asked.<br /><br />‘Yes.’ Natarajan seemed to be disturbed. He turned to Sampat and said, ‘Why are you still here?’<br /><br />‘I have a little bit of work with him,’ Sampat said, pointing at the programme manager.<br /><br />The programme manager was about to explode with rage. ‘Look here Nataraja Iyer! You hobnob with ill-mannered urchins if that’s what you want to do. I don’t want them in the studio.’<br /><br />‘Whom are you calling an urchin?’<br /><br />‘Sampat, what’s all this?’ Natarajan asked in a loud voice.<br /><br />‘He’s so insulting. Who’s he calling an urchin?’<br /><br />The programme manager called out: ‘Hey ! hey!’<br /><br />Natarajan lifted his hand irritably. The number he was trying to reach was still busy. ‘There’s no alternative to this damn telephone in this studio,’ he said.<br /><br />A moment of silence followed. Then Sampat told the programme manager, ‘I’ll be late sir, please sign that permission slip for me.’ He now spoke in a different tone.<br /><br />‘What permission?’<br /><br />‘I am bringing six visitors to the studio.’<br /><br />The programme manager was staring at the table. ‘Why do you need any permission? Even the gatekeeper gives you a double salute, though he ignores me completely.’<br /><br />Natarajan’s brow was now somewhat less creased with worry.<br /><br />Sampat did not reply. The programme manager said, ‘Where’s your slip?’<br /><br />Sampat riffled through a number of paper slips on the desk and handed one of them to the manager. When he went out signed permission slip in hand, Natarajan said, ‘It’s already late Sampat. You’d better leave with the tiffin carrier.’<br /><br />‘Sir, I need thirty rupees more,’ Sampat asked hesitantly.<br /><br />Natarajan said, ‘Didn’t I give you fifty rupees?’<br /><br />‘That will be just about enough to pay the Woodlands bill. Ghosh wants food brought from Deluxe Hotel for him and Ramlal Master. Sound recordist Daniel always likes to have soup and sandwiches from Buharis.’<br /><br />Natarajan muttered, “I need to be at the bank by 2 o’clock.’ He then took out thirty rupees from his wallet and gave it to Sampat. When Sampat came out of the room, Natarajan told the programme manager, ‘The sound engineer will fall ill unless he has soup from Buharis and chicken, whenever he shoots here.’ He did not expect a reply to this quip. Sampat lingered for a while more before leaving on his errand. Just as he expected, Natarajan called him once again.<br /><br />‘Bring some food for the manager too,’ he told him. ‘No need for that,’ the programme manager said. Natarrajan pretended not to hear him. He concentrated on his telephoning act. Sampat went in search of Syed’s car.<br /><br />Syed’s car stopped in front of Floor No. II. Ramlal got down, the corner of his mouth spilling red.<br /><br />The scented paan he was chewing overpowered the people around him with its strong aroma. Sampat told Syed, ‘Bhai, don’t go anywhere. We’ll have to bring food now.’<br /><br />The Chandra Creations set had been put up on Floor No. II. The sound recording van stood in front of the big swinging door. Seated next to it on folding chairs were cameraman Ghosh, Jagannath Rao and a few others. Ghosh said, ‘Hey Sampat! Has our leading leady gone to get her make-up done?’ ‘She hasn’t come yet,’ said Sampat, ‘the manager is trying to reach her by phone.’<br /><br />Ghosh cleared his throat and spat. Jagannath sat smoking quietly.<br /><br />Sampat entered the floor. A river scene with a tree and a few shrubs had been fabricated. A variety of paper flowers had been strung on the trees and shrubs. Lights small and large had been arranged on the crisscrossing wooden rafters above, all ready for the shooting. The light boys, carpenter and the odd job men were seated on the floor chewing betel leaves. Sampat spotted Munuswami and told him, ‘I am going out to bring food. Seven or eight of my family will come to the studio to watch the shooting. Please give them vantage seats.’<br /><br />‘I’ll take care of all that. But, have you got the permission slip? Otherwise the receptionist can create problems.’<br /><br />‘I have the permission slip.’<br /><br />‘We only have half an hour’s work once the heroine comes. After that we can at least stretch our feet in the office. Location shooting does play havoc with the body.’<br /><br />From outside could be heard the voice of the director calling ‘Rajgopal! Rajgopal!’<br />Munuswami went on with his lament, ‘We should have called the lady here. That way, we could have finished our work by now. We could have avoided all these light boys having to wait so long.’<br /><br />One of the light boys asked Munuswami, ‘It’s only rarely that we get to work overtime for an hour or two on the morning shift in this godforsaken studio. Why do you want to sabotage that?’<br />Just then, Jagannath Rao came in. ‘Isn’t Rajgopal there?’ he asked.<br /><br />‘No sir,’ said Munuswami.<br /><br />‘OK, Sampat, why don’t you go check if the studio is free?’ Jagannath Rao said.<br /><br />‘It is free sir. I checked it out on my way here.’<br /><br />‘ Right then, inform the operator and the editor and ask them to keep the rushes of the last shot ready. Let’s project it once.’<br /><br />When Sampat came out, he found Ghosh trying to punch Ramlal in his stomach. Unmindful of his long pyjamas collecting dust from the floor, Ramlal was demonstrating his Egyptian dance as best he could. ‘Have the rushes projected in the theatre,’ Ghosh told Sampat as well.<br />Sampat got into Syed’s car. Syed stopped the car in front of the Chandra Creations room.<br /><br />‘Iyer came again and bawled at me,’ Das said, and started to load the vessels in the car.<br /><br />‘We’ll bring the food in just ten minutes,’ Sampat told him, ‘I have already ordered twenty meals from Woodlands.’<br /><br />The tiffin carriers didn’t move, but the brass vessels made a racket as they clashed with one another in the jerky movement of the car.<br /><br />‘Just a minute,’ Sampat said. He got off the car and went to the first floor of the studio’s projection theatre. He instructed the operator there and went on to the editing department.<br /><br />That part of the studio was airconditioned. Editor Pitambaram was swearing violently at someone. He turned to Sampat and asked, ‘I say, when did you come back from the outdoor shooting?’<br /><br />‘We were back as early as 10-10.30. The director wanted to see the rushes. I have just instructed the operator.’<br /><br />‘So there’ll be no indoor shooting today?’<br /><br />‘It is scheduled. Hasn’t started yet.’<br /><br />‘That female hasn’t come in. Isn’t that the problem?’<br /><br />Sampat’s response was non-committal. ‘May I go now, sir?’<br /><br />Pitambaram called out: ‘Come here you ass!’ A well dressed young man came in, his face a hard mask.<br /><br />‘You lazy bum! You think you’re doing great if you wear a white shirt and pants, you donkey! Move all the cans we assembled yesterday to the theatre, you sleepyhead!’<br /><br />With no change of expression, the young man picked up the round tin boxes and took them away.<br /><br />‘Sir, how about your lunch?’ Sampat asked.<br /><br />‘I don’t want a meal. Try and get me some puri-kurma, stuff like that.’<br /><br />‘Ok sir.’<br /><br />‘Get that pieface a proper meal. He hasn’t eaten the whole morning.’<br /><br />‘Yes sir.’<br /><br />‘Where are the cigarettes?’<br /><br />‘I’ll get you some on my way back sir.’<br /><br />Sampat ran and got into the car. Syed started the car and zoomed forward. When they were about to pass the studio receptionist, Sampat said, ‘Bhai, hold on for a moment.’ Syed applied the brakes hard and all four wheels squealed to a stop. Sampat got down and ran to the receptionist’s desk. Just then, a car entered the studio gate and went past them. Sampat stood still for a moment. He then handed over the entry permit for his relatives to the receptionist.<br /><br />‘Isn’t that your boss who went in?’ the receptionist asked Sampat.<br /><br />‘Yes, it’s our Reddiar. Send my visitors on to Munuswami. He’ll take care of them,’ he told the receptionist and ran back to the car. ‘Hurry,’ he told Syed.<br /><br />‘How can I hurry if you stop every ten feet?’<br /><br />The car had really come to a stop. It didn’t start for a while. Just as Sampat was about to get down and give it a push, the boss’s car went past them once again, this time from inside the studio out.<br /><br />‘That was the manager, wasn’t it?’ Syed asked.<br /><br />‘He said he had to go to the bank. Maybe he’s also going to Jayachandrika’s house,’ said Sampat.<br /><br />He got down.<br /><br />‘That woman is always late,’ said Syed and made some violent attempts to start the engine. The car finally started.<br /><br />The service at Woodlands was pretty quick. They packed the tiffin carriers in no time. While the plantains and beedas were being counted out, a waiter took Sampat aside and gave him a cool glass of badam milk. ‘Did you give the driver a glass?’ Sampat asked.<br /><br />‘The manager is watching.’<br /><br />As Sampat was leaving, four of the hotel staff deliberately came into his line of vision. Sampat had been able to get one of them a three-minute part in a film.<br /><br />‘What brother, shall we straightaway go and collect the non-veg food or shall we first drop off all this food at the studio?’ Syed asked.<br /><br />‘Let’s go to the studio first and then to Deluxe Hotel,’ said Sampat.<br /><br />Syed drove the car straight to the lunch room. The car gave off a strong aroma of food, thanks to spilt rasam and sambar.<br /><br />It was piercing hot. As Sampat looked around to find someone to unload the food vessels, Munuswami came out from the lunch hall. ‘You are just in time. Everyone’s waiting for lunch,’ he said.<br /><br />‘What about the shooting?’ Sampat asked.<br /><br />‘The director postponed it to after lunch.’<br /><br />‘Then…’<br /><br />Munuswami interrupted him. ‘Your relatives have all come. I have arranged for them to be seated on benches under the peepul tree.’<br /><br />‘Not that… what about the shooting?’<br /><br />‘Jayachandrika hasn’t come yet.’<br /><br />While the Woodlands food was being unloaded, Sampat went to the peepul tree. Parvati, Umapati, their mother, mother’s mother, and younger brother Thangavelu were all sitting on the bench, their postures suitably deferential.<br /><br />Umapati wasn’t wearing a red shirt. Parvati’s hair wasn’t tied up with a ribbon. They both seemed to be in two minds about whether to smile at Sampat or not. Sampat told them, ‘The shooting should start in about half an hour. Please wait here.’ Parvati perspired profusely.<br /><br />‘Is it true someone called Jayachandrika hasn’t turned up yet?’ Parvati’s mother asked. This irritated Sampat. Ignoring the question, he asked, ‘Are you comfortable? Can I get you some water or something?’<br /><br />‘We’re fine, you don’t trouble yourself in the midst of all your work,’ said Parvati’s mother.<br />Sampat left them there and went back to the ‘tiffin hall.’ On the way, he spotted the director and some underlings, looking anxious.<br /><br />When he reached the tiffin hall, he found the car missing. Only Ghosh was there. Sampat had a sinking feeling in the stomach. There was no sign of Munuswami or Das.<br />Sampat came to the programme office all aflutter. He found the car there. Syed was standing there in his best deferential manner, holding the handle of the rear door.<br /><br />‘What is it?’ Sampat asked.<br /><br />‘The boss is in there,’ Syed told him in a low voice, pointing to the programme office.<br /><br />‘Where’s Murugesan car?’<br /><br />‘No sign of it so far. Jayachandrika hasn’t come in yet. When last seen, the manager went in search of her. He too hasn’t come back. That’s why the boss is on the phone.’<br /><br />‘Why don’t we go and get the Deluxe food?’<br /><br />‘Boss wants the car. You should stay here too, if you ask me.’<br /><br />Das came running from nowhere. ‘Das’, Sampat called out.<br /><br />‘Yes?’ said Das.<br /><br />Sampat gave him a list and money and said, “Take a taxi and buy all this stuff.’<br /><br />Das would normally have muttered his protests. But just then Reddiar came out of the programme office—so fast that the spring doors of the room swung open and shut several times.<br /><br />Syed opened the backdoor in a flash and waited.<br /><br />Das ran away. Sampat stood rooted to the spot, watching Reddiar motionlessly. Reddiar, whose physical appearance commanded respect from everyone in his presence, stood in the sun, not knowing what to do. Then seeming to come to a decision, he got into the car. Once again, Syed closed the door within the blink of an eye, sat in his seat and started the car.<br /><br />Reddiar looked back through the car window from his seat. He nodded his head towards Sampat. Sampat quickly came and stood by his side.<br /><br />‘Get in,’ Reddiar said to him. Sampat sat next to Syed.<br /><br />Syed put the car in gear and waited. ‘Go to Jayachandrika’s house,’ Reddiar said.<br /><br />The car started.Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-53702594888837928662007-07-21T17:33:00.000-07:002007-07-21T20:44:26.511-07:00Introduction to a novel by Ashokamitran<strong>Star-Crossed </strong><br /><strong>A novel by Ashokamitran</strong><br /><strong>Translated from Tamil by V Ramnarayan<br />Price: Rs. 150<br />ISBN: 978-81-8368-283-1</strong><br /><strong><u>Available online</u></strong><br /><a href="http://indiaplaza.in/search.aspx?catname=Books&srchkey=title&srchVal=star-crossed">http://indiaplaza.in/search.aspx?catname=Books&srchkey=title&srchVal=star-crossed</a><br /><strong></strong><br />Star-crossed is a novel about the world of Tamil cinema minus the glamour. It takes a keen look at the lives of filmmakers, technicians, producers and actors. Turning the spotlight on the fringes of the entertainment world, Ashokamitran exposes the daily trials and tribulations of a cast of character none too familiar to those who equate the world of celluloid with the proverbial dream factory.The story revolves around the several minor cogs in the wheels that make film production in the studios of Madras go round. An elaborate, albeit chaotic, machinery consisting of people, services and equipment, goes into action everyday, based on a flimsy foundation of ad hoc financing and superstitions peculiar to the industry. The whole situation is a tragicomedy of people with dreams in their eyes and hearts, and their manipulation by the forces of commerce and greed.<br /><br />The novel starts with Natarajan, a production manager in a Kodambakkam studio, organising a team of people for a stint of outdoor shooting in the early hours of a typical Madras morning. Reddiar and Rama Iyengar, film producers both, Sampat, an errand boy; Rajgopal, a wannabe manager of sorts; Chitti, an editor’s assistant; Manickaraj, a supplier of stock shots to film-makers and Somanathan, an aspiring screenplay writer are among several bit players whose ordinary lives provide a stark contrast from the magic they help create on scren.The story abounds in action and we see people running about doing their jobs, but, as the novel proceeds, we realise all the sound and fury signify nothing in the lives of so many that depend on the film industry for their livelihood. We move from one climax to the next, one anticlimax to another. To quote one of the characters in the novel, “There are no permanent or temporary jobs in cinema. Every job is permanent. And temporary!’ The hype, the uncertainties and the personality cult that surround Indian cinema are brought to life in this realistic tale laced with humour and compassion.<br /><br />The original Tamil title, Karainda Nizhalgal, conveys the tragedy and uncertainty inherent in the lives of these providers of mass entertainment, whose fortunes rise and fall or sink altogether with the making of a film. Simply told, the novel provides poignant expression to Ashokamitran’s empathy for his flesh and blood characters, based no doubt on his own experience in the film world of Madras.<br /><br /><strong>About the author</strong><br />Ashokamitran has been an internationally recognised Tamil writer of fiction for decades, known for the wry detachment and spare prose of his writing. His novels have been translated into English, Tamil, Telugu and other languages. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection of short stories entitled ‘Appavin Snehitargal’ (Father’s Friends) in 1996.<br /><br /><br /><strong></strong>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-16813803058073101142007-06-10T00:09:00.000-07:002007-06-10T00:10:33.414-07:00Flame of the Forest<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUWAPsoj25gFtaDBnGS9gTsfKMPkc8rWmVaxqdN0hLYNDg-OHMLhSk9WvWqpnXKbSS1bXd507QfLeDjlciDjQ-SS3ZXihP58WJKvfiu3vSjIbXnBCD4vp4gI1YBH164CEc3SPGag/s1600-h/FOF+Email.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5074329577426013010" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUWAPsoj25gFtaDBnGS9gTsfKMPkc8rWmVaxqdN0hLYNDg-OHMLhSk9WvWqpnXKbSS1bXd507QfLeDjlciDjQ-SS3ZXihP58WJKvfiu3vSjIbXnBCD4vp4gI1YBH164CEc3SPGag/s320/FOF+Email.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div></div>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-12279355302255743572007-05-19T06:49:00.001-07:002007-05-24T23:41:20.173-07:00Karmayogi<em>My biography of R K Swamy a self-made advertising icon of the 20th century is scheduled to be released on 29 May at Chennai. Now that it’s official, I can broadcast the following piece I wrote some time ago to the world.</em><br /><br />To my eternal regret, there have been a few extraordinary personalities my essential reserve has prevented me from getting to know better, although the opportunity presented itself time and again — R K Narayan, Semmangudi Srinivasier and Kalakshetra’s Sankara Menon were examples.<br /><br />There are others you wish you had had the chance to get to know better; you came into contact with them just once or twice in your life and that from a distance, and later heard fascinating, even inspiring accounts of their lives from those who knew them well.To this category belonged the late R K Swamy, the advertising legend from the south who made history by establishing the first all-India advertising agency based in Chennai, and took it to the Top Five in record time. A writing project brought me in contact with many members of the RK Swamy BBDO ‘family’ – that’s how the employees and associates of the agency are fondly called by all concerned — and it was a memorable experience to listen to their accounts of this unlikely adman, a completely self-made person from a poor, orthodox Iyengar family of Kumbakonam.<br /><br />Straitened circumstances took Swamy’s parents to Bombay to seek a livelihood there in the late 1920s, and that is where Swamy’s career in advertising began, when he and his brothers were forced by circumstances to go to work when they should have been entering the portals of college. Unschooled the siblings might have been, but certainly not uneducated, as all of them, especially Swamy, became voracious readers and highly intelligent survivors in the university of life, to put it rather dramatically.<br /><br />Joining the international agency, J Walter Thompson, as a translator of Gujarati advertisements (!), Swamy grew rapidly in the organisation by sheer devotion to work and extraordinary display of initiative that led him to impress his boss Edward Fielden with a thoroughly researched report on the tobacco market in India commissioned by a British client of JWT.<br /><br />As he rose in the agency, Swamy absorbed the best values practised by Fielden and added his own sense of honesty, integrity and fair play to his work, so that all his work came to be synonymous with solid research and hard facts. No tall claims were made, and no product was sought to be sold on the strength of smart copy or attractive visuals alone. A man who never went to college, he also earned a reputation for his proficiency in English.<br /><br />Having earned his spurs in Calcutta and Bombay, he persuaded his boss to transfer him to Madras where he opened the JWT South office in 1955. Building a brilliant young team around himself and Umesh Rao, the creator of the Air India maharajah, he created advertisers out of Madras companies traditionally notorious for their reluctance to embrace the medium of advertising. He soon conquered Madras and his branch was the most profitable in the whole of JWT India which later became Hindustan Thompson Associates or HTA on Indianisation.<br /><br />How Swamy walked out at age 50 to create his own agency, when the HTA management overlooked his obvious credentials for the top slot in India in favour of outsider Maurice Mathias, is now part of the lore of Indian advertising. Friends and relatives wondered if he had made a risky, quixotic decision that could lead to disaster, but Swamy made a huge success of his new enterprise - by always taking the path less taken.<br /><br />He pioneered public sector advertising in India, he took on large bodies like the Indian Newspaper Society fighting them on matters of principle, and became a powerful spokesman for the whole industry. One of the earliest in advertising to practise modern management principles in the industry, he was a pious man, who played a major part in the revival of temples and gave generously for worthy causes. He was one of the first businessmen in India to anticipate the advent of globalisation and enter into partnership with a large multinational agency. Person after person I met in the course of my work expressed their deep admiration and respect for this many-sided personality who single-mindedly pursued excellence in all he did. One of them, a former CMD of a multinational corporation said of him:<br /><br />“Everything he did had to be for the good of the country. He had an exceptional feeling for the poor, for the downtrodden. He was a very spiritual person, a karmayogi.”Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-20340812698546508562007-05-24T23:37:00.000-07:002007-05-24T23:39:51.835-07:00Evening raga<em>Yesterday, 24 May 2007, a dear friend and mentor more than 25 years my senior, breathed his last. The death of R Ramachandran, the man who founded the south Chennai sabha Hamsadhwani and made a brilliant success of it has created an irreplaceable void in the world of Carnatic music. Like many other music lovers, musicians and friends and admirers from every walk of life, I am devastated. I reproduce here a tribute I wrote of him some years ago, which appeared in the portal Chennaionline..<br /></em><br />Some people never retire. Some start a second innings after they have completed long years of service in their chosen profession. ‘Hamsadhwani’ Ramachandran is one of those rare birds to make an impressive success of their first innings and a roaring one of their second. R Ramachandran or RRC as he is known to one and all was a veteran journalist when I first met him, back in the early eighties at the office of ‘Sruti’ magazine. It was, in those days and for long afterwards, an exciting adda where people interested in music and dance came to chat, discuss, debate, occasionally come to verbal blows, under the informal chairmanship of the editor, N Pattabhiraman, my uncle. RRC was initially a guest of P N Sundaresan, Pattabhi’s eldest brother, and a former colleague at ‘The Hindu’. Keenly interested in cricket, RRC straightaway decided to adopt me as one of his younger friends. Come to think of it, most of his friends are young, and the few among his contemporaries are bound to be young at heart as he himself is.<br /><br />When RRC retired from ‘The Hindu’, as its chief sub-editor, if I remember right, he had been a journalist for well nigh three decades, including some years in ‘Free Press’, ‘Economic Times’ and the ‘Indian Express’. Throughout that period he had been a champion of the downtrodden and his political views were Left of centre for all that he was an admirer of such stalwarts as Rajaji whose persuasion was of a completely different hue. He was a fiery trade unionist too - I mean in the moral sense, not knowing if he ever held office -and even courted imprisonment once while trying to obstruct his bosses from producing the newspaper with the entire workforce on strike.<br /><br />These qualities were very much in evidence during the time I had the honour of being his colleague in an evening daily in the early nineties soon after his retirement from ‘The Hindu’. With the young team there (with the exception of RRC, and a couple of others including yours truly) he shared his vast experience cheerfully. He often lightened the deadline-induced tension of the office with his bright smile and constant encouragement.<br /><br />And he was positively inspirational when a mindless management, aided and abetted by a spineless editor, demanded apologies from all of us for an imagined slight to the “MD’s wife”. He and some of us resigned in a bunch, but not before RRC had told the editor, in the gentlest of voices and with the most benign of smiles, how ashamed he was of having to share a room with such a moral coward.<br /><br />Never afraid of celebrities, RRC rubbed shoulders with the high and mighty with the practised ease of a politician, though never with an ulterior motive. Even in his student days, he did not hesitate to approach the eminent personalities of the time with invitations to address student audiences - a practice he continued when after retirement he started one of the most successful sabhas of Madras - Hamsadhwani.<br /><br />A great admirer of Nani Palkhivala and his speeches on the Union Budget, RRC organised similar speeches at ‘Hamsadhwani’, to offer members a break from the music. I even had the pleasure of speaking at a function at the sabha to felicitate Tamil Nadu’s representatives on the Indian team that took part in the 1999 cricket World Cup in England.<br /><br />As I said before, RRC had, and still is, in the midst of a great second innings as the secretary of ‘Hamsadhwani’, the south Chennai sabha he founded, which enjoys immense popularity among rasikas and musicians alike. It is a place where performer and listener alike are made to feel important and welcome. The resultant ambience, enhanced by the open-air theatre, often produces music of excellent quality. And every time the sabha organises an unusual event, the support for the occasion is total, from members, sponsors and VIP guests alike. Not long ago, RRC’s own sathabhishekam was celebrated by his team of office-bearers on a grand scale, and the encomiums came from far and wide.<br /><br />Today, as he prepares to honour the memory of the late Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, with a ‘Hamsadhwani’ concert by T N Krishnan, accompanied by Umayalpuram Sivaraman, to be followed by an audio-visual presentation of the Sangita Pitamaha in full flow, RRC is as full of energy and enthusiasm in the evening of his life, as any youngster.Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-68005215972383815962007-04-22T08:48:00.000-07:002007-04-22T08:51:32.312-07:00Dad's army or brat pack?By the time you read these lines, the Indian team to tour Bangladesh will have been announced. To go by media reports, there will be an accent on youth when it comes to picking the one-day squad but no such emphasis is likely in the composition of the Test team. Pundits will prognosticate on how India will regroup its forces to shake off the psychological shackles the World Cup disaster has imposed on the team, and millions of fans will wait with bated breath to see how new coach Ravi Shastri is going to restore the morale of India’s beleaguered troops while at the same time encouraging them to enjoy the game. Both a sensation-hungry media and fans ranging from toddlers to octogenarians will at once clamour for youth and the continuation of the status quo. Some will swear by Tendulkar and others by Ganguly, and yet others will demand a complete overhaul. The cynics will of course bet their last penny that every match India plays is a fixed game.<br /><br />The risk with fielding a new look side against Bangladesh is that it could result in inflated performances by the young inductees in subcontinental conditions in the face of friendly opposition. That Bangladesh is not yet capable of testing India’s best, at least in Test match cricket, is inarguable, despite India’s setback in the World Cup. On the contrary, to go with the tried and tested—some would say jaded—for this series could enable the over-the-hill to prolong their careers, to the detriment of others on the threshold of the big league. A situation in which so many qualify for membership in Dad’s Army could have been avoided by the gradual induction of young talent and the staggered easing out of the seniors of the team.<br /><br />Much is made of this business of inducting youth as though it were an invention of the 21st century. Indian selection committees have always been more adventurous than their counterparts elsewhere. Vijay Mehra, the Delhi opening batsman, was only marginally older on debut back in the sixties than Mushtaq Mohammad of Pakistan was when he became the youngest Test cricketer in the world. Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi became the youngest Test captain in the world when he took over from Nari Contractor in an emergency. Some of these experiments succeeded while others, predictably, failed. Young A K Sengupta was battered and bruised by Hall and Gilchrist at Madras when he was pressed into service while still in his teens as Test opener following a hundred against the touring West Indies in 1959. Of spin bowling’s famous four, Venkataraghavan and Chandrasekhar were teenagers, Bedi was 20 and Prasanna 22 when they made their respective debuts for India.<br /><br />India had to wait almost another decade before a selection committee once again gave youth prominence. Under Vijay Merchant’s chairmanship, revolutionary changes were made, some of them daring trials involving youth. G R Viswanath and Eknath Solkar were discoveries of this period, though the likes of Ashok Gandotra and Ambar Roy fell by the wayside. Questions were asked when Viswanath made a duck in the first innings of the 1969 Kanpur Test, but he made up magnificently in the second with a fearless 137 that included 25 boundaries. Solkar went on to become one of the best short legs in the world, besides consistently performing above his ability with both bat and ball on the international arena. He even opened the innings and scored a Test hundred. Incredibly, he opened the bowling too, his innocent swing repeatedly foxing Geoffrey Boycott, at the time the world’s best opening batsman.<br />The spin quartet dominated Indian cricket for nearly two decades. Those of us who happened to be pursuing the craft of spin bowling during that period simply had no chance of making it to the national team. The two most famous bowlers to miss out, Padmakar Shivalkar and Rajinder Goel, left armers both, were good enough to play for any country. It is nobody’s case that they should have replaced Bishan Bedi, arguably the greatest left arm spinner of all time, but there should have been an attempt to play them at least in a domestic series, without jeopardizing India’s chances.<br /><br />The most spectacular example of a precocious talent coming good has of course been that of Sachin Tendulkar, who debuted at the age of 15 and went on to become one of the greatest batsmen of the world, though he did not achieve instant success. More often than not, however, a youngster who has not gone through the mill of domestic cricket fails to come to terms with the high altitude of international cricket. Again, more often than not, the selectors, instead of showing patience with the young prodigy of their choice, dump him in the face of widespread criticism. The young discard has now to make his way back through the Ranji Trophy and the like, but finds himself an alien among people of his own state. Former Indian opener Aakash Chopra, a surprisingly gifted writer, thus describes one of these members of the brat pack in a magazine article:<br /><br />“The iPod belted to his side, the Oakleys covering his eyes, the studied nonchalance that is supposed to say, ‘Look at me, I am an India player,’ is part fear, part bravado. I go up to him and we chat. Like everyone else, he does not want to be here. Unfortunately, unlike those of us who have played domestic cricket for years before getting to play for India and being axed for various reasons, he is not used to being here. There is an unstated resentment at his fate, which he shows in the way he plays domestic games—he is clearly not trying as hard as everyone else.”<br />Chopra then compares the attitude of the Test discard with that of a champion performer in the Ranji Trophy who has never played for India. “He is cynical and bitter. He has never played for India, and probably never will, but he has done sterling service for his state, and now, on his ground, he is ignored for a youngster who has played for India but might well never do so again. There is a difference, one all of us are aware of.”<br /><br />“Many youngsters who have been dropped from the Indian side seem to struggle to motivate themselves while playing cricket,” Chopra continues. “Inevitably, if they do not see success soon, many will give up.”<br /><br />Aakash Chopra himself has been a victim of a system that rarely rewards the solid performers and team men rather than the flashy individualists. Surprisingly preferred to the in-form Sadagopan Ramesh on the Australian tour of 2001, he showed character and a strong will opening the innings in the company of Virender Sehwag and giving India firm starts in the Test series. He didn’t last very long in Test cricket, the selectors showing little patience with him, and dropping him for the third Test of the 2003 Pakistan tour, preferring a non-regular opener in young wicket keeper Parthiv Patel. Patel was himself a typical example of the kind of youngster Chopra talks about—someone who pitchforked into international cricket without having to prove himself at the domestic level.<br /><br />In fact the opening batsmaen’s slot is the one position the Indian selectors have treated with scant respect, for all that it is perhaps the most crucial one in the team. Ramesh and Shiv Sundar Das were an excellent pair never allowed to settle down, thanks to the selectors’ totally avoidable penchant for experimentation. Many opening batsmen came and went—from Sanjay Bangar and Connor Williams to Debang Gandhi and Gautam Gambhir. Most of these players did perform reasonably well, but none of them was allowed to stay long enough to stabilize himself. Gambhir has been the most recent victim of this shortsighted, and often inexplicable, policy. Now replaced in the one-day squad by Robin Uthappa and, the Delhi lefthander has little chance of making it to the Test eleven, where Wasim Jaffer has been impressive if not highly consistent. His only hope is to replace Virender Sehwag if and when he is demoted in the batting order or dropped.<br /><br />The youth versus experience debate should have no place in BCCI’s scheme of things. The idea should be to pick the best team available, ideally a judicious blend of both mature heads and quick legs, a balance between flair and the right attitude, and an overall insistence on fairness all round. A Sachin Tendulkar happens but once in a century; a Parthiv Patel should not have happened and should not happen. The unseemly haste to blood him played havoc with a number of careers—remember a feisty little competitor called Ajay Ratra, who was smart behind the wickets, but also scored a match saving hundred in the West Indies? Patel has equally been a victim—after the first fine rapture, it’s been downhill for him, and he is hardly 22.<br /><br />It’s in the spin department that India has seemingly shot herself in the foot. Anil Kumble has retired from one-day cricket to concentrate on Test cricket. We have taken him on two World Cup campaigns and dropped him at the vital moment when he could have made the difference between defeat and victory. On both occasions we have paid a heavy price, but why did the selectors pick him in the first place if they were not sure of playing him in all the important games? Wouldn’t they have been better off with off spinner Ramesh Powar in the squad? And whatever happened to the promising leg spinner Piyush Chawla? Should not someone of his undoubted talent be understudying Kumble on tours and preparing to take over from him when the time comes? Or is he a spent force already, like so many youngsters identified not long ago in the bowling department and subsequently discarded?<br /><br />The selectors have their task cut out. If they pick the ‘best’ Indian side for the Bangladesh tour, not inducting young blood, they will have no new material to consider for the forthcoming tours of Ireland and England. If they pick a young team and it clicks, then they will have a different dilemma of whom to drop from the youngsters, and whom to bring back from the old guard. And with the media constantly looking for masala, I don’t envy them, but urge them to err on the side of experimentation.<br /><br /><strong> (Published in Sunday Express, 22 April 2007)</strong>Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26827241.post-3596609379700343992007-02-03T03:22:00.000-08:002007-02-03T03:29:15.569-08:00Dream XIPeople are talking about India's chances in the World Cup. A TV channel called me to ask me about my dream eleven for the World Cup. I asked my questioner, 'Do you mean my dream Indian XI?' He said, 'Yes, of course.' I told him I didn't dream about Indian cricket, but if he wanted my opinion on the probable team, I could try to make a list. I got stuck midway, as my eleven had too many fast bowlers and too many batsmen in it. I said Sehwag would probably be back and the silence at the other end was deafening. In an anxious voice, my friend asked me whether I would include Munaf Patel in the side. I said why not, if he can prove his fitness, as he did so well in the West Indies? I didn't realise it was a trick question. There was a flurry of queries about why was so and so missing in my list while such and such found a place in it. I decided to have a coughing fit and terminate the interview.<br /><br />It set me thinking. These are the same people who called for heads to roll barely a month ago. People who wanted variable pay to be introduced for our pampered cricketers, based on performance. 'Tendulkar has proved his critics wrong,' blared the headlines, as soon as he completed a hundred against West Indies. The same column had called for his exclusion just days earlier.In the case of Dada, everybody who had rejoiced in his axing last year, now joined his diehard fans--mainly Brinda Karat and Sharmila Tagore (or was it Nafisa Ali and Aparna Sen, I forget)--in telling the whole world, ' I told you so.'<br /><br />The worst amnesia seems to have afflicted the selectors who have made Tendulkar vice captain clean forgetting how long ago and why he relinquished the captaincy.Ramnarayanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00725485560951538975noreply@blogger.com4