 Ram Guha wows Book Club audience
Ramachandra Guha is a self-confessed partisan of Karnataka cricket. At a recent book release function under the auspices of the Madras
Book Club, he drank plenty of water as he usually does at his lectures and excelled himself at dramatic abhinaya and high volume articulation to have his spellbound audience eating out of his hand. The book under discussion, ‘The States of Indian Cricket’, is an updated rehash of two very successful earlier compilations, ‘Wickets in the East’, and ‘Spin and Other Turns’.
Guha spoke as entertainingly as ever, provocatively at times, but never once faltering for words. He gave a detailed account of how, a Tamil by ancestry, north Indian by residence in the years of childhood and adolescence, and Bangalorean in his grown years, he chose at age eight to adopt Karnataka as his home state for cricket watching purposes. He is not ashamed to describe himself as a chauvinist and is an unabashed admirer of the heroes of Karnataka cricket, starting from Prasanna-Chandrasekhar and G R Viswanath, down to today’s Rahul Dravid and Anil
Kumble.
Chauvinist or not, Ram Guha certainly picked a winner when he chose to support Karnataka. His accounts of that state’s path-breaking victories over Bombay in the Ranji Trophy back in the ‘70s and later triumphs in the ‘90s were stuff of which sporting fables are made. In conversation with the author later, quite a few people in the audience agreed that Karnataka’s cricketers were not only good cricketers, but invariably decent human beings.
That Ram Guha is not a great admirer of Tamil Nadu cricket was revealed by some of his utterances. It is hard not to agree with the view held by many non-Tamils (and presumably by Guha) that for all their talent, Tamil Nadu’s cricketers have underachieved through history. An exception to the rule was the hard working S Venkataraghavan whom Guha admires for his brilliant fielding, gutsy batting and great attitude as a bowler, but “he was simply not as good a bowler as
Prasanna.”
Guha also touched upon his pet theory on the special leanings of Iyers and Iyengars towards certain aspects of cricket such as spin bowling, and paid tributes to the pioneering spirit of the Buchi Babu clan and Chennai cricket’s first family - A G Ram Singh and his sons.
I am a great fan of Ramachandra Guha the speaker, but for once his effort did not rise above the amusing to the heights of inspired oratory he has scaled often in the past. The book is a very interesting read, but a few factual errors have, disappointingly, survived from the first edition. (Example: Venkataraghavan is described as an alumnus of the Madras Institute of Technology, while he actually graduated from Guindy Engineering College).
V Ramnarayan
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