Despite the warm summer evening several city old timers and lovers of cricket gathered under the shade of a blossoming jackfruit tree to watch V. Ramnarayan launch his book Third Man . The casual gathering of the former first class cricketer’s colleagues and friends provided the perfect setting at Akshara book store in Jubilee Hills for an evening of nostalgia as the cricketer-turned-author caught up with his buddies and recalled his days as a Ranji player. In a chat, the author recalls how he began writing this book many years ago only to have life interrupt it by a couple of decades.
“This book has always been at the back of my mind. In fact, I’d even begun penning it and had written as many as 30 pages in a ruled book when life interrupted it by a couple of decades. Even as it lay forgotten Krishna Shastri, an author himself and a good friend, prompted me to pick up where I’d left off. He kept pushing me to finish the book and when I found a publisher I decided to do so,” says Ramnarayan. Incidentally, when the author did begin writing his book several years after his first attempt, he realised that his writing was almost identical to his first draft.
Third ManThe book is filled with minute details and memories of his childhood spent playing cricket in a family that was immersed in the sport, his subsequent induction into the Hyderabad Ranji team at the age of 28 and his journey as a first class cricketer.
The title Third Man is inspired by the fact that Ramnarayan was the third off-spinner after E.A.S. Prasanna and S. Venkataraghavan. “I made my peace with being the third man long before I made my Ranji debut at age 28. By then I had thought that I would never play professional cricket. In fact, when I was asked to play I didn’t think I was fit enough. But suddenly I was in the running,” recalls the author, who says that when he had to stop playing the sport it came as a hard blow. “There was a time when I couldn’t bear to watch cricket also. But then I eventually got it out of my system,” says Ramnarayan, who has since been blogging about cricket and even began writing for Cricinfo in 2001.
The former cricketer has also since carved a niche for himself as the editor of Sruti Magazine, a teacher and an entrepreneur even. “You could say I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do,” he laughs, adding that he released his first book on the history of Tamil Nadu cricket in 2002 that was commissioned by the group that he joined later. “All of this gave me the experience to tackle my own story. My blog brought in a lot of response and gave me the confidence that there were readers for my kind of cricket writing.”
Currently a student of Carnatic music and the Malayalam language, Ramnarayan has an insatiable thirst for knowledge.
“I think the child in me has made me do all this. I’m never going to sing on a stage, but it’s something I’m doing for my own interest. Malayalam too I’m learning because I love their literature and would love to be able to read it,” says the author, who is already penning his next book on Carnatic music that he’d like to bring out this year.
