A bumpy road ahead for Manoj and India

FOR INDIA, `Asia' was a cup full to the brim even before the Dhaka `trial by media in the middle' got going. What else did you expect in the conspiracy of circumstances that prevailed but the knockout punch's being first delivered by Sri Lanka - for all Pakistan to be provided with just the opportunity it sought to third- eye witness India's countdown and countout? Did you see Rahul Dravid's countenance each time he came out to bat in this Asia Cup? Tense as tense could be he looked - not one muscle in his face relaxing even once. This is what those hapless happenings outside the game had done to one deadly serious in his approach to the game. In such a setting, we must be grateful that Dravid stayed put to make 24 vs Sri Lanka and 26 vs Pakistan. As Rahul so agonised alongside other writhing Indian performers, how many of you noticed that Ajay Jadeja had come to be displaced, by Dravid, as Sourav Ganguly's deputy for the Asia Cup?

`Kunwar Ajay' - when the game was not worth the candle he had burnt at both ends - at least saved face (after that tamely nibbling 8 vs Sri Lanka) by hitting 93 vs Pakistan. This was Ajay's rearguardian way of venturing to get out of the `Jadejam' in which he had landed himself. It is amazing how public opinion could reverse-swing in your favour when the 93 you notch are runs made against Pakistan. Whether such momentary forgiving is forgetting only time can tell. The Indian batting challenge in this `Asian' began and ended with Sachin. On paper, it was Abdur Razzaq (8-0-28- 4) who demolished India. Metaphorically, however, it was Manoj Prabhakar `bowling' all over again - this time against his own India - who sliced through our batting. Where Hansie Cronje blamed Satan for his errant behaviour, Manoj emerged as a `Prabhakarmayogi' from it all.

It is a mock mantle Manoj Prabhakar is just not going to be able to sustain. It is not going to be long before Prabhakar realises that what he has won is notoriety rather than a name. It is as this `man of the moment' progressively gets to balance such notoriety with the fame this great game brought him that Prabhakar will discern that he has cut Kapil Dev's nose to spite Manoj's face. Prabhakar will also make the shattering discovery that wisdom coming in hindsight is going to be valueless in rebuilding his cricketing image. ``Is hamaam mein hum sub nange hain!'' - ``It is a bath (exposed to public view) in which we have all stripped ourselves!'' Prabhakar is on record as saying (on Saturday, June 3, 2000). The style of expose Manoj carried out, I say, is nothing but media striptease. In this dizzying instant, Manoj Prabhakar might feel vindicated by the printed world's hailing his `videotapestry' as ``journalism at its best''. Yet it is only a matter of time, and tide, before Prabhakar divines that the very media that used him has moved on, losing its spot use for him.

It is in that enlightening moment (coming too late) that Prabhakar will find himself all alone in the cricket world. In going so clandestinely public, Manoj noted that he had perhaps lost his friends in the cricketing world forever. He will, sooner than he thinks, be wondering whether the game he played so hard for India was worth destroying the secret way he carried out the act. Demythifying a legend like Kapil Dev might or might not have been justified. But, in destroying a giant, you also destroy yourself a bit - in the long run. Prabhakar had a pretty long run for his polite pace. That long run (now employed to win heady fame) is going to leave Manoj with plenty of scope to do a rethink in what remains of his cricketing life and times. It might, right now, look as if Indian cricket did catch a Tartar in Prabhakar. Yet this is a game in which you live and learn, Manoj. And, as you live to absorb how narrowly exploitative they were in harnessing your volatile temperament to their dubious cause, you will learn, Manoj, that you never fight the Establishment and really win.

Lala Amarnath was a more mercurial adversary than Manoj Prabhakar. But even Lala could sustain his anti-Establishment stance, at the BCCI wicket, only up to a point. In the end, Lala Amarnath had to go back to the same Cricket Board - to the same Raj Singh Dungarpur who was supposed to have `done in' his son Mohinder - to get hold of that much- needed cash going with the C.K. Nayudu award. Somewhere in the Manoj- videotaped transcript that was put out by a press hungry for the kill, I seem to remember reading that the Union Sports Ministry asked Prabhakar to go back to the BCCI, ``as an autonomous body'', for his blocked benefit- fund money! So, just now, Manoj might think he has pipped Kapil Dev - and with him all others who matter - at the post. But as he runs from pillar to post in due course, Manoj will discover that there really is no justice in the world. If fame is fleeting, a name `spot' made is even more of a mirage. It will not be long before Manoj Prabhakar finds out that there is no way out at the end of the bumpy road on which he has, sadly unthinkingly, set Indian cricket.

``Oh, but by then Manoj will have made his pile!'' it could be argued. Such a line of argument is not just specious rationalisation, it is an expedient oversimplification of the issue. The issue is going to get more and more complicated, as Manoj goes along with the CBI. And, as Manoj thus finds himself inexorably drawn into endless legal quibble, the face- off is sure to have `Tehelkar' Prabhakar introspecting as never before. For the only one to have endorsed the gravamen of Manoj's charge (vis-a-vis Kapil Dev) is Ravi Shastri. I hate to bring this up when Ravi Shastri -virtually leading the TWI team in the absence, early on, of STAR Sports' Sunil Gavaskar and Ramiz Raja - did such a commendable job of bridging the credibility gap between Manoj Prabhakar's bat and Kapil Dev's pad. Here, Harsha Bhogle deserves kudos for `a way with words' through which he created the atmosphere vital for Ravi Shastri to carry tele-conviction from day one. Taming Aamir Sohail meant taming one who did not exactly speak Shakespearian English! In the circumstances, it was Ravi Shastri and Harsha Bhogle who `carried the can', so to speak. Never was the telecommentary scene more forbidding. That Harsha and Ravi came through it with credit - without miniskirting the match-fix issue - is something that redounds to their eternal credit.

That is why it distresses me to query whether Ravi Shastri acted quite like the professional commentator he is in joining public issue on the Manoj-Kapil rip-off. At the point where Ravi `seconded' Manoj's caveat against Kapil, there was no way of knowing whether Kapil would continue to be India's supercoach during the Asia Cup at Dhaka. Maybe Ravi Shastri calculated that the odds, in the betting tangle, were against Kapil's staying in BCCI office. But any such assumption was surely premature. It will be contended that what Ravi Shastri had to say on the Manoj- Kapil wrangle was a matter of his personal conviction. And that Ravi had the courage of his convictions.

Ravi had and he hadn't, seeing that Shastri knew he was going to be an Asia Cup telecaster who, as the Master of Ceremonies at the prize- giving function, could conceivably have been called upon to interview Kapil Dev. And, in acting the way he did, did not Ravi foreclose all possibility of Kapil Dev's agreeing to be interviewed by `emcee' Shastri? That Kapil predictably maintained a low profile during this Asia Cup, that Sourav Ganguly and co. obliged Ravi by moving out of the tournament at the earliest opportunity, is another pair of cricketing shoes altogether. What if India had not lost out so swiftly, making it to the final somehow? In that eventuality, Ravi Shastri would have had no go but to stay out of the telepicture into which Kapil Dev could have pitchforked himself. A possible `development' Ravi should have envisioned as a telecaster.

The point I am raising is a basic one. It is whether any commentator should put himself in an invidious position by which he finds that he just cannot interact with the coach of one of the leading teams in a tournament so prestigious as the Asia Cup. In the charged milieu in which India found itself playing Sri Lanka and Pakistan, it is a wonder that we even put up the effort we did at Dhaka. Sachin Tendulkar looked untouched by it all and that is a happy Brian Lara-confronting augury. Yet my professional point about Ravi Shastri's perceivably putting himself out of interviewing bounds, where Kapil Dev was concerned, remains. Remain Kapil Dev might or might not on the TV scene. Looking to the way India lost at Dhaka, Mohammed Azharuddin, too, could now come to be viewed as `running out of batting ideas' vs Sri Lanka; and then being `caught in a turn of the wrist' of his own timorous making vs Pakistan. Azhar, after those scores of 8 vs Sri Lanka and 1 vs Pakistan, could have virtually eased himself out of this tortured Indian team - for V.V.S. Laxman to recapture, in it, his legitimate middle-order slot. As for Nayan Mongia, he was but a mechanical replacement for Saba Karim, who is sure to be back in contention, given his `shoe-button eye for detail'!

The only problem child for the selectors now, therefore, is Ajay Jadeja. Do they, or do they not, give `playboy' Jadeja the fringe benefit of the doubt? Or do they make a clean break with the past in a setting in which our big three, Sourav, Sachin and Rahul, have emerged unscathed from it all? All I would say is that here is a rare opening for a revamp - no one who is viewed to be a potential villain to be retained in the Indian eleven, now or ever!

RAJU BHARATAN

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