Manjrekar - Imperfect

SANJAY MANJREKAR

IMPERFECT

To my mother

CONTENTS

THE MOST THRILLING moment in my life is when a good movie is about to start, and I am in front of a screen in a dark room with a drink and popcorn in hand. Thats my bliss.

If my father had not been a former Test cricketer, and if I had not grown up in Dadar, where the only sport people played was cricket, I would not have become a cricketer.

Since the day I retired from cricket I have not been tempted, even once, to pick up a cricket bat and play a match. I realize now, seventeen years after quitting the game, that I played cricket because it served a purpose at the time and not really because I deeply loved the game. No amount of coaxing has got me to play a cricket match after my retirement, whether it is a benefit match or a veterans tournament or an overseas tour of retired or tired cricketers.

When I quit cricket I desperately started seeking out people who were not cricketers. They might have been related to cricket in some way, but they were not cricketers per se. I was easily impressed by seemingly knowledgeable people and surrounded myself with them, because I knew they would tell me things I didnt already know. By then I was starved for the knowledge of the world outside cricket because I had missed out on all this information. By the age of thirty-two, I was in some great hurry to catch up and get to know everything there was to know in the non-cricketing world.

Music and movies took up a lot of my post-retirement time. I have watched almost all BBC films on life, wildlife, nature, the solar system and the universe. When I watch movies, I look for ones that will educate me, show me things I havent known or experienced, make me feel new emotions. In this pursuit, I didnt realize when I slipped into the world of foreign language films. Foreign cinema is a whole new world that I get terribly excited about after all, its a trip into the unknown.

I have not read a single book on sport or a sportsmans autobiography. Such books hold no interest for me, perhaps because I feel they may not reveal anything new. For example, I have no idea whats happening in the world of tennis, or in the English Premier League. When people around me talk about football and tennis, despite being a former international sportsman, I just sit silently in one corner of the room. But ask me anything about Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Mehdi Hassan or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and we may be talking for hours.

Similarly, I consider film-makers nothing short of magicians or wizards. I have learnt a lot about life from movies. I mostly watch serious, true to life, drama; and many of them have taught me some important life lessons. A good movie for just Rs 500 is the greatest deal you can get in todays world. I never discourage my kids from watching a good film. They too have become movie buffs like me. My daughter Devika and I have passionate discussions on films we have both watched.

I must have watched most of the good Hollywood and European films. A lot of people around me share this passion. If you are a fan of films from anywhere around the world, you can be my friend. If you are a fan of Kishore Kumar, well, you can be my soulmate.

But let there be no misunderstanding. Cricket still holds a great interest for me, even if its only in a way any job does for a working professional. The game is important for my livelihood because of the profession I have chosen after my retirement. I will forever be grateful to the sport for helping me raise my family well and give my kids a good education. If it didnt help me in my work, I would easily skip watching an ongoing match and instead watch a Quentin Tarantino film again. If Id been born in a family of musicians or film-makers Id have grown up to be one of them maybe a good one at that because music and cinema are the loves that have stayed and will stay with me forever.

To those who think that I underachieved as a cricketer, I say this: For a guy who was basically not really that into sport, playing more than 100 international matches was not such a bad effort, was it? You perhaps think an unfulfilled career has made me grow cold towards cricket, maybe even resent it. I have asked myself this question, and Ive found the answer in the privacy of my farmhouse with only my family for company. When my son wants me to join him for a game of cricket or football, I look at him as if he has asked me to climb a mountain. I feel like saying, If you want my company, son, how about watching a film together?

I think I am a bit of a geek born into a cricketing family, in a cricket-loving place, who found cricket to be a convenient career path. I can leave emotion aside when I analyse cricket. Cricketing technique and statistics fascinate me. I enjoy spending time with statisticians on all productions of live cricket.

As a kid, I played cricket because it was fun, but more so because I saw my father as a cricketer and witnessed his fame. I saw how people would turn up and take his autographs. I also watched other cricketing stars Sunil Gavaskar, Gundappa Viswanath, Erapalli Prasanna and Rohan Kanhai turn up on occasion at our house in Dadar. I saw people mob them outside our house.

As a child I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be famous.

This book is about me, my cricket career, my life. My strengths and weaknesses, my successes and failures. Its about my experiences. I feel we have an obligation to the next generation to chronicle our lives. Every individual lives a uniquely different life. He does not need to be famous to share his life experiences. Life stories are always interesting. No one leads an uneventful life.

Having been a sportsman, I also want young aspiring sportsmen to learn from my career. Like a father said to his son: I made twenty mistakes in my life; youll make twenty new ones.

I HAD NO relationship with my father to speak of. The overpowering emotion that I felt towards him was fear. It is easy for me to say it now as a fifty-year-old father of two, but as a child, an adolescent and a young adult, I was terrified of my father. I have made peace with it for a long time now. Vijay Laxman Manjrekar, who played 53 Tests for India and notched 3,208 runs at an average of 39.12, was a troubled soul post retirement. A disturbed, frustrated and angry man is what his three children had as a father.

Yet, he would often be a profoundly wise man. In the few conversations that we had, he would tell me, Treat cricket as a game, not as your life. He obviously said this from his own life experiences. We, his family, could see that he had made cricket his life. He was not quite prepared for life outside cricket. Its sad that in this sport you can, at best, have a career at the top for ten to fifteen years, and even that career comes to an end in the prime of your normal life, in your mid-thirties. My father had no other skills; he struggled to find his place in the world after his playing days, and that included the cricketing world too.

He was a highly respected and famous cricketer. Life after cricket must have been tough for him. He now had to work nine-to-five in a public-sector company, but at heart he was an artist. It was like asking a lead guitarist to sit behind a desk and do a clerks job. He tried, but he wasnt cut out for it.

At one stage, he tried his hand at cricket coaching, but he didnt possess the tact required to handle young cricketers. A story goes that once former India opener Chetan Chauhan came to him for some advice. Sir, whats wrong with my batting? Chauhan asked. My father told him, There is nothing wrong with you, but something is wrong with the selectors: they picked you.