In some earlier issues, I had worked out statistically to show why Ravindra Jadeja is India’s best all-rounder of all times. Any cricketer is considered to be an all-rounder if the batting average of the individual, when divided by the bowling average, gives a result of one or more. If Mithali Raj could be considered to be the Sachin Tendulkar of Indian cricket, it would be only proper to call Deepti Sharma as the Ravindra Jadeja of Indian cricket and perhaps a little more.

Born to Bhagwan Sharma and Sushila Sharma in Agra on 24 August 1997, Deepti’s initial inspiration for playing cricket came from her elder brother, Sumit, who was a local pace bowler. Like a few women cricketers in the current Indian cricket team, like Shefali Varma and Smriti Mandhana, Deepti started playing cricket along with the boys of her locality. In fact, when the teenager Deepti caught the eye of Hemlata Kala, a former Indian cricketer and then chairperson of BCCI’s selection committee for women, Kala thought that Deepti was a boy!

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The year 2008 brought about a big change in my life when I moved from the Indian Air Force to the corporate world. It was a planned move in my career, but something else happened to my lifestyle which I had never planned or anticipated. I had always been notorious for being an early-to-bed person and 10 p.m. had always been the latest cut-off time for my studies even during the most crucial examination times.

The only exception was the period of study at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, where the curriculum and mode of imparting knowledge have to be experienced to be believed; it just does not permit any physical or mental laxity, laziness or luxury. Needless to add, the professors are exceptional as are the case studies that one has to prepare by burning the midnight oil.

Out from the clutches of IIMA, as the General Manager of Forbes & Company Limited, I had every opportunity to revert to my old habits, which they say die hard, but one thing ensured that it was not to be: the start of the Indian Premier League. With the exception of a few matches, almost all matches continued to be decided in the last two overs of the match and starting at 8 p.m. it was not unusual for most of the matches going beyond 11.15 p.m.

Thanks to the organising skill of Lalit Modi, the IPL not only impacted my personal lifestyle but converted not only cricket but the whole sports world into a huge commercial venture which before 2008 was unforeseeable by any stretch of the imagination. Undoubtedly, Indian cricket and Indian cricketers have been the biggest gainers and the gain has not been limited to just commercial gains.

Foreign players and Boards that at one time did not refrain from misbehaving with their Indian counterparts are now judicious enough not to annoy their adversaries lest they are boycotted from participating in cricket’s most lucrative competition. At the same time, the Board of Control for Cricket in India now has a big reservoir to exhume cricketing talent in this country.

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“Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned”, goes an age-old English proverb, but time and again this scorn has proved to be of great advantage to our country. Tulsidas is said to have been chastised by his wife all because of his infatuation for his wife, and the ridiculed lover went on to compose the Ram Charit Manas which today governs the life of more than a billion people around the world. Kicked out of the home by his wife Vidyotama for his stupidity and ignorance, Kalidas went on to become the greatest dramatist and writer that India has ever produced.

The story of Mohammed Shami has a close resemblance to that of Tulsidas and Kalidas. Accused by his wife of domestic violence to the extent of him having come close to imprisonment, Shami seems to have come back with a vengeance, and the expression of his anger seems to make the opposition batsmen suffer on the cricket field, much to the delight of all Indian cricket fans.

Born to a farmer’s family on 3 September 1990 in a village in the Uttar Pradesh district of Amroha, Shami’s career has been one of uncertainties and injuries. Paradoxically, it has been injuries to his teammates that have created the vent for Mohammed Shami to come up and prove his worth. In 2012, an injury to one of his teammates created an opportunity for Shami to play for the East Zone in the Duleep Trophy, and with an eight wicket haul, he was instrumental in his team winning the Duleep Trophy.

Having been made to sit out for four matches in the 2023 ICC ODI World Cup despite an impressive performance against the Australians just before that, an injury to Hardik Pandya left the selectors with no alternative but to rework the Indian team’s composition, and in came Shami with a big bang.

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Believe it or not, sometimes a single mosquito can change the fate not only of an individual but that of an entire nation. Cricket buffs will be quick to understand what I want to drive home. Yes, India’s current ace batter, Shubman Gill, was not available for India’s inaugural match against Australia in this year’s One Day International World Cup played at Chennai, and all because of suffering from fever due to dengue, an ailment caused by an infected mosquito bite that leads to a drop in the blood platelets in the human body.

It will not be prudent to delve into further details of the dangers of the disease as this is not a medical write-up. Still, it would be sufficient to say that this year several deaths in the country have occurred due to this disease of dengue, such can be the most disastrous effects of this problem. Shubman Gill’s absence has not only depleted the strength of India’s batting but has also brought a rude interruption to the career of an individual who is currently at the prime of his career. To justify the latter statement, one has only to state that during this calendar year, with 1231 runs, Shubman to date has been the highest accumulator of runs in ODIs.

This tall and lanky cricketer has suddenly pushed names like Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli into the background due to his added fast reflexes and has become an asset while fielding in the slips.

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The colour of India’s white ball cricket has undergone a dramatic turn over the last few months. For the Indian fans, Virat Kohli or Rohit Sharma is no longer the ultimate batting hero though quite late. A new name has suddenly come up in contention as India’s saviour — Surya Kumar Ashok Yadav. Known popularly as Surya Kumar Yadav, cricket commentators have found the most suitable acronym to this unique batting talent’s name — SKY.

The coming of SKY has lent an unprecedented strength to India’s middle order in white ball cricket, especially in the shorter versions of the game. Surya Kumar has a rather modest batting average above thirty in One Day Internationals but it is his scoring rate of above 100 which makes him an invaluable asset in the middle order which is coupled with his reliable fielding. However, it is in the T20 Internationals that Surya Kumar’s spoils are remarkable and almost unbelievable.

In the T20I he averages 44.0 but what is more remarkable is his strike rate of above 180. To give an idea of what it implies is that if an entire team bats at the same rate it would be scoring 216 runs at an average each time and if a few extra runs are added it would be almost a winning total of around 225 each time.

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Prithvi Shaw, India’s newest teenage sensation, turned 19 last month. Having already made a Test century on his debut, he is currently preparing himself for the upcoming Australia tour which begins in December and which will be his toughest yet as a batsman. The young right-hander rose to prominence when, as a 14-year-old, he smashed 546 of 330 balls including 85 fours and five sixes in the Harris Shield, Mumbai in 2013, breaking the record for the highest score in school cricket.

It was January 1966 when one morning the newspaper headline ran thus, “A bolt from the blue — Shastri dies in Tashkent”; India had lost its second Prime Minister who was out in the then USSR to sign a peace agreement with Pakistan after the 1965 operations. The Indian political leadership seemed to have been left in a state of disarray and confusion. The immediate question that cropped up was that after Nehru it was Shastri but who after Shastri?

However, the regime of Indira Gandhi that followed that of Lal Bahadur Shastri was one of India’s nascent emergence as a world power and one of national and international political guile to which the world was introduced, perhaps, for the first time.

The present Indian cricket scenario has been quite similar to the Indian political scenario of the 1960s. For two decades Indian spectators at the cricket field had been chanting one name with the greatest of gusto and enthusiasm, that of Sachin Tendulkar. His retirement left cricket fans wondering as to whether they would ever, in their lifetime, see a batsman so versatile and entertaining. The wait was short-lived as the arrival of Virat Kohli at the centrestage has almost pushed the Tendulkar era into oblivion. At the same time one now wonders whether one has seen in Virat Kohli the ultimate batting talent of cricket. However, if Virat himself is to be believed, coming up on the horizon is a new star to whom Virat extended the ultimate accolade when he said, “When we were of his age, we did not possess even one tenth the talent.” The new rising star is none other than a teenager from Mumbai named Prithvi Shaw.

This October, Prithvi walked into the men’s international world with credentials that definitely called for respect but the manner in which he announced his arrival was something that every cricket fan had expected in the least. I remember our school headmaster giving us live examples when the matter was about conveying the essence of certain idioms. Prithvi Shaw’s 90 minute debut century would go well to drive home the meaning of the idiom, “To take the bull by the horn.” In the process of reaching his three-figure-innings at Rajkot, not only did Prithvi become the second youngest Indian cricketer to score a century but also the youngest-ever Indian cricketer to score a century on debut. More amazing was the manner in which he bullied the pace bullies of the West Indies and sent them on a leather hunt.

Some self-styled critics have tried to rob the magnitude of Shaw’s innings by stating that he was fortunate to have made his debut against the West Indies; a poor criticism from those who have a rather lopsided view about the entire game. In its present state the current West Indian team is not even a shade of their once-world-championship might but the decline has been more as a consequence of their inept batting rather than any gross dissemination of their bowling talent; even today the West Indian bowling, with some of its bowlers sending down deliveries at around 90 miles per hour, requires some serious batting talent to deal with the perpetual volley of deliveries.

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GP CAPT ACHCHYUT KUMAR

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]abh Spresam Deeptum or ‘Touch the sky with glory’, so runs the motto of the Indian Air Force and so for one born into an Air Force family with aircraft flying all around since her childhood days, the desire to rise up to the skies, even if not in an aircraft, must have always been there. Such is the story of the world’s highest ranked One Day International batswoman, Padma Shri Mithali Dorai Raj.

In a country where women’s cricket suffers patronage, to be able to rise as the best in the world is nothing short of a miracle. In the past, ladies like Shanta Rangaswamy and Diana Edulji did pave the way for a better future for women’s cricket in India and Anjum Chopra did continue the impetus but modern day women cricketers like Mithali Raj and Jhulam Nishit Goswami have taken Indian women’s cricket to an entirely different level; to be ranked as the best in the world in a game where the best sportswomen seem to be coming from Australia and England, one has to be really good. Have no doubt about the Australian and English strength since among the top ten leading ODI scorers, while three are British there are five Australians.

Born to an Air Warrior of the Indian Air Force, Dorai Raj and Leela Raj, at Jodhpur on 3 December 1982, Mithali took to cricket at the very young age of just ten years. The cricket prodigy needed just seven years to find her way into the Indian ODI squad, making her sensational debut against Ireland, at Milton Keynes, on 26 June 1999. Not to be cowed down by the big occasion, the teenager went on to score an unbeaten 114 runs to announce to the world the coming of a new cricket star. While the 114 remains Mithali’s highest ODI score till date, what is worth noting is that she has remained unbeaten on all the five occasions that she has scored an ODI hundred.

With a teenage appearance on the international scene, a batting average of over 50 in both, Tests as well as ODIs and an international career extending as long as 18 years, Mithali Raj has been rightly termed as the ‘Tendulkar of Women’s Cricket’. Mithali has been a part of the Indian team in the Women’s Cricket World Cup in 2000, 2005, 2009, 2013 and if all goes well will be making her fifth appearance this year; a unique achievement in world cricket and a superhuman achievement in the Indian context.

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