The Midas touch

There are very few things which have stayed with me for as long as cricket. It was the first exposure for a little boy growing up in small town to engage in something outside of his personal life. You went to school, returned home, grabbed your bat and played not just till the sun set but till the twilight diffused.

You could give me a plank of wood and a rubber ball, and I’d not need anything else in the world. I guess my parents figured this out quite early as I can recall most of my early birthday gifts to be either cricket bats or cricketing accessories. As much as it was the on-field action which enthralled me, I was also seduced by what happened off the field – the game plan, the team selection, I always wanted to be fully informed. Imagine a 7-year-old kid waking up at 6, just so that he could flip to the second last page of the newspaper and have his first meal of the day – I could skip breakfast but not my daily dose of cricket pieces. I could go on and on about my fascination with Sportstar, Cricket Samrat but that is not the reason I am here. This is about something else.

THE CONUNDRUM         

Sometimes I think that we millennial were fortunate to have been born in a time of information scarcity, and not in the current info-demic phase. Why? because it led to - curiosity. And I think that curiosity is what preserves our bond with cricket even now. Not being able to figure out the score while in school, or when the TV shut down at homes, made us strive that extra hard to source that information and on the way forged this beautiful bond that most of us have with the game.

THE RATIONALE

Well, the reason I am back to my blog after all these years is because the situation demanded me to.  It is beyond me how we can get attached to people who we have never met or spoken to, and how these people influence our lives so much – part of the reason I started off this blog with the opening I did, attempting to find an answer as I introspect more. The last time I felt so emotional was when Sachin retired from the game. I was quite sure then that nothing will come close to that feeling but here I am grieving the retirement of the biggest cricketer Indian team has ever seen – Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

There is so much to talk about his cricket but there are bigger experts out there who can talk about it. I am here trying to speak about MSD – the emotion, the enigma, the feeling, the memories, my bridge from adolescence to adulthood.

THE EMOTION, THE ENIGMA, THE FEELING

I have been a Sachin fanboy for life, even today he continues to be my favourite, but I never wanted to emulate him outside of the game but when it comes to Dhoni, I want to become Dhoni- the person that he is as there is plenty you can learn from Dhoni the person.  

There is much that has been said about his calmness – the most evident part of his personality was his ability to control his emotions. Be it an ebb or flow, Dhoni stayed the same. Harsha Bhogle brilliantly wrote in his blog that there has never been a cricketer who was so emotionally detached from the game and yet so fantastic at it. That is the kind of control I want to bring in my life, the ability to go about one’s business without getting flustered or impacted by the process or the perceived outcomes.

What Dhoni brought to cricket is very apt in the current times, he was probably one of those cricketers who infused the “unconventional” in a game as traditional as cricket. A game which boasted of its technique and its textbook conventional methods and on-field protocols, now has made a room for the unorthodox. Him, along with Sehwag, ABD, and probably even Malinga have been one of those few cricketers who added the extra dimension to an otherwise rigid game. As we see a paradigm shift in how businesses run today, and the big push that all companies lay on out of the box thinking, it will not be a sin to say that people like Dhoni fueled this similar progression in the game of cricket. Who’d have thunk a decade ago, that a start-up will outbid Tata Sons to get rights to a cricketing tournament. Well, this is the change I am talking about.

He was such a fascinating cricketer to watch. Sachin could certainly make time stop in India, and Peter Roebuck also narrates how his batting made a train stop in India but Dhoni made a bus stop for me.

It was a quiet afternoon of April 2005; I was returning from Delhi after the national semi-finals of ESPN School Quiz (part of the reason the memory is so vivid). Our bus driver parked the bus at a small Dhabha for a casual chai-break. The place had a tiny 14 inches TV and India v Pakistan was playing on it, we all were discussing why Ganguly had sent in a young Dhoni to bat up the order. It seemed absurd, wicket-keepers were known to not be able to bat - Adam Gilchrist was an anomaly in the world of cricket.

But that day as Dhoni clobbered the Pakistani attack in Vizag, it kindled a new hope in us and I am glad that I did not miss the genesis of the greatest cricketer India has seen, even if it meant getting off the bus and taking another one at the end of Indian innings.

THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND

I don’t know another man, in any field who has as high a situational awareness as Dhoni. I’d pay to listen to Dhoni the coach, the analyst and the decision maker. He still has so much to give and share, be it in cricket or any other filed, I am sure he will do wonders at it.

Seldom there comes a man who adds so much happiness to your life without being a part of it, Sachin was the first one for me, Dhoni is a close second.

Despite being the most successful captain for us, he continues to be the humble guy who believes in low-key presence and only delivering outcomes. The man who always stepped aside and let his team hog the limelight also used his original kitmaker’s bats at the end of his career. He did this to thank them for trusting him with a sponsorship when he was not the guy with the Midas touch but just another guy from Ranchi starting off his career in a game which saw biggies only from the metro cities. If nothing, we all can learn gratitude from the man.

THE LEGACY

Sachin, may be the one who infused confidence in the young India to be world beaters but it was Dhoni who distributed this idea, along with Tiktok (ofcourse), to the India which lives in small towns.

If you dissect Dhoni the man, there is a ton load of lessons you can learn from him. Yes, much more than the startup co-founder who repackages whatsapp forwards, global learning on his twitter feed. Just look at his parting video - a montage of low-resolution images collected, likely, on MS Powerpoint. A powerful reminder to everyone in corporate – it is the output that matters, the presentation is secondary. (Some consultants at MBB may disagree, including my wife)

I could go on and on about how he has impacted me, but I must attend to the laundry (perils of adulthood), and so I will soon come with a second version. But as I leave, I want all of us to take a pause and appreciate the man for his contribution and most of all, learn from his example. Let this be the wave that inspires us to acknowledge the simple things in life – calmness, gratitude and awareness, and the greatness they can bring to us when practiced in real.