Spinning a yarn of spinners in Fortune Turners

By Rahul Banerji

A Sunday evening gathering at the Civil Services Officers Institute in Delhi turned out to be a heady mish-mash of nostalgia, reunions, an entertaining yarn or three, and a few sobering home truths.

The occasion was the launch of a book commemorating the famed ‘spin quartet’ of Indian cricket with one of the Fab Four in attendance and when Bishan Singh Bedi is on song, a cocktail of wisdom and entertainment can never be too far away.

Add a pungent Kapil Dev to the mix and one is guaranteed some solid northern Indian-flavoured fun pretty much all way, leavened by good doses of earthy insight.

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But first, a little bit about the reason for the occasion. Fortune Turners: The Quartet that Spun India to Glory, penned by Aditya Bhushan and Sachin Bajaj, seeks to recapture an era that began the change in India’s cricketing fortunes through four of its key protagonists. How far we have come since, is self evident.

In the Sixties and Seventies, Erapalli Prasanna, Bishan Bedi, Bhagwat Chandrashekhar and Srinivas Venkatraghavan ruled the roost. India’s bowling was defined by their feats. The four played in only one Test together, but as a unit left the game with a combined haul of 853 Test wickets from 231 matches.

Occasionally, a yarn can be more than the sum of its parts. Thus, the bald figures, Bedi with 266 wickets from 67 Tests, Chandra with 242 from 58, Prasanna (189 from 49 games), and Venkat (156 from 57) is one part of the atory.

What the statistics will never recapture is the magic of the years that stretched between 1962 and 1978. Simply put, the four ruled the 22 yards of the cricket pitch, each with his unique ability that under captains like Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi and Ajit Wadekar, became a fearsome weapon to wield.

It was to commemorate those golden years and their key protagonists that a section of Delhi’s sporting elite was in attendance.

From the world of cricket, India stumper Surinder Khanna turned up to be with his first skipper, Bedi, plus first class stalwarts like Hari Gidwani and Venkat Sunderam (now an occasional golfing partner), besides hockey legends Aslam Sher Khan and Zafar Iqbal (another fellow-golfer).

In splits

Thereafter it was the banter between Bedi and Kapil that had the audience in splits, with the latter taking a dig at the spin legend’s “fitness” and how he used to try and avoid catching his captain’s eye on the 1978 tour of Pakistan, where he was the junior-most and most frequent target of Bedi’s homilies and “advice:.

“I used to actually sit behind one of the pillars far away from the door at the breakfast buffet to that Paaji would not see me and start off all over again,” Kapil recalled, smiling. “It was strange though, because four years later, I was captain of India.”

Bedi had high words of praise for Kapil Dev. “If there is one cricketer who helped change the game in India, it is him. He brought in a culture of hard work and fitness that had rarely been seen before.

“I would also give a great deal of credit to my former captain Nawab Pataudi, who created the feeling in the India team that we can actually win Test matches, rather than just turn up to play. And he led by example.”

Romance of spin

As the jokes, yarns and anecdotes flowed, it evoked what the book’s author, Aditya Bhushan had referred to in his address, the romance of it all. Four unlikely, dissimilar individuals united by a hunger to do well for their team by winning matches for India.

The evening was moderated by my long-time partner in crime from our cricketnext.com and espnstar.com days, G. Rajaraman, now a media personality in his own right, who steered the post-release discussion deftly.

Joining us was another ex-cricketnext colleague and former Cricket Club of India batsman, Hemant Kenkre.

Co-author Sachin Bajaj, who runs the Global School of Cricket, is also a long-time CCI figure while Bhushan’s first book was a biography of India’s first Test captain, Col C.K. Nayudu, A Colonel Destined to Lead.

Also read: Two winners and no losers on London’s sporting Super Sunday