NOT MANY people know that his father had named him after the legendary music director Sachin Dev Burman. As a matter of fact until the age of 14 he had aspired to become a pace bowler. However he received the cold shoulder in 1987 from the Australian great Dennis Lillee at the MRF Pace Academy in Chennai. But then all through his 24-year long career he never had to pay up the monetary fine imposed by the Indian cricket team for late coming players and for those flouting the dress code.

The individual records associated with Sachin Tendulkar’s name perhaps may never be broken. At the same time it is worth mentioning that Pete Sampras’ record of 14 grand slam wins was once considered unbreakable. When Roger Federer surpassed that record with 17 grand slam titles, the power brokers rolled out the debate whether he was or not the GOAT – Greatest of All Time. Now with Rafael Nadal closely on his heels with 13 grand slam credits under his belt the ‘greatest ever’ power equation appears to be shifting. Apparently Tendulkar’s performance off the field has been impeccable unlike most celebrities though they have had only the good fortune to attain much less success in comparison.

Yet purists of the game argue that Tendulkar has never been a team player. They say his individual contribution to the team’s performance can never be matched with those of Saurav Ganguly, Anil Kumble, Rahul Dravid and V.V.S. Lakshman. Some of the media barons of his home town in the meantime had conspired to camouflage the fact that Tendulkar had kept his admirers 2 years on edge during his journey from his 99^th century to 100^th. Pakistani batting legend Javed Miandad has confessed that his attempt to unduly prolong his career did not do him any good. We have seen this flaw in judgment not only with sporting legends but also with other great artists of yesteryear. The rumour mill is also rife with whispers that the highest civilian honor has more to do with political mileage than appreciation for a sporting genius.

Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi at 21 was the youngest test cricket captain India has ever had. The cricket commentator foursome of Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri, Sanjay Manjrekar and Harsha Bhogle oddly appear to have overlooked the circumstances that led to having Pataudi take over the reins from Nari Contractor during their customary time travel escapades into India’s cricketing history. Nari was incapacitated and lost his career while captaining the country’s test team in West Indies. In the match against Barbados Charlie

Griffith was to deliver the fourth ball of his second over. At that time sight screens had not come into play. Someone opened a window in the pavilion and Nari’s head turned for a moment denying him the chance to duck Griffith’s ball. He lay unconscious in the hospital for 6 days. It was West Indies’ captain Sir Frank Worrel who first donated blood to Nari when the situation demanded blood transfusion. (Sir Frank Worrel was the first appointed black captain of West Indies. Worrell, Everton Weekes, and Sir Clyde Walcott – the “Three W’s”- made up what was considered to be the finest middle order batting line up of the 60s. He was also the most charismatic and influential captain the West Indies ever had. The affection with which his team was received in Australia during their landmark tour of 1960-61 is eulogized in the trophy named after him for which the two teams play even today.)  Now 79, Nari has never blamed Griffith, but only attributed the injury to his own distraction.

Nari Contractor never played for Mumbai. Destiny perhaps had found something so alluring in this man

that it never wanted him out of the perimeters of its checker board. His pregnant mother was returning from a virtually unknown place called Dohad in Gujarat to Mumbai. She had hoped to have a safer delivery in the great city. Nari’s uncle was the engine driver of the train she had boarded. As his work schedule was to get over in another two hours at Godhra, he asked his sister to get off the train but promised to take her to Mumbai the next day. Things do not always happen the way you envisage them and Nari was born the same day. Little did anyone know at that time that on the basis of this incident Nari would be eligible to play for Gujarat many years later. In his debut in first class cricket Nari went on to score centuries in both the innings for Gujarat against Baroda which feat still remains unparalleled in Indian cricketing history.

The day he scored a ton against Australia at Brabourne stadium, a group of children playing cricket on the road saw Nari walking towards the State Bank of India building at Fort. When they asked him why did he have to work in the evening on a day he had scored a hundred, he smiled nonchalantly and said that a century wasn’t good enough to run his house. Sachin Tendulkar currently is estimated to be worth US$160 Million.

Nari wasn’t from Gujarat, nor from Mumbai, he was from Providence.

( Though written on 17th November this post could not be published sooner because of contractual obligations .)

 

15th August 2013, Thursday: Mahatma Gandhi’s antagonists mostly were candid in their admissions that they had all undergone an unwitting mutation during their confrontations with him. Richard Attenborough, on the other hand, was no antagonist of Mahatma. But for Motilal Kothari, an Indian living in the 1962 London, Attenborough would never have been part of the deal. In a bid to realizing his dream of presenting Mahatma to the world on celluloid, Kothari coaxed Attenborough into reading Mahatma’s own autobiography, his ‘Satyagraha in South Africa’, and Louis Fischer’s ‘Life of Mahatma Gandhi’. The impact it created on Attenborough turned out to be much beyond Kothari’s expectations. It kept the British film maker going for 20 years, despite objections from many nationalist quarters in India, in his relentless pursuit of making the biopic ‘Gandhi’, winning eight Academy awards in the process, including those for best picture, director, screenplay, actor and cinematography. That was as far back as 1983.

 Long before that, in 1944, Attenborough and Shiela Sim were co-actors in a production of ‘The Lady with the Lamp’ at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. A year later their admiration for each other gave way to a seasoned, yet demonstrative liaison blossoming into marriage out of which they’d a son and 2 daughters. The Academy Award winning costumier of ‘Gandhi’, Bhanu Attaiah remembers Attenborough as a compassionate man and his son Michael to be of the same age as hers own. Remorsefully though, in 2004 on Boxing Day, his elder daughter Jane and her own daughter were killed in the South Asian tsunami. Four years later, over Christmas in 2008, Attenborough suffered a stroke and fell hitting his head on the marble floor of his home that left him briefly in a coma. Since then he has been confined to a wheel chair. He never fully recovered and continued to struggle to speak and move around.Last year, he sold off his 11.5 million Pound London mansion, where he has been living with his wife Sheila, now 90. His 86-year old younger brother David justifying the sale said “it simply wasn’t practical” for him to retain the house. Maintaining a hauntingly huge house and a sick wife at the same time was a hard bargain for a person himself in ill health. Obviously he did the right thing by opting for foster care rather than burden his own son and daughter. Riding on the algorithm of coherence over emotions, the West finds it arduous to compromise individual freedom in the altar of the combined family system, where the younger generation considers taking care of their elders as an ethical obligation. Even in the East, the dialectics of home and its square measures are now being redefined in the wake of the rush for falling in step with the times.

 Sheila Sim was moved to a care home after she was diagnosed with senile dementia. Eighteen months later Attenborough too joined her in the special care facility, where older and sick from the entertainment community are being taken care of. The news of the British movie maker’s displacement somehow prompted me to watch ‘Gandhi’ a second time leading to a proliferation of my perceptions about the moving narrative pitted against historical actualities. In his 240-page book ‘In search of Gandhi’ Attenborough tells how in 1963, with the help of Lord Mountbatten, he presented his case to Jawaharlal Nehru. Arranging funds for the 22 Million Dollar production was a daunting task mainly because National Film Development Council’s contribution to the total production was as little as of 6.5 Million Dollars. When funds ran out and work came to a standstill, Attenborough was forced to accept part time acting roles. The duration of air travel he had undertaken during the 20 years in the making of ‘Gandhi’ put together, should stretch over 3 most productive years of his life. 

The story of ‘Gandhi’ without doubt is also the story of more than half a century in the history of the unbridled, but alluring India. Attenborough has been scrupulous in admitting that “of course it’s a cheek, it’s an impudence to tell that kind of history in 3 hours”. Unlike David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia), Attenborough has not bothered to analyze his protagonist neither as a politician nor as a person. “I have no interest in being remembered as a creative film maker”, said Attenborough in an interview 29 years ago. That’s exactly the reason why he has been recognized more as a chronicler by choice rather than a deliberate story teller: from the point of a young barrister’s conflict with cultural prejudices in an apartheid foreign land to an act of history’s great ironies, the life-long crusader of nonviolence falling prey to an assassin’s bullet in a Delhi prayer ground bounded by flowerbeds in full bloom. In doing so, Attenborough has not only left out several historical figures of that time, but also decided not to dwell on some of the contentious traits in his lead character, like the fall out with his youngest son and testing of his vow of celibacy by sleeping unclothed  in the company of young women.

Perhaps by injecting drama and exaggeration Attenborough may have hoped to attract more viewership that actually resulted in his narration depart from facts to a certain extent. About his first rail road journey in South Africa, “He (the constable) took me by the hand and pushed me out of the first class compartment”, says Mahatma. In the movie Mahatma has been pushed so hard by the policeman that he fell flat on his face. The 3 baton blows Mahatma receives from a policeman in the scene where the burning

of his own and other Indians’ registration certificates take place is also unduly exaggerated, whereas Mahatma doesn’t make reference to any policeman in his own narration of the incident. Another example is the visit by the English missionary C.F. Andrews while Mahatma is shown to be in jail in Bihar in 1917. Mahatma, actually, was never in that jail, nor such a visit by the missionary had ever taken place. There are more deviations from what actually had happened on numerous occasions in the movie.

Mahatma’s trysts with reticence, supplication and abstinence ran deep in his spiritual wits out of which he drew his fortitude that served him navigate through unpathed waters. Especially when in times of self-doubt, he says, he used to wake up from sleep listening to an ‘inner voice’ that would steer him clear through heavy traffic and placate him back to the tranquil anger-free audacity before adversities. Despite common belief, it would also be unfair to judge Mahatma that he had disapproved of violence in its entirety. On the contrary he was quite resolute in drawing the line between cowardice and spirited use of nonviolence. He advocated the path of taking up arms for his country when it came to defending her honour rather than being a gutless witness succumbing to inglorious belligerence. Yet he also believed that nonviolence was infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness was more manly than punishment.

Leonardo Da Vinci is known to have had the curious habit of leaving hidden codes and messages for coming generations in his works of art.  Attenborough had no such concerns to deal with, for Mahatma’s life held no veiled crescendos beneath its exterior. Admittedly, Mahatma too, like anyone else, had the luxury of living only one life time, yet his footprints weigh down the scale of history in the same gravity in this millennium as it did in the previous.

[ This article appeared in a ‘Khaleej Times’ -published from Dubai- special report in August 2013.]

 

THE MACROECONOMIC theories conceived by no less mortals like Nobel laureates during the last three decades now appear like an act without audience in the theatre of the absurd. For the first time since 1917 the US is no longer in the famous-five club along with Britain, Canada, France and Germany with a contracted debt of $14.29 trillion equaling one hundred percent of its GDP. What seemingly was regarded as a balance sheet crisis has distended into an endurance expedition hitherto unknown in economic history. The gravity of disclosures is alarming to the extent that the US is borrowing forty cents per every dollar it spends. Considering that there was a time not too long ago when the prospect of the US defaulting on its debt pledge was unperceivable, the current situation is hugely disturbing especially to those whose currencies are pegged to the US dollar.