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Tag: Indian cricket

Behind the Scenes of R. Ashwin’s Rise to Cricket Fame!

Posted on by prathod

R. Ashwin, one of India’s greatest cricketers, shares his incredible journey in I Have the Streets, co-written with Sidharth Monga. Ashwin not only talks about his amazing cricket achievements but also tells the story of his struggles with health as a child, the strong support from his family, and his love for cricket growing up in the streets of Madras.

 

Read this exclusive excerpt to get a glimpse of Ashwin’s early cricketing days full of hard work, family sacrifices, and his deep passion for the game.

 

I Have the Streets
I Have the Streets | R. Ashwin, Sidharth Monga

***

I am ten when Appa’s teammates at Egmore Excelsiors ask him to bring me around to play for them. I have been taking formal coaching, and my batting is coming along nicely. Appa fears I will get hit by the hard cricket ball, so he keeps resisting. I am not puny, but I don’t have the muscle mass to go with my height. With all my wheezing and vomiting bouts, I struggle to keep any food down. Two years later, he finally gives in.

 

At twelve, I make my Madras leagues debut for Egmore Excelsiors in the fifth division. My first kitbag is the same improvised pads-around-the-bat contraption. The bat is Appa’s Simon Tuskers, fully taped and gutted. In my second season, I have scored a century. My main utility, though, is to field at slip and short leg. I take a lot of catches. And blows, because fifth-division spinners are quite erratic with their discipline, thus endangering their short-leg fielders.

 

Now, instead of protecting me from the cricket ball, Appa is following the coaches’ advice that tennis-ball cricket will ruin my game. So, he tries to ration those matches for me. To help me rid myself of the fear, he installs a net in the house. The surface of the first one is quite rough, so he gets it redone to a smooth finish. During a family function at home, he asks the videographer to film me while batting. It comes back like a wedding film.

 

Appa throws balls at me from a close distance so that I don’t fear the thirty- to forty-year-old pros in the leagues, who can be a terror with the unpredictable bounce of the matting pitches we get in the fifth division.

 

Batting against them is not even the scariest part. It is the fear of letting your teammates down and getting admonished for it. The first season is really intimidating. I’m not sure know what they will say or where they will make me stand on the field. I keep fearing misfielding or dropping a catch. No matter how poorly the team has bowled, if a young kid makes a mistake on the field, that kid becomes the reason they lost. They make you run from deep midwicket to deep cover between balls. To score a hundred and compete against these men in just one year tells me I might have something in me as a cricketer.

 

Appa recognizes it and wants me to be tested against the best. He gets me enrolled in as many academies as he can. Some coaches he pays; others he takes favours from, using his connections. Former India wicketkeeper Bharath Reddy now handles operations at Chemplast. As the name suggests, it is a chemical company in Madras. The name doesn’t give away, though, that they field two strong teams in the higher divisions of the Madras leagues: Jolly Rovers and Alwarpet CC. He also runs his own academy, where I train.

 

By thirteen, I am a bit of a big dog at the Bharath Reddy Academy. Appa is tempted to get me to the seniors’ nets, among the Jolly Rovers probables, to test me. One of the quicks knocking at the Jolly Rovers door is L. Balaji, who is unplayable on matting pitches. He bowls rockets that don’t even come straight at you. His outswingers are hard to follow; his inswingers hit batters in the chest and not the pads.

 

The thing with Appa, though, is that he will never undermine a coach by making such a demand. A coach is almost like a senior police officer whose orders must be followed without question. The other thing about Appa is that he will not give up. When this inner conflict of his becomes apparent, Amma comes to the rescue by offering to make that call to Bharath Reddy. However, Bharath Reddy still ends up giving Appa a piece of his mind when he sees us. Facing Balaji at thirteen is a death wish, he says.

 

Appa is slightly bolder at the other academy, Sishya, run by P.K. Dharmalingam, who does cricket shows on TV. He is the man Kapil Dev credits with teaching him how to take catches running back and over his shoulder, the most famous one being that of Viv Richards in the 1983 World Cup final. After two months of persistence, Appa finally convinces Dharmalingam to let me bat against the senior quicks. There is no sight screen; we are on a matting surface with concrete underneath, and this big, fast bowler runs in. The first ball I face hits me in the chest, and I am down. I have to be carried out of the nets.

 

For a few days after the incident, I wake up in the middle of the night to see a hand near my nose and mouth. It’s Appa checking to see if I am still breathing. He feels guilty and is worried about pushing me too far. He scales it back a little but doesn’t give up on repetitions. Repetition to build muscle memory is a big thing with him. A day before I have a match, he sits on a sofa and keeps throwing balls at me. At least 200. ‘Bend that knee when you play the cover-drive.’ He has also tied a ball to a rope that hangs from the ceiling so that I can keep repeating my shots. This way, I don’t need a person to throw balls at me, nor do I need someone to run after the ball.

 

There is one problem, though: the ball keeps hitting the fridge before coming back to me. This fridge was gifted to Thatha by his father-in-law when it was rare for homes to have one. Thatha continues to treasure it. The fridge has become the trigger for the outpouring of all the tension between Thatha and Appa. Thatha doesn’t like Appa investing so much time, money and emotion in my cricket. Especially with my health problems.

 

On this one day, I am getting in a last-minute knock before a league game. As I keep hitting the fridge, tempers flare between Thatha and Appa, who cushions me from it. ‘You have no value for money. You don’t know how expensive this fridge is.’

 

In an attempt to shield the fridge, Appa tries to get in the way of a shot I play, but my bat swing ends at his forehead, splitting it open. Immediately, blood gushes out. The floor turns red. I freeze, drop the bat and stand there not knowing what to do.

***

Get your copy of I Have the Streets by R. Ashwin and Sidharth Monga on Amazon or wherever books are sold.

For the love of Vasoo Paranjape: Cricket Drona and the batting legend

Posted on by sanjeeta

India has a relationship of great adulation with cricket, marked by unbridled excitement. The game has shaped our national consciousness in many different ways, and is the lynchpin of patriotism and camaraderie in the country – even if we have nothing in common, there will always be cricket. A colonial inheritance, cricket exists at all the coordinates of our culture, from advertisements of soft drinks with cricketers smiling through the screen to entire feature films like Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan. But we cannot talk about cricket without talking about Sachin Tendulkar. And we cannot talk about Sachin Tendulkar without talking about Vasoo Paranjape.

Ramakant Achrekar is the name we tend to associate with Sachin Tendulkar, but Vasoo Paranjape was the quiet pillar of influence who shaped the journey of the legendary batsman. Paranjape never laid any claims on his relationship with Tendulkar, and this is perhaps what makes Paranjape stand out as a mentor. There was no impulse of self-gratification in his interactions with the players, and at no point did he invest time and energy in them hoping for fame in return. This relationship was not unreciprocated; Cricket Drona tells us that Paranjape was the second person Tendulkar called when he had decided to announce his retirement from international cricket. Paranjape was bewildered about the call; he felt that he had played no significant part in Tendulkar’s life. But Tendulkar didn’t agree. ‘Sir, I know what you have done for me’, he said.

In his segment in Cricket Dhoni, Tendulkar recalls how Paranjape’s recommendation was instrumental in getting him selected for the West Indies tour. He knows Paranjape always had his best interests at heart, and from the chronicles of their interactions, this becomes amply clear. Paranjape had an eye for talent which he had carefully cultivated and which proved his words time and again. But the impact Paranjape had on Tendulkar was not limited to the pitch. There was a deep emotional influence as well, which is natural to any solid mentor-mentee relationship. In a part of his essay on Paranjape, Tendulkar discusses such an event:

“Vasoo Sir was watching this Irani Trophy match with my father. My father would never watch me play—he had this superstition that if he watched me play, I would get out early. But apparently, Vasoo Sir had convinced him to come to this game. Sir took out his 1955 Fiat and drove my father to the venue, telling him, ‘Don’t worry, he won’t get out… If your presence was reason enough for him to get out, all the schools in Mumbai would want to hire you as their principal.’ My father simply laughed and got into the car. I am forever indebted to Sir for this. My father watched me play live only on two occasions, and this was one of them. The memory makes me very emotional.”

Paranjape worked with players as individuals with their unique propensities and characteristics. “I had a very unorthodox batting grip, with both hands way down the bat’s handle”, writes Sachin. But Paranjape did not try to change this. Instead, he focused on the strategies of the game, studying the opposition, playing a good stretch at an innings, things that opened up the beauty of the game for Tendulkar. “[W]hen I worked a little more closely with him, I understood that Sachin had another great power: the power to forget. He was able to erase the memory of the previous ball or the previous innings from his immediate focus. This is the factor that separates the greats from the non-greats: the ability to shut out what’s happened in the past and stay in the present. This, to me, is one of his biggest strengths”, writes Paranjape about Tendukar, revealing how nuanced his reading of the player was. He was able to notice every detail of what makes a player stand out.

Behind every person who is outstanding in their field is the work and influence of mentors, coaches and teachers, people who shape and modulate individual talent into a set of redoubtable skills. These skills become indispensable, and become the characteristic element of people who are larger than life, whose lives and performances are scintillating to a degree where they become more than human. In more ways than one, Vasoo Paranjape drove Tendulkar to become what he is. Cricket Drona is an homage to the man who became the strength and support of many cricket legends.

 

[To read more about Vasoo Paranjape, order you copy of Cricket Drona here!]

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