It all started more than a decade ago, when I had barely stepped out of school into college. At a book exhibition in Indore, I happened to pick up two books on cricket. 'By God's Decree', Kapil Dev's first autobiography and 'All The Beautiful Boys', by Rajan Bala. The first one because it seemed a good buy for the starry-eyed cricket fan that I was and the second one because of no specific reason. The name sounded catchy maybe. Or because the cover was attractive, showing an international match in progress. In the first book Kapil Dev talked about his early days and described his career till 1985. I quickly devoured the book, which left no significant imprint behind. The second book was mostly, an assorted collection of mini-biographies of Indian players the author, a cricket journalist, had seen playing over the years. It was a fascinating concoction of personalities and incidences interspersed with the technicalities of the game.
I was hooked onto the book. All these years, I had been only one of the millions of fans who are blindly passionate about the game without knowing what drives their passion. I would watch all the matches India played, celebrating each win and mourning each loss as the sole ends in themselves. The game, that was the means to those ends, never mattered that much to me. This book changed all that. It introduced me to the personalities that enriched the game. I read about the immaculate perfectionist that was Sunil Gavaskar, about the astonishingly gifted Gundappa Visvanath, about the peerless leader Tiger Pataudi, about the suicidally courageous Mohinder Amarnath and many more fabulous men.
I developed a sense of appreciation of the history of the game, atleast in the Indian context. I learnt to separate the chaff from the grain. I grew up from being one among the "rabble, who flock to cricket grounds to be entertained" (in Bala's words) to being a "student of the game, one who is not carried away by the superficial and the flippant". I started picking up the finer nuances of the game. Pretty soon, cricket stopped being merely a game between bat and ball for me. It became something much more than that. It became a constant companion, a soulmate, a partner for life. The 2001 Australia series ensured that my bond with cricket was further strengthened. The affair has endured till date. Relationships with human beings are numerous and transient but this is one stand that will never be broken.
For introducing me to the inner beauty of the game that I knew but skin deep, I have to thank Mr Rajan Bala from the bottom of my heart. You may wonder why I am writing this a decade after the story began. This is because Mr Bala is no more. He passed away in October last year. He was one of the finest cricket journalists India has ever produced. What set him apart from others was his mind-boggling knowledge of the intricacies of the game. It is said that Tiger Pataudi used to invite him for team meetings during Test matches. I cannot think of a greater tribute that a non-player can receive, coming as it does from India's best captain ever. I have been trying to purchase a book by Bala, 'Glances At Perfection', but unfortunately it is out of stock at most places. And it suddenly occurred to me that I must place on record my gratitude for the man who, through his pen, showed a teenager what it really meant to be 'passionate' about something. It is my humble advice to all those Indian cricket followers who think of the game as more than instant entertainment. The purists would want you to read 'The Art of Cricket' and 'The Art of Captaincy' but please do also read 'All The Beautiful Boys' by Rajan Bala. Who knows, there might be so many more love affairs waiting to happen.
