To Dravid, With Love - Diary of an Indian Sports fan

The year is 2012, the place Bangalore. We are driving down a high-end street in Indira nagar, looking for a bungalow named “Srishti”. The roads are pretty deserted, and yet we have asked a couple of people for directions – they have not been very specific, just pointed to a random cluster of houses in the distance. Baba spots this gorgeous bungalow somewhere there, complete with ornate pillars, lavish balconies,and a sprawling lawn.

“No, that one,” I say, and sure enough, as we drive nearer, the name “Srishti” on a simple marble nameplate stares back at us.

“It’s Rahul Dravid’s house, Baba,” I say, taking out my camera with a beaming smile, “It has to be like the man…”

Alerted by a frantic phone call from my father (“Where are you? Your Dravid is retiring!”), I sat expressionless in front of the television. I fished for words to describe my feelings, but weirdly enough, my mind was flooded with 'newsy' phrases – “End of an Era!”, “The Wall Steps Down!”, “Mr. Cricket hangs up his Boots!” – I just could not shake them off, much to my dismay.

I heard a quiet sigh behind me. “I don’t think I will watch cricket anymore,” my mother, for whom cricket was mostly about “Did India win?” and “Is Sourav still on crease?”, said. “Who else can you depend on anymore?”

A copybook scenario: some ODI a few years back, India making a mountain off a molehill in a chase, Baba and I threatening to tumble from the edge of our seats any second. Ma peeks into the room.

“Sourav out?” she asks the standard cricket question of every Bengali mother of our childhood.

“Dravid still playing?” she ventures again, ignoring my insolence.

“Yes,” Baba replies curtly, to discourage further questions.

It does not matter if India won or lost that day, what matters is that my Ma, whose cricket knowledge is rudimentary, to put it mildly, knew the bottom line of Indian cricket of that period by intuition – “admire Sachin Tendulkar, love Sourav Ganguly, and trust Rahul Dravid”. This little memory, like an inundated mountain stream, crashed against the floodgates of my mind – unleashing tears and memories, and a throbbing realization that an entire childhood was slowly being taken away from me.

I am a Rahul Dravid fan. Like a million other people in this world.

But the realist in me immediately jumps in every time to replace it with a view of what would happen if I were to meet him - To me, he is the one. To him, I am just another one of those irritating photograph-seekers that he has to deal with every day.

If I were to meet him, and say “Sir, I am a massive fan!” he would smile, shake hands, say a polite thank you maybe, and immediately classify me into a category. There I would be, simpering like a star-struck moron, frozen-tipped fingers et al, my heart meaning to explain what that human being means to me, mouth betraying – and all the time, to him, I would be just another one of his numerous admirers.

Rahul,

More than a decade back, when I was in the eighth grade, we were once reading Charles Dickens in class, and came across the word “composed” in the text. My teacher, after briefly explaining the meaning, asked us if we could think of some personality who we could call composed.

The teacher smiled. “That’s right,” she said. And added, to my absolute delight, “If in this class, I had to choose someone who fitted the description of composed, it would be you.”

To be utterly honest, my initial reasons for liking you were simply your good looks. When you are just ten years old and not really well-versed with the intricacies of cricket, your basis for liking people are often based on such grounds. My other options were a baby faced Tendulkar, a gawky Ganguly, a sour-faced Azharuddin, a hirsute Navjot Singh Sidhu – face it, it was a no-contest right from the word go. I could say you were a crush from the days when I did not know what a crush was.

Slowly, I found myself getting increasingly possessive about you, even before I completely appreciated your style of play. I remember a rash promise to never set my eyes upon a certain Bengali daily, because it had exhausted the whole front page adulating a Ganguly knock, and had relegated your equally important “holding-up-the-other-side” knock to the inner pages.

I was an adolescent, at an age when you start looking for a role model in some other realm, to escape from the clutches of a monotonous existence. You were probably my first (and maybe only) consciously chosen role model.

India became only the third team ever to win a Test following on. The world was all agog with VVS Laxman’s phenomenal 281; your equally vital 180* faded somewhere into the background. You were unfazed, the only thing that mattered to you was that the team won. A friend participated in a poster making competition. She requested me for a caption. Both the poster and the caption won separate awards. She did not publicly mention who had captioned the poster. I did not care about it, what mattered was that my school won.

This is not an attempt to brag. I was not doing all this because this is what I wanted to be as a person, but because I wanted to be like you in every way. Initially, it felt great – it gave me a kind of self-fabricated telepathic connection to you.

However, it has not always been smooth sailing with you. When you declared the innings with Tendulkar batting at 194 in the famous Multan test against Pakistan, the whole country was in an uproar – nobody could believe that an indubitable character like you could court such controversy. And though I have defended you in every discussion that followed regarding this, personally it has been a hard decision to accept – agreed Tendulkar becomes pretty selfish when he approaches a milestone (not everyone is blessed with the raw swag of Virender Sehwag), but how long would it have taken to score merely six more runs?

The allegations against you were excruciating to say the least – that you had always wanted the captain’s baton; that you were jealous of the other two pillars of the team; that you had turned against the very person who was considered your closest friend in the side. I remember praying every morning that you would do something dramatic to silence these people – maybe step down or speak up against the autocrat. That was probably the first time your impeccable decency and your motto of “keep playing, and let the detractors keep talking” enraged me. The memory of the India-South Africa ODI at Eden Gardens, where the entire stadium chanted slogans against you and Chappell, still haunts me. I remember picking up a heated argument with an elderly uncle that day, who sort of represented the collective Bengali sentiment of the hour.

“It was gross injustice. It deserves a protest in exactly this scale,” he said.

But then, what is a decades-old relationship without a blemish or two, here and there?

This tribute was never meant to be an ode to the cricketer Rahul Dravid; not to your readiness to don the keeper’s gloves when the team needed an extra batsman; nor to your completely uncharacteristic 22-ball 50 against New Zealand at Hyderabad in 2003 (it still remains the second fastest ODI half-century by an Indian); nor to your aggressive stroke-making when in your late 200s against Pakistan at Rawalpindi, ignoring the glorious opportunity of becoming only the second Indian cricketer to score a 300 in Test cricket; nor your choosing to retire quietly before the beginning of a series, thus relinquishing the opportunity to have the glorious farewell that you so thoroughly deserved; nor your refusal to join the BCCI's Board of Advisors, and instead choosing to make a difference at the grass-root level by coaching the Indian U-19s – all these have not been the emphasis of this article. Instead, I want to thank you.

But most of all, I thank you for the pride that I get in being your fan – a sort of reflected glory that this satellite of yours basks in every time your name is uttered.

"Where are you? Your Dravid is retiring..."

(Read about the sports memories of an Indian female sports fan)