Playing it my way Sachin Tendulkar & Hodder & stoughton; Pice: Rs.899; Pages: 486
Arguably the greatest test cricket batsman in the history of the game which has replaced hockey as the nation™s favourite field sport ” although his test average of 53.98 runs per innings pales in comparison with that of Australian legend Sir Donald Bradman (99.94) ” it™s indisputable that Sachin Tendulkar, who retired from the game last year, has (together with another Bombay test cricket star Sunil Gavaskar ” average 51.12) played a stellar role in elevating India into a top-ranked cricketing nation, and indeed the epicentre of world cricket.
The flowering of his genius began at age 16 when he took on a fearsome Pakistan pace attack comprising Imran Khan, Waqar Younis and Wasim Akram ” who gave him a baptism by fire (and a bloody nose). Since then Tendulkar has broken every test and one-day international (ODI) record. He has played 200 international test matches, scored 100 centuries and played 486 ODIs ” feats unmatched by any other test/international cricketer.
It could be argued that the first little master (Sunil Gavaskar) raised Indian batsmanship to world-class level, but in the Tendulkar era Indian batsmen inspired by him began to thrash and dominate the world™s fastest and wiliest bowlers. The impressive on-field feats of Gavaskar, Tendulkar, Vengsarkar, Sehwag, Srikkanth and other batsmen of the past three decades forever banished memories of an early 1950s test match in England, when an Indian scoreboard read 0-4.
The opening chapters detail the author™s childhood, but don™t dwell upon the difficulties that middle class children experience in learning to play and develop their sporting skills. Unlike children in elite boarding schools who have access to excellent practice and match play facilities, the less privileged have to struggle hard against an education system which grudgingly encourages sports education. The early chapters contain several anecdotes of how the young Sachin ” who was fortunate to attract the attention of legendary coach Ramakant Achrekar ” had to contend with huge logistics and financial problems to develop his kinesthetic intelligence.
Surprisingly, Tendulkar has little to say about the crowded maidans (maintained by the Bombay Municipal Corporation) in which children and youth are obliged ” while in danger of being hit by flying balls from all sides ” to develop batting, bowling and fielding skills. Perhaps, this is a good time for Tendulkar to speak up on this issue.
From here on, Tendulkar faithfully and with engaging modesty describes his ascent into the record books as the greatest cricketer in Indian history. He candidly admits that in his test cricket debut against Pakistan in 1989 when he scored a mere 15 after playing and missing as many times, he discovered the huge gap between Indian and international cricket. Nevertheless, in the four tests series (all matches drawn), the teenager scored two half centuries despite suffering a bloody nose from a Waqar Younis bouncer. œDenying Pakistan a win on home turf was a big achievement for India¦ and served as a major boost for the team, writes Tendulkar of his debut test series.
In neatly organised subsequent chapters ” aided and abetted by the well-known cricket chronicler and writer Boria Majumdar who has been awarded a Ph D for his thesis on ˜The social history of Indian cricket™ by Oxford University ” Tendulkar traces his rise to fame and fabulous riches in this game hitherto played by a small number of Commonwealth countries, but which over three decades past and the advent of satellite television has become a global spectator sport, attracting the eyeballs of over a billion aficionados.
Playing It My Way is a facts and data supported story of the transformation of the baby-faced prodigy into a master batsman who captured the imagination and adulation of the public for elevating several India teams into formidable ” even feared outfits ” on cricket fields around the world. The story of his courtship and marriage in 1995 to Anjali is charmingly narrated in an eponymous chapter, and uncovers fast-changing social mores in middle class India.
From 1995 onwards, Sachin focused on developing and maturing into the Indian Bradman. Inevitably, it wasn™t smooth sailing. The loss to Sri Lanka after besting Pakistan in the first ODI World Cup Championship held in the subcontinent (1996) is heart-breakingly described, as is his failure as India captain in 1996 when the test squad lost several series in South Africa, West Indies and an ODI series against Pakistan and Sri Lanka, following which he was œunceremoniously sacked as skipper. How Sachin stomached this rejection, suffered severe injuries, the sudden death of his father and then played his œbest series ever against Australia in 2001, are chapters highly recommended to all young cricketers aspiring to make a future in this game, now a career option for youth with kinaesthetic intelligence.
The 28 chapters of this book are not mere bland history. There are revealing insights into the art of batsmanship, off-field strategies, on-field tactics, full score-boards, as well as advice on learning to take reverses on the chin and move on.
It™s a personal history of a consummate cricketer, an individual who developed the mental strength and character to emerge as a role model for cricketers, indeed all sports persons around the world. Every school, college and library should make it available to students.
Dilip Thakore
Misleading Guide
Gaddafi™s Harem Annick Cojean & GROVE PRESS; Price: Rs.889; Pages: 284
The next big global storm which could knock the world off balance is brewing in the post-colonial states of the Middle East and Arab/Muslim countries of North Africa. There is the theatre of armed conflict in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, and spreading Shia-Sunni conflict in the region has resulted in large-scale displacement of people and mass migration across national borders. In Egypt, the Arab Spring revolution of 2011 which toppled President Hosni Mubarak is in full retreat with the army seizing power, and in Libya tribal wars have broken out following the deposition and lynching of Colonel Gaddafi in October 2011, ending his 42-year reign of terror over the people of this oil-rich north African country.
With fracking technology which enables the extraction of crude oil from rocks having made the USA ” hitherto the world™s largest importer and consumer of crude oil and petroleum ” independent of imports from the Middle East which is heavily dependent on oil
revenue, and the Arab nations hosting the world™s largest youth population, the Middle East is a tinder box awaiting the slightest spark to explode.
Yet if the disaster brewing in the Middle East and Arab North Africa is to be averted, it™s important to understand why democracy and democratic governance have been a dismal failure in the few nations which have attempted to plant it. It™s galling but true that the only Middle East country in which democracy has struck roots is Israel, in which governments come and go as per the vote of the people which might be one explanation for its dominance of the region.
Certainly, Muslim societies of the Middle East and Arab states yearn for better governance and political stability, even if not democracy. This is why in 1950, the people of Libya (pop. 6 million) welcomed the monarchical rule of King Idris I, after suffering the excesses of Italian colonial rule during the early decades of the 20th century and of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, in particular.
But after huge oil reserves were discovered in the country in 1959, in the tradition of Middle East potentates King Idris proved to be a greedy, corrupt individual who failed to build the foundation of a nation from the country™s oil bounty. Therefore when in September 1969 a group of Army officers led by 27-year-old Muammar Gaddafi staged a coup d™etat and declared the Al Fateh revolution, Libyans enthusiastically welcomed it. However over the next few years, far from being a national saviour, Gaddafi morphed into a ruthless dictator himself and quelled a counter-coup in 1975 following which 22 army officers and an equal number of civilians were summarily executed. Subsequently, he emerged as the Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution, and published The Green Book in the style of Chairman Mao™s Little Red Book, in which he enunciated the principles of jamhariya governance.
Right through the last quarter of the 20th century when the price of crude oil rose to dizzying heights, western nations continued to import oil from Libya. This despite reports of Gaddafi™s widespread human rights abuses and well-publicised idiosyncrasies, including a notorious attempt to save his fellow dictator Idi Amin in Uganda, who ordered the expulsion of a long-settled 73,000-strong Indian community from the east African country. In the West, Gaddafi™s blend of Islamic and Marxist rhetoric was tolerated with amused contempt, but not a few left intellectuals singled out Libya as a rare Muslim country in which women were accorded equal citizenship rights, as loudly proclaimed by Gaddafi™s all-women squad of bodyguards.
Yet, as everyone suspected, the platoon of women bodyguards (˜Amazons™) was not a volunteer force as Gaddafi liked to proclaim. It was a harem of young women inducted by force and abused at will by the dictator, according to Annick Cojean, a special correspondent of the Paris-based daily Le Monde who visited Libya after Gaddafi™s long reign of whimsical terror was brought to an end in 2011 by rebel militia. Cojean was in Libya to investigate the role of women in the revolution which overthrew the despot.
Photographs showing Libyans celebrating the death of Gaddafi depicted very few, if any women, suggesting that they were sorry to see Gaddafi lynched. œHad the author of the Green Book not endlessly proclaimed that men and women were equal?
Had he not systematically presented himself as their fierce defender, raising the legal age of marriage to twenty, condemning polygamy and the abuses of the patriarchal society, granting more rights to divorced women ¦ and founding a Military Academy for Women to candidates from all over the world? writes Cojean in the prologue. But a chance meeting with Soraya, one of Gaddafi™s Amazons, exposed another unknown side of the Defender of Islam and Brother Leader.
Soraya was a 15-year- old schoolgirl when she was selected to present a bouquet to the Guide who took a fancy to her and inducted her into the Amazons. Inevitably this was just a ruse to get her away from her family. After the Revolution and Gaddafi™s fall, she recounts her horror story of kidnap, sexual slavery and abuse for the Guide™s pleasure. Rejected by her family and tribe for being ˜dishonoured™ in the archaic Islamic tradition, Soraya poured her heart out to Cojean.
The book ends with contemporary Libya. On October 23, 2011, Moustapha Abdeljalil, Islamist president of the National Transition Council, officially declared that Libya had been liberated from Gaddafi™s rule. But as the women of Libya who had suffered most under the Guide™s tyranny waited for a word of appreciation and solace, the author notes: œNot a word about their suffering or their contribution to the revolution. No allusion to the role they would be playing in the new Libya except that œpolygamy would no longer be impeded by the obligation ” established by Gaddafi ” to ask one™s first wife to marry a second one.
Clearly, the travails of Soraya and her sisters in Libya are far from over.
Shweta Nair