Forgotten Hero

There were quite a few things left undecided as the IPL came to a close. For instance, was the strategic time-out a disaster or a catastrophe, is Robin Uthappa a talentless buffoon or just plain retarded, is the KKR team universally popular or universally hated, and finally the toughest one of them all, who is the bigger moron, Rameez Raja, Pommie Mbangwa or that idiot in obnoxiously garish suits who was in the studio for the first half of the tournament? But one thing was certain - the IPL 2 took cricket commentary to never before seen depths of intolerability. In fact the commentary during IPL 2 was one of the reasons why some smart gentleman once remarked, “the mute button is one of the greatest inventions of mankind”. But there a few precious moments, during the nauseating dribble that was IPL 2 commentary, when cricket was cricket again, when even people like Yusuf Pathan were made to look like cricketers, rather than the cricketing equivalent of a construction worker whose only task is to smash a wall down with a sledgehammer, moments when Harsha Bhogle finally returned to cricket commentary after a terribly long hiatus.

When I look back at my life, I can lay the responsibility (or blame as some might call it) for my obsessive pursuit of sports (despite my complete ineptitude at playing any of them) squarely on the shoulders of two people - Harsha Bhogle and John Dykes. While one of them continues to be the face of football for Asian football fans, the other, who was once probably the second most recognizable name in Indian cricket, has slowly drifted in anonymity and has now been relegated to brief appearances on IPL broadcasts. In fact ever since the emergence of a plethora of sports channels in India all of whom are looking to make instant money with cricket, the cricket coverage has become splintered, and with each channel following the Set Max approach, of dumbing down as the only approach to make cricket more accessible, a true cricket enthusiast like, Harsha Bhogle, now seems to be superfluous to requirements. But enough of my rant on the state of cricket coverage in India, that’s a blog for a different day. Today’s blog is about a man who for over a decade made cricket come alive.

No other person I have seen has the same enthusiasm and passion for the game that Harsha demonstrated. And he spoke with a kind of sincerity that made you believe in him and the game, all this combined with an almost instinctive appreciation of the fine points of the game, made him one of the prime reasons why a generation of Indians were addicted to the game. In fact one of the reasons why we complain so much about the idiots we see in the commentary box today, is the fact that we have been spoilt by years of Bhogle’s presence, which more often than not compensated for the ignoramus sitting next to him. And watching the sport of cricket through the eyes of a person like Harsha, you cannot but gain a greater appreciation for the beauty of the sport. A marketing person from Set Max once told us that they bought in the likes of Mandira Bedi to describe the game because they wanted to simplify commentary. But the whole beauty of the sport is that sometimes someone needs to point out the artistry and magic of the game for it to really sink in. Sachin Tendulkar’s straight drive has become a part of cricketing folklore not just because of the beauty of the shot, but partly because of the way Harsha Bhogle described it. My fondest memories of cricket include the magnificent innings played by Sachin Tendulkar under severe stress at Chepauk in Chennai, in Pakistan’s return to India test in 1998, a match which India ultimately lost. And I can remember, almost as if it was yesterday the battle between Sachin and the Pakistani spinners on a minefield of a pitch. And every time the memory replays in my head, it always plays to the same familiar voice. Historical events owe their magnificence as much to the commentators as they do to the event itself. And in Harsha Bhogle, we have been privileged to have the finest commentator possible. I genuinely feel sad for the little kids of today, who will have to grow up to the sights and sounds of the IPL, which include the likes of Rameez Raja and Yusuf Pathan, particularly because we were privileged to grow up to those Sachin specials in the sandstorms of Sharjah and Harsha Bhogle’s description of them. Can you ever imagine the words ‘There goes Pathan and he hoiks its over mid-wicket for a DLF maximum’ becoming cricketing legend? And it wasn’t just during those great times that you remember that magical voice, even when Indian cricket went through the doldrums, in Harsha Bhogle you always had a calming influence, in the form of a voice which with unabated enthusiasm was always trying to highlight the beauty of the game. It’s funny how as cricket evolves, it has actually become a simpler sport, as a friend of mine pointed out to me the other day, T-20 has taken the complexity out of the sport and along with it the aesthetics also, when musclemen and innocuous off-spinners become match winners, you know that the space for sheer beauty in this game is increasingly becoming smaller. And it is in these times that I miss commentators like Harsha Bhogle even more. And as I write this, the future isn’t much brighter; the latest batch of cricket presenters includes former soap stars and reality contest winners, whose only claim to fame is their marketable personalities. Just as the evolution of cricket will deprive the future generations of classical cricketers, so too will they prevent the rise of enthusiastic young men, whose love for the game can infect you through a television screen. This post is a much a farewell to the future Harsha Bhogle’s and Gautam Bhimani’s as it is a tribute to them.

But let’s not lament the future just yet; with the Cricket World Cup in 2011 in India, not being telecast on SET, there might be hope yet. In the meanwhile a toast to the man who turned cricket commentary into an art form, the ultimate romantic of the game, who made me fall in love with the sport as well – a toast to Harsha Bhogle. And to the man, who in a speech in my college, said that he is going through the toughest phase of his professional career today, I wish him the best of luck.