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)
