Durani.
| Photo Credit: File photograph: N. Sridharan
My enduring reminiscence of Salim Durani isn’t the sixes he hit (though I noticed some of them) or the wickets he claimed (I noticed many of these too), however the method of his arrival at a press convention in New Delhi. We had been only a handful of journalists and we had needed to await a bit.
Durani walked into the room, waving smiling, trying round as if acknowledging the cheers of a crowd in a stadium. It was dramatic, and it advised he knew love and respect had been his due. He knew of the influence he made on any group from six to sixty thousand. This was past mere self-confidence or entitlement. This was a sharing of charisma, a doubling of pleasure. I’ve by no means seen a sportsman burst right into a room with such goodwill.
So it was with a heavy coronary heart that one examine his final days, spent alone and sans the glamour, the public love, the unstinted admiration of those that had come into contact with him nonetheless briefly. But Durani’s was a life effectively lived. He didn’t perceive moderation both in his cricket or his life, and sometimes paid for it.
Yet few cricketers (and he performed simply 29 Tests as India performed 65) impressed such an outpouring of grief from such a variety of personalities in several fields. From politicians (of totally different hues) to artistes they grew to become fan boys, united by their admiration for the man who performed and lived like no different.
Perhaps in that admiration lay the key to Durani (he signed his autographs with a single ‘r’, though there are two in most references). It wasn’t the cricket alone, though that was an necessary component. He performed key roles in two collection wins, in opposition to England at house in 1961-62, and the inaugural win in the West Indies a decade later. Durani had, above all, the variety of persona others aspired to — gifted, good-looking, assured, uncontainable, patently life-affirming, with the potential to do issues others couldn’t and with little obvious effort. Most males wish to imagine that they’ve one thing of Durani inside them, solely ready to be teased out!
If he had better self-discipline, he might need scored extra runs, taken extra wickets. But he wouldn’t have been Durani. He wouldn’t have just about grabbed the ball from his skipper Ajit Wadekar and proceeded to dismiss Garry Sobers and Clive Lloyd en path to a well-known win. He wouldn’t have hit 15 sixes in 29 Tests at a time when Indian batsmen believed taking part in in the air was a mortal sin (Farokh Engineer, typically known as ‘swashbuckling’, had two sixes in 46 Tests).
The nice off-spinner Erapalli Prasanna as soon as despatched me an image of the Fabulous Four — Bishan Bedi, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, Venkatraghavan and himself — with a observe saying, “Genius in the middle”. The genius was Salim Durani. And he lived with all the vulnerabilities of genius — inconsistency, occasional flashes of ordinariness, self-doubt and ‘unleadability’. Tiger Pataudi, who was his captain in 15 Tests, typically mentioned he regretted by no means having been in a position to get the finest out of Durani, though he made his solely Test century in the West Indies after Pataudi had despatched him in at No. 3, six locations above the order from the first innings.
As a younger boy in Bengaluru, I noticed him mastermind Central Zone’s triumph in the Duleep Trophy (in the days when the event meant one thing, and was only a rung under Test cricket). So sure had been the authorities that West would beat Central in the semifinal that they ready for a West vs. South last. But Durani helped beat each West (7/111 and 83) and South (9/87 and 83 n.o.). It was magical. Central Zone had been thus placed on the cricketing map.
Some of the most beloved cricketers to have performed the sport didn’t get the honour as a result of of their averages. Like the Australian Victor Trumper they introduced one thing to the sport that captured the creativeness. Durani captured a nation’s creativeness, and that’s an epitaph reserved just for the finest.
