Like Dostoyevsky and Llosa, he demanded of you to get into the mood
for the epic, and prepare for the alternating ebb and tide of runs. His
craft portrayed the beauty of slowness, as if he had taken to heart
Simon and Garfunkel’s famous song that began with those memorable words:
“Slow down, you move too fast...”
The departure of Rahul Dravid from the grand stage of Indian cricket has brought the curtain down on a style of play we as a nation mastered, and then subsequently banished from our cricketing repertoire. In the conscious forfeiting of that style is the saga of the metamorphosis of India, particularly its middle class, from the time its economy was liberalised and its people effaced or suppressed certain attributes of their collective personality.
These were precisely the attributes you required to appreciate Dravid’s batting, the inherent slowness of it, and the ethereal beauty that suffused his craft. Not for him the flashy brilliance that so often defines the ephemeral, the cameo. He left as many balls as he defended dourly, bat and pad close together, taking his time to get his eye in, running singles and twos initially, and then judiciously choosing deliveries to lean into them for a drive, or standing on his toes to flick a four off his pad, as if he were brushing away a fly. His was rarely ever an explosive knock, it almost always mirrored the imperceptible movement of time, slow and steady but always ticking — eventually reaching the century-mark, which he did 36 times over 164 Tests. To relish Dravid’s style you were required to invest your time and patience, and possess a sensibility sensitive to the classical, in art as much as in cricket.
Some of Dravid’s batting essays are to cricket what, say, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or Llosa’s The War of the End of the World are to the literary world. Like them, Dravid hoped to conceive his stay at the wicket on a mammoth scale, in terms of endeavour, intent and beauty. He succeeded mostly; at times he failed, as he disappointingly did at the fag end of his career. A typically successful Dravid innings did not have the spectators in raptures, on their feet, for every moment of his presence at the crease. His oeuvre wasn’t of the page-turner kind, those books you thumb through cover to cover on a flight or during the inordinate wait at a railway station for a train long delayed. Like Dostoyevsky and Llosa, he demanded of you to get into the mood for the epic, and prepare for the alternating ebb and tide of runs. His craft portrayed the beauty of slowness, as if he had taken to heart Simon and Garfunkel’s famous song that began with those memorable words: “Slow down, you move too fast...”
Yet his was the slowness that did not evoke a yawn. It was never tedious to watch Dravid. True, he did not have the frenetic pace of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, yet a true cricket-worm was more likely to ensure he did not miss out on a few minutes of Dravid’s innings than he was of his flashy contemporaries. To skip a few paragraphs in Dostoyevsky’s novel is to run the risk of missing out on a captivating dream sequence, or a peeling off yet another layer of the protagonist’s personality, or a subtle step in the progress to the denouement. Every ten runs in a Dravid epic knock were created differently, devoid of repetition other than his copybook defence. A straight bat to the ball that drops at the batsman’s feet is akin to a comma or colon — you can’t redefine its usage unless you wish to turn in a text riddled with errors. Dravid loved to build his innings, albeit without blemishes. It was to render his batting flawless he so often turned to stonewalling. His slowness was deliberate, and it captured the essence of time and its movement. And so you sat and watched Dravid’s slowness, in the expectation of glimpsing a glittering gem.
For a man who played international cricket for nearly 16 years, beginning 1996, averaged an impressive 52.31, and won more matches for India than any, he never received the top billing among the spectators or the advertisers, even though in one-day internationals he scored 10,899 runs in 344 matches. Dravid lacked the flamboyance of Sehwag and Tendulkar, even Dhoni. And he was perhaps always conscious of it.
In his famous Bradman Oration in Canberra, Australia, on Dec 14, 2011, he cavilled at Twenty20, in the self-effacing style he adopted to overpower bowlers: “Given that an acceptable strike rate in T20 these days is about 120, I should probably complain about it the most.” At his retirement, Tendulkar said about India’s arguably best number three batsman, “There can never be another Dravid.”
You agree with Tendulkar not because Dravid’s skills are nonpareil, but because the Indian milieu has changed too dramatically over the last two decades to produce yet another great exponent of slowness. Through his career Dravid was a reminder, a living memory, of an era in which the bat was a tool of art, not a weapon to bludgeon the opponent with. It laid emphasis on planning your innings, of building it run by run, digging in and choosing loose deliveries to dispatch to the boundary, of not lifting the ball in the air and, above all, unmindful of the passage of time. It was India’s predominant style of batting. It was the style coaches wanted to steep their pupils in.
But this style of batting reflecting the endearing charm of slowness diminished in importance and influence because of two important developments. One, post-World Cup victory in 1983, the Indian spectator discovered the one-day format, and the Indian cricket board adopted the format as its principal revenue model. A nationwide TV community of cricket-consumers brought in millions through the selling of television rights to games. A spate of One-day Internationals devalued the importance of Test cricket and its inherent slowness. Two, India opened up its economy, bringing about a sweeping change in the ethos of its people who began to accord primacy to money and profit to the complete exclusion of endeavours impossible to measure monetarily. This gradually spawned a new culture of instant-ness. Its expressions were, and are, instant profit, instant gratification, instant communication, instant food, and, quite naturally, instant cricket, best exemplified by the Twenty20 IPL tournament and its contrived fun. Speed, not slowness, is the essence of this new culture, immediate results its defining principle.
Really, in this milieu, where could Dravid and his art of slowness have fitted in? Dravid was aware of the change in Indian society. To a journalist in Delhi, in a private conversation, he confessed last year, “It is a blessing to have played Test cricket at the time this format still has some meaning.” He echoed this sentiment in his Bradman oration: “We will often get told that Test matches don’t make financial sense, but no one ever fell in love with Test cricket because they wanted to be a businessman. Not everything of value comes at a price.” He went on to add, “As much as cricket’s revenues are important to its growth, its traditions and its vibrancy are a necessary part of its progress in the future.” As he wound up his speech in Canberra, he advocated, “I know it is utterly fanciful to expect professional cricketers to play the game like amateurs; but the trick, I believe, is taking the spirit of the amateur — of discovery, of learning, of pure joy, of playing by the rules — into our profession.”
Yet his retirement, announced before the scrum of national media, had an irony — Dravid will continue to play in the IPL. This fine exponent of slowness, some would argue, should have chosen not to participate in tamasha (showman) cricket. Perhaps there is a contractual obligation to meet, perhaps the lure of money is irresistible to the best of us. Perhaps it is wrong of us to expect him to play the activist even as we ignore injustices around us to make our money. For Dravid, though, you hope he will eventually initiate a course on the beauty of slowness, a beauty our modern existence has shrivelled beyond recognition
-Ajaz ashraf (A journalist for A Pakistan Daily)
The departure of Rahul Dravid from the grand stage of Indian cricket has brought the curtain down on a style of play we as a nation mastered, and then subsequently banished from our cricketing repertoire. In the conscious forfeiting of that style is the saga of the metamorphosis of India, particularly its middle class, from the time its economy was liberalised and its people effaced or suppressed certain attributes of their collective personality.
These were precisely the attributes you required to appreciate Dravid’s batting, the inherent slowness of it, and the ethereal beauty that suffused his craft. Not for him the flashy brilliance that so often defines the ephemeral, the cameo. He left as many balls as he defended dourly, bat and pad close together, taking his time to get his eye in, running singles and twos initially, and then judiciously choosing deliveries to lean into them for a drive, or standing on his toes to flick a four off his pad, as if he were brushing away a fly. His was rarely ever an explosive knock, it almost always mirrored the imperceptible movement of time, slow and steady but always ticking — eventually reaching the century-mark, which he did 36 times over 164 Tests. To relish Dravid’s style you were required to invest your time and patience, and possess a sensibility sensitive to the classical, in art as much as in cricket.
Some of Dravid’s batting essays are to cricket what, say, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or Llosa’s The War of the End of the World are to the literary world. Like them, Dravid hoped to conceive his stay at the wicket on a mammoth scale, in terms of endeavour, intent and beauty. He succeeded mostly; at times he failed, as he disappointingly did at the fag end of his career. A typically successful Dravid innings did not have the spectators in raptures, on their feet, for every moment of his presence at the crease. His oeuvre wasn’t of the page-turner kind, those books you thumb through cover to cover on a flight or during the inordinate wait at a railway station for a train long delayed. Like Dostoyevsky and Llosa, he demanded of you to get into the mood for the epic, and prepare for the alternating ebb and tide of runs. His craft portrayed the beauty of slowness, as if he had taken to heart Simon and Garfunkel’s famous song that began with those memorable words: “Slow down, you move too fast...”
Yet his was the slowness that did not evoke a yawn. It was never tedious to watch Dravid. True, he did not have the frenetic pace of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, yet a true cricket-worm was more likely to ensure he did not miss out on a few minutes of Dravid’s innings than he was of his flashy contemporaries. To skip a few paragraphs in Dostoyevsky’s novel is to run the risk of missing out on a captivating dream sequence, or a peeling off yet another layer of the protagonist’s personality, or a subtle step in the progress to the denouement. Every ten runs in a Dravid epic knock were created differently, devoid of repetition other than his copybook defence. A straight bat to the ball that drops at the batsman’s feet is akin to a comma or colon — you can’t redefine its usage unless you wish to turn in a text riddled with errors. Dravid loved to build his innings, albeit without blemishes. It was to render his batting flawless he so often turned to stonewalling. His slowness was deliberate, and it captured the essence of time and its movement. And so you sat and watched Dravid’s slowness, in the expectation of glimpsing a glittering gem.
For a man who played international cricket for nearly 16 years, beginning 1996, averaged an impressive 52.31, and won more matches for India than any, he never received the top billing among the spectators or the advertisers, even though in one-day internationals he scored 10,899 runs in 344 matches. Dravid lacked the flamboyance of Sehwag and Tendulkar, even Dhoni. And he was perhaps always conscious of it.
In his famous Bradman Oration in Canberra, Australia, on Dec 14, 2011, he cavilled at Twenty20, in the self-effacing style he adopted to overpower bowlers: “Given that an acceptable strike rate in T20 these days is about 120, I should probably complain about it the most.” At his retirement, Tendulkar said about India’s arguably best number three batsman, “There can never be another Dravid.”
You agree with Tendulkar not because Dravid’s skills are nonpareil, but because the Indian milieu has changed too dramatically over the last two decades to produce yet another great exponent of slowness. Through his career Dravid was a reminder, a living memory, of an era in which the bat was a tool of art, not a weapon to bludgeon the opponent with. It laid emphasis on planning your innings, of building it run by run, digging in and choosing loose deliveries to dispatch to the boundary, of not lifting the ball in the air and, above all, unmindful of the passage of time. It was India’s predominant style of batting. It was the style coaches wanted to steep their pupils in.
But this style of batting reflecting the endearing charm of slowness diminished in importance and influence because of two important developments. One, post-World Cup victory in 1983, the Indian spectator discovered the one-day format, and the Indian cricket board adopted the format as its principal revenue model. A nationwide TV community of cricket-consumers brought in millions through the selling of television rights to games. A spate of One-day Internationals devalued the importance of Test cricket and its inherent slowness. Two, India opened up its economy, bringing about a sweeping change in the ethos of its people who began to accord primacy to money and profit to the complete exclusion of endeavours impossible to measure monetarily. This gradually spawned a new culture of instant-ness. Its expressions were, and are, instant profit, instant gratification, instant communication, instant food, and, quite naturally, instant cricket, best exemplified by the Twenty20 IPL tournament and its contrived fun. Speed, not slowness, is the essence of this new culture, immediate results its defining principle.
Really, in this milieu, where could Dravid and his art of slowness have fitted in? Dravid was aware of the change in Indian society. To a journalist in Delhi, in a private conversation, he confessed last year, “It is a blessing to have played Test cricket at the time this format still has some meaning.” He echoed this sentiment in his Bradman oration: “We will often get told that Test matches don’t make financial sense, but no one ever fell in love with Test cricket because they wanted to be a businessman. Not everything of value comes at a price.” He went on to add, “As much as cricket’s revenues are important to its growth, its traditions and its vibrancy are a necessary part of its progress in the future.” As he wound up his speech in Canberra, he advocated, “I know it is utterly fanciful to expect professional cricketers to play the game like amateurs; but the trick, I believe, is taking the spirit of the amateur — of discovery, of learning, of pure joy, of playing by the rules — into our profession.”
Yet his retirement, announced before the scrum of national media, had an irony — Dravid will continue to play in the IPL. This fine exponent of slowness, some would argue, should have chosen not to participate in tamasha (showman) cricket. Perhaps there is a contractual obligation to meet, perhaps the lure of money is irresistible to the best of us. Perhaps it is wrong of us to expect him to play the activist even as we ignore injustices around us to make our money. For Dravid, though, you hope he will eventually initiate a course on the beauty of slowness, a beauty our modern existence has shrivelled beyond recognition
-Ajaz ashraf (A journalist for A Pakistan Daily)
