Book Review: Triumph in Bombay

First, a confession: I do not watch cricket games any more, especially those that involve India. I find them insufferably tiresome. The raspy hype and hoopla that surround them are painfully grating. The sport does not give me the unalloyed joy that it once did.

But I still do find myself quite enjoying reading books about the game, especially those that dare to go beyond the confines of the playing arena, call a spade a spade, and invoke memories of the sport in its purest form, free of its obsessions with numbers and revenue figures.

Time was when cricket was much bigger than an individual’s 200th Test match or a national captain’s whopping earnings from product endorsements. Back then, such meaningless landmarks did not matter. What did was the pure pursuit of excellence on the world stage by the its greatest exponents. 

So does this book help me rise above the pain of seeing cricket being sullied by myopia, if only momentarily? Well, not quite to the extent that some other books about cricket World Cups, notably by Robert Winder and Mike Marqusee (both about the 1996 World Cup), might have, but it does contain many passages that serve the author’s avowed purpose of exploring and revealing “something about a continent in flux, a continent that could not be more different from fifteen years ago”.

Since both nomenclature and interpretation are of the essence, the use of ‘Bombay’ in the title of this book seems somewhat incongruous, and in more ways than one. Besides the fact that the city no longer officially bears that name, it is no more quite the place that it used to be for India cricket fans. The game has changed beyond recognition over the past decade and a half, and clinging to Bombay cannot conceal that fact.

But would Triumph in Mumbai have sounded quite as impactful as Triumph in Bombay does? In physical terms, the metropolis is still pretty much the same urban sprawl; the spirit of the place is probably no longer what it used to be back in the era when it was known as the hub of Indian cricket, especially when it came to producing high quality batsmen.

Similarly, cricket is still the name of the game, but it is no longer the gentleman’s game that it once was. The balance of power in world cricket has shifted to India, thanks to all the money that the sport generates this part of the world, and like so much else in this country, it has been reduced to a lucrative sport dominated by a self-serving oligarchy.

When the subcontinent hosted the World Cup in 1996, the author, Vaibhav Vats, was only ten and the game was in a completely different zone. Today, both the game and the World Cup are grossly overrated. India and the men who control cricket in this country have destroyed it systematically and reduced it to complete humbug.

But, mercifully, this book is not only about the game. It is a more a travelogue that records a young fan’s impressions of life on the road in the course of a six-week-long tournament that sees him register his presence in 12 of the 13 venues in three countries where the 2011 World Cup was played.

It is essentially a journalistic account that suffers a touch because its dispassionate tone, but many of the encounters that the author has during his travels do provide interesting insights into people, places and cultures. The nuggets of info from the periphery of the event that he digs out and shares are often delightful.

In Dhaka, Vats meets a professor who is also a member of the Communist Party of Bangladesh, who helps him place the nation’s history in some perspective. In Trincomalee, he meets an erstwhile LTTE commander’s young son who perceives the game as a means to forge a new identity for himself and speaks about his exploits in youth cricket. In Ahmedabad, he chats up a Muslim cabbie and toys with the idea of asking him what it is like living in Modi’s Gujarat and eventually thinks the better of it.

It is also in throwing light on some of the key personalities involved in the 2011 battle – his analyses primarily on press conference performances – that he scores quite a few points. While he points out that in the final days of the World Cup, Mahendra Singh Dhoni was probably finding the press conferences more difficult to handle than the games, he extols the “unambiguous pleasure” that Kumar Sangakkara delivered. His responses were “unfailingly crisp and measured”, writes Vats, adding that “this articulation is a gift in an age of banality”. The game could certainly do with more such rounded personalities.