The sentient watcher

Men in White: A Book of Cricket by Mukul Kesavan
(Penguin/Viking) 278pp, Rs 395

Men in White: A book of cricket © Penguin India

A few months ago, in the wake of the hysterical public reaction to the Indian team's early exit from the World Cup, Mukul Kesavan wrote an editorial for a daily newspaper, denouncing the average Indian cricket follower as a "lazy, pampered know-nothing" with an unreasonable sense of entitlement. Though widely appreciated, the piece also drew some strong negative reactions. Accusing Kesavan of being an armchair intellectual, blind to the tribulations and feelings of the average fan, one blogger asked rhetorically if he had ever been inside a stadium in a non-journalistic (hence non-privileged) capacity.

The answer to that question can be found in the Introduction to Kesavan's Men in White, where he recalls a run-in with police brutality at the Ferozshah Kotla when he was just nine. The point is, the experience didn't end his relationship with cricket. He went back again. And again. And yet again.

Calling a sports writer an armchair intellectual is another way of saying he lacks genuine passion for the game - the kind of passion that makes you abandon all pretence to refined objectivity and turns you into an atavistic chest-thumper when a favourite team or player wins. But Kesavan's love for cricket, Test cricket in particular, can be seen on every page of Men in White, a collection of essays that first appeared in the pages of Cricinfo Magazine and its predecessor Wisden Asia Cricket, and other publications.

Like all cricket buffs, Kesavan is very opinionated and proud of it (in fact, he expressly states the value of subjectivity in a short piece about Don Bradman's World XI).

He holds forth here on a number of topics, making a persuasive case for doing away with the match referee ("a bureaucrat, removed from the action, his decisions opaque to authority") and some of the special rules created for ODIs "one-day cricket is a kind of licence Raj where inefficient batsmen flourish"); discussing favourite players (the likening of Kapil Dev to Br'er Rabbit is one of the best throwaway descriptions I've read), the culture of cricket in Chennai, and the implications of a racist remark by Dean Jones; and recounting how he helped India win a Test against Australia in 2001 by the simple expedient of keeping his eyes shut in the final half hour so that no further Indian wickets fell. Other highlights include his childhood memories of playing the "Lutyens Variant" of cricket in a neighbourhood park, something most of us can relate to, and of listening to radio commentary. And in one of the most perceptive essays in this collection, he discusses the role "anecdotage" - the treating of period gossip as undisputed fact - has played in the creation of cricket's mythology (was Bishan Bedi really a better bowler than Bhagwat Chandrasekhar?).

But the most compelling thing about this book is Kesavan's recognition of the conflict between fair-minded sports analysis and that visceral feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when a cherished team does badly. And equally, the recognition that both qualities co-exist in himself. At one point, while discussing the "non-paying and non-playing" spectator who treats defeat as a personal betrayal, he complains that for the typical Indian cricket fan, no real-world match can compare with the one in Lagaan, with its neat, satisfying ending. But in the very next paragraph, he restrains himself. "That's a cheap shot," he writes. "After 40 years or more of rooting for India, I may not contain multitudes but I know that I have to make room for at least two people: that middle-aged, freeloading, non-playing slob on the sofa and the child on the concrete terraces for whom the sight of Farokh Engineer swaggering down the steps of Willingdon Pavilion to open the Indian innings was a doorway to heaven. Separately and sometimes together, both of them wrote this book." This self-awareness is what makes Men in White so readable.

Was Bishan Bedi a better bowler than Bhagwat Chandrasekhar? © Getty Images

Essay collections of this sort don't always hold together, but the pieces here form a body of work that tells us as much about the nature of a cricket lover's evolving relationship with the sport as it does about the sport itself. They reflect the ambivalences and inconsistencies of our opinions (commenting on his adulatory piece about Rahul Dravid, Kesavan says, "I set out to write a hard-nosed assessment of an overrated batsman, and look what emerged.") and the role that irrational perceptions play in shaping our feelings towards teams and players. For those disillusioned by poor administration and the increasing mediocrity of the one-day game, Men in White is a reminder of what cricket can be at its best. But it's also a reminder that our reaction to sporting victories and defeats tells us a lot about ourselves.