That kernel we seek

Was down in the dumps last week, like a shell upturned in the Mithi. The banalities of corporate life and the boredom of executing processes. But on returning home, the television, forever cursed as the refuge of the shock-headed, brought me a classic. Dravid's 190 at Hamilton against New Zealand in '99. What a composition! 31 boundaries of such perfect ineffable elegance. Drives off his toes through midwicket. Cover drives, off the backfoot, and on the rise off the front foot, like intricate fluid clicking clockwork. I think the grace is what drew him to cricket, as the lusty blows did the Dhonis. It's not that you like cricket, overall, and then you develop your style. What you originally loved, the first time you played, becomes your style, it becomes you. Be it cricket, or poetry, or perhaps love. The way wrists roll and toes swivel and the ball streaks through the gap. What a great player, and how much of it has come from the mere love of grace and not through any natural strength or any animal ability to sense and respond and whack it.

That's what I loved when playing at school. The music in the heart at six in the morning in an Bangalore winter when you're shivering and long for a warm blanket to snuggle back into, and the feel of the bat's grip, and the thrill of lining up for practice, the pick, pock, pick of the old withering ball on willow. The sleepy forearms are waking up. You can smell the fresh grass under your squeaking canvas shoes, and then your heart beats like a drum when the sun is out and there's an hour left for breakfast and then the match. Breakfast is upma, who cares about upma... The new ball! You run your fingers along the seam, angle them across as if you're some crack swing bowler, and then the thrill of announcing, "guys we're shining the Dukes-side". And the willow's chipped edges at dusk when your fingers are aching and sweaty and stinking.

Jacque Kallis, he's another batsman who plays the way one should, with all the dignity and science of it. O to watch him drive off the backfoot. I also watched an old test last week, I think the '86 India-England series, where David Gower got out on zero to such a beautiful, languid, listless shot, a yawning flick to short fine leg off Madan Lal. And I'd rather watch Lara play one heart-stopping pull with his right pad drawn up, than a hundred sixes from Afridi.

So it's not really that we like Cricket, or that we like trading stocks- there's some core conviction that we have, some values we look for, that these passions answer for us. Why do we look for them? Some childhood psychological explanation maybe. I'm plodding through Freud's Interpretation of Dreams; maybe that'll throw up some theory on why elegance and grace mean so much to some like me, and the banging frenzy of American football or even the slog overs of cricket mean so much to others.

In my case, it all ended when Mum decided a coaching camp was expensive and in any case being a middle class bram student I'd better focus on studies, and on my ICSE boards. I actually sulked on a tree and watched Carlton Saldhana teach my friends about the importance of top-hand driving, and how the great Azhar, even when he flicked behind square, never used bottom hand for a vertical bat shot. Someone called out my name, the coach saw me on the tree and gave me a dirty look, and then I decided to end it all. No more cricket. I had played about six matches for school, I opened in all of them, my highest score was 13, my lowest score was zero, and everyone agreed I was an elegant batsman. Among the finest memories of my life is a reflex straight drive off a near yorker-length ball, hard, new and shiny, from a tall and nasty bowler. It zipped through and past the stumps, parting the grass, and crossed the fence right behind the bowler. You'd never think a short, skinny fellow could make a ball do that. Ah, what a beautiful game.