No tears for Paaji

No tears for Paaji

This perhaps is Kapil Dev's real tragedy: When the time came for the country's favourite `Devil' to exit from the cricketing arena, the tears had already dried up. Surely it was not supposed to end like this. Could any of us have imagined that we would greet his petulant letter of resignation as national coach with such an audible thank-god-he-has-gone sigh of relief? Certainly not. The man who sprayed the exultant world around him with champagne that happy sunshiny day at Lord's 17 summers ago was not meant to be a leading protagonist in Indian cricket's most sordid hour. Then again, maybe he was. Maybe Kapil Dev's tragedy in three parts was encrypted in the bewildering trajectory of India's favourite sport.

Here goes the story thus far. Part I: Local boy makes good. If only epitaph writers could freeze frame these images. Kapil Dev the teenager who sprinted his way into the nation's team and heart. An endearing, vivacious antidote to the stuffiness and reticence of whole generations of cricketers with their public school demeanour. A welcome burst of competitiveness and grit at a time when a delicate cover drive was valued more than a breathless accumulation of runs, when exuding the brute will to win was considered impolite. The delicious presaging of things to come in the 1983 World Cup when the Haryanvi with a huge heart whacked 175 runs after five of his teammates had returned to the dressing room for all of 17 runs at Tunbridge Wells. That crowning moment at Lord's when Kapil's boys wrested once and for all for the subcontinent an Indian game invented in England. Part II: An incurable bout of affluenza. Call it an adjunct to iconhood, deem it a defining characteristic of a slowly liberalising India, ordeclare it a result of cricket's television age -- but affluence changed forever the game and heroes like Kapil. Not only did sponsorships and advertisers bring money into the game -- and no one grudges this redistribution of wealth -- but spectators' expectations of cricketers too rose more than just a bit. Now that the game had come into everyday living rooms, the eleven worthy men were under increasing pressures: every lunge at fine leg was under scrutiny, every outing was expected to translate into a resounding win; and (as befits new-found peddlers of colas and shaving creams) every cricketer had to justify his time in the spotlight by demonstrating his ability to carry affluence smoothly. If somewhere in this lay the beginnings of match-fixing, it was but inevitable that the exploits of all but the most squeaky clean cricketers would lend themselves to innuendo and gossipy whispers. So it was with Kapil: he told us which refrigerator to buy, but he could not hush the popular craving for conspiracytheories.

Then the inevitable happened. Part III: The dawn of a grave new world. The Cronje confessions, the BCCI's inept leadership, Manoj Prabhakar's sensational allegation that Kapil offered him Rs 25 lakh to chuck a match, Kapil's ill-fated attempt to play the TV stakes by turning on the faucet... all this is too recent to merit recounting. If some do find the tears to bid a wet-eyed farewell to Indian cricket's most flamboyant star, this then is what they will rue: that Paaji's narrative got intertwined with cricket's.