George Bernard Shaw is believed to have said that, “The English are not very spiritual people. So they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.” In India however, cricket and God co-exist peacefully; both are given the space, time and respect they deserve.
It is a common enough sight, here — boys with bare feet and faded shorts, playing enthusiastically under a scorching midday sun, on makeshift cricket pitches: lunch, school and life forgotten. Former cricketer, music connoisseur and journalist, V. Ramnarayan, who has just released a memoir on his life in cricket, was once one of them, “I couldn’t help but get into cricket,” he laughs. “My whole family was into it.”
His book, titled the
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“A lot of strange things happened in my cricket career. There are funny instances and sad ones. I still ponder about decisions I should have taken that may have changed my life. This is autobiographical, in a way but it could be the story of any sportsman,” he says. Though he first picked up his bat at the age of five, it was not until his family returned to Chennai (Madras) after a stint in Kollam (Quilon), that he was completely won over by the game, thanks to being part of a cricket-crazy family. A student of the PS High School where he was inducted in its junior team, Ramnarayan remembers playing cricket in a vast open field opposite his childhood home, “Where Venus Colony is situated today,” he says. In college too (Presidency College), he played cricket but his induction into first class cricket happened when he moved to Hyderabad as a probationary officer of the State Bank of India where he made his Ranji trophy debut at the age of 28 in the 1975-76 season, “I had almost given up, by then,” says the writer who has played with some of the biggest names in cricket including ML Jaisimha, Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi and Abbas Ali Baig. And though his exit from the team is tinged with bitterness and regret, he admits that, “I’m lucky to have been able to do what I did.” Years passed before he could revisit his memories of the game. The seeds for this book were planted 30 years ago, he says when, “I was at a friend’s place in Besant Nagar where I met his guest Pradeep of Orient Longman. We began talking about cricket and by the end of that conversation; he insisted that I write down my cricket stories. I began jotting them in a ruled notebook, but I stopped after 30 pages, I suppose I got taken over by my life.”
Twenty years later, he started again, thanks to the egging of writer and illustrator Krishna Shastri Devulapalli, “We would walk together on the beach in the evening and swap stories. Krishna, would tell me these outrageous stories, while I would tell him my cricket ones. He kept pestering me to write a book based on them,” he says. “I started blogging and writing about cricket and I was amazed by the number of takers. My friends and family constantly were at me to write a book. And here it is,” he smiles.