The Tiger roared, loud & clear

[1]

Rs 795

In many ways, Mansoor Ali Khan was a game-changer. To the manor born he may have been, that too with an impeccable cricket pedigree, who not only broke the mould as an individual — without compromising on his essential self — but also, in the process, gave Indian cricket the direction it has been following ever since.

For those of recent vintage, it may be difficult to imagine the way the game of cricket, and its exponents, looked at themselves before Pataudi, Pat or Tiger, as he was variously known, came along. Independence had come not very many years before Tiger made his debut in 1962 and the old ways of thinking were hard to break out of.
Barriers of region and language had erected themselves in the 30-odd years India had been a part of the Test cricket fraternity, and Indian dressing rooms were more often than not divided into bitterly suspicious camps. Till Pataudi came along.
In his inimitable, affable style, he systematically dismantled the barriers and effectively made the point that together the team represented India and not West or South or North zone, nor any particular state.
Later captains were to build on this foundation and subsequent generations of fans were fortunate to see the unity flower fully in the success of Kapil Dev and his Devils who laid the mighty West Indies low on a balmy summer afternoon at Lord’s just under 30 years ago to underline India’s arrival on the big stage. For the game-changer, it would have been a mightily satisfying moment indeed.
Millions of Indians have since been pulled even deeper into the game thanks to the feats of teams led by Mohammad Azharuddin, Sourav Ganguly and, lately, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, all of whom also had the colossally comfortable presence of a
certain Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar in their respective dressing rooms.
And all of them — the great Sunil Gavaskar included — in a sense, walked the road mapped out by Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi.
Pataudi is no longer amongst us, illness taking him away years too early, but his legacy is a vibrant one that thrives to date. Despite ending his India career in 1975, Tiger was closely involved in cricket’s most modern avatar, the Twenty20 format, and also helped pilot the path-breaking Indian Premier League (IPL) in its early years.
That the association did not end happily is another matter, but it serves to underline just how ready he was to move with the times.
So how does one look back at the life of one man who managed so much in 70 years? Two books released recently take very different routes — one is a kind of biography, and the other a compilation of writings on the man. One offers one man’s reminiscences — and opinions — while the other offers a much wider spread to pick out of, from team-mates, commentators and cricket writers to his daughters who remember the father
and not the public persona, however self-effacing he may have been.
Cricket, in fact, overshadowed Pataudi’s other accomplishments, some of which veteran sports writer Kishin R. Wadhwaney touches upon in The Nawab: Biography of the Legendary Cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi. There are, in some detail, tales of the family, its history, the manner in which young Mansoor had to cope with the sudden demise of his father Iftikhar on a polo field, to the evolution of the boy into the man he would become.
There are insights aplenty for those who today remember Tiger only in name, along with the occasional appearance in public — be they of a royal growing into manhood in the hurly-burly of a newly-liberated India, the intrigues that dogged him as a cricketer and captain, the fairy tale romance of the country’s brightest cine star of the time. All that and more adorns Wadhwaney’s book, though one wishes a diligent editor had been part of the effort of putting the book together so that the loose ends could have been tied up neatly.
Suresh Menon, on the other hand, opts to cull and compile a wide variety of thought and experience in Pataudi: Nawab of Cricket. Not for him the uni-dimensional approach — probably the wiser one given the range and spread of lives Mansoor Ali Khan touched as
a human being and as a cricketer.
So from a Winchester schoolmate in David Wooley to teammates Abbas Ali Baig, Farrokh Engineer and Bishan Singh Bedi to commentator N. Ram, press box legends John Woodcock Ray Robinson and Robin Marlar and cricketing greats Vijay Merchant, Ted Dexter and Ian Chappel — not to mention the recently-retired Rahul Dravid — it is all there is this slim volume of varied and enchanting commentary on the man who was and will always be remembered as the game-changer.
Sample this as a good example of why. Recalls Engineer, for years a teammate and friend, “The team looked up to Tiger not only because of his cricketing pedigree but because of the way he had overcome a serious handicap. Also, he was extremely fair, and led by example rather than by making speeches or thumping tables… Captaincy for him was always about man-management rather than tactics or strategy. This despite the fact that he was a fine thinker on the game.”