A lament for my youth

One of these days I will switch on the television and not feel like watching cricket any more. Anil Kumble and Sourav Ganguly have left the game, and Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar are surely next. Then VVS Laxman. I'll switch that TV back off, find something else to do, and maybe check the score every hour. Or not.

My nostalgia won't come from the fact that these guys were so good. I'm confident that equally good players will arrive on the scene, as they always do. We will see breathtaking strokeplay, audacious captaincy and matchwinning spells of bowling. These men are special to me not because of what they did on the cricket field, but because of the place they occupied in my emotional landscape. Their retirement feels like a phase of my life is over.

Back when we were young - by 'we' I mean Sachin and me - we watched cricket in a different way. Watching cricket was one of the handful of leisure pastimes open to me. Sure, I read books, but how many books could you read? There was no internet in those days, Doordarshan was all you had for television, and going out to watch a movie was an occasional experience. Cricket, when it was on, filled the gaps in our days. It also gave us something to cheer for - there wasn't much else back then.

I remember watching Sachin's debut on television feeling slightly jealous. Here he was, just a year older than me, already playing cricket for India. But that feeling vanished once he began batting. I was too young then to be able to isolate the qualities that make a batsman great - the balance, the still head, the minimal movement, how early he saw the ball and how late he played it. But the strokeplay of a great batsman is always more than the sum of its parts, and watching Sachin could be a magical experience. What's more, this kid liked to attack, unlike the giant he'd just missed playing with, Sunnybhai.

Anil Kumble took longer to warm to. Spinners are often attritional, and Kumble took his time to work his way into our affections. He won us more matches than any other player in the 90s, but many of them were at home, on tracks prepared to suit him. We did not give that much importance, pointing to his overseas record, even as he protested that a bowler could only bowl a side out when his team put runs on the board - and Indians never did on non-subcontinental tracks.

That changed in the new millennium. Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly came into their own, VVS Laxman blossomed, and Kumble showed that he could be a matchwinner anywhere. In the decades before this, our teams had mainly frustrated us, as we thought about what could have been.These men inspired us. Do you remember Anil Kumble with a broken jaw, wrapped up in bandage, running in and taking Brian Lara's wicket in Antigua? I stayed up all night to watch those matches, and I remember being unable to sleep the morning after Kumble did that, so stirring it was.

In all this time, India changed. We liberalised, opened up parts of the economy, got ourselves a few hundred TV channels, the internet and a new way of living. Our cricketers changed too - an analogy now too cliched to repeat. But this much is true - we finally shrugged off our inferiority complex and started giving it back to the goras. I can't forget the Natwest Trophy final, with Mohammad Kaif and Yuvraj Singh helped us nail an unlikely win. Or Sourav Ganguly waving his T-shirt around as if to say, "take that, you #$@#!" I remember Sourav at Brisbane. I remember Rahul Dravid seizing the moment to deliver some of our most memorable wins, at Headingley, Adelaide and Rawalpindi. I remember Laxman, who could make you pinch yourself with disbelief, so beautifully he batted.

Like Sachin, like these other men, I've grown up now. I watch cricket differently - there are no many leisure options open to me, and I admit that I don't watch every match that India plays. Sometimes I go to a pub and chill with friends; sometimes I surf the internet, or watch videos on YouTube; sometimes I hang at a mall, drink coffee in the food court, browse books at a bookstore 80 times bigger than the stores of my youth. I no longer have the scorecards of every Test India has played memorised - India plays way too much for that now. I don't have stats at the tip of my fingers, though I have memories I will never forget. Some days, cricket doesn't excite me, it makes me nostalgic. I guess I'm growing old.

If I was ten years younger, no doubt MS Dhoni and Rohit Sharma would occupy the space in my life that Kumble and those four batsmen did. But these new dudes aren't milestones in my life, the way their predecessors were. Sometimes you hear a song from your childhood and it transports you back to how you were then, and evokes the innocence or hope or youthful loss of another time. These new songs don't do it for me that way. They're nice, and I'll hum and dance, and I'll be bemused when the selectors play their besura antakshari, but that's it.

Great. So I started this piece thinking I will lament the retirement of these fine players, but instead I've mourned the passing of a phase of my own life. We Indian cricket fans are selfish, aren't we?

Source: cricket.ndtv.com