Our secular institution

All that you can’t leave behind: why we can never do without cricket
Soumya Bhattacharya
Penguin, 2009,
pp 129, Rs 199

Hockey continues to be our national sport (yes, from time to time, we need to keep reminding ourselves) and disciplines such as tennis and more recently badminton have captured the imagination of Indian sports lovers. But nothing quite excites and drives us like cricket does. Everyone has an opinion, and the beauty is that there is no such thing as a correct opinion or a wrong one. Yes, statistics throw up cold numbers and therefore leave little room for debate, but that is certainly not the case when it comes to opinion.
Not everyone who is passionate to the extent of being obsessive about cricket, however, gets a platform to express himself. Most of us have to make do with discussions with friends, which begin pleasantly enough and soon become animated before mushrooming into full-blown and heated arguments because each man has his opinion, and is completely convinced that he is correct. Time after time.

Then, we have people like Soumya Bhattacharya, tied to cricket through a special bond that was the extraordinary World Cup triumph in 1983. Bhattacharya is fortunate in that he is in a position where he can share his views with millions of people. Fortune, however, has had very little role to play in the manner in which he has communicated with fellow cricket-lovers through All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

This labour of love isn’t overpowering in that it doesn’t beat you into accepting the author’s point of view as being the only one worth consideration. If anything, All That You... is a personal account of a fascinating relationship that began with Kapil Devils conquering the world, and that hasn’t suffered because of the passage of time or the escalation of responsibilities.

Given that he is the Resident Editor of The Hindustan Times in Mumbai, Bhattacharya doesn’t need a book to influence opinions, which in any case doesn’t seem to be his motive. Right at the beginning, though, he debunks the popular myth that cricket in India is a religion.

“Religion led to the bloodbath that accompanied the birth pangs of the two nation states of India and Pakistan. Religion has scarred India more deeply than anything else,” he writes. “Cricket is our anti-religion, our most precious, deeply secular institution. ...Cricket is the only thing that unites a country as diverse and as contradiction-fraught as India.” How’s that for a simple truth, put quite simply?!

This isn’t a chronology of events, nor merely a faithful chronicling of epochal moments in Indian cricketing history. As it should be, this is a freewheeling and highly involved, personalised, account of the highs and lows of Indian cricket over the last 25 years or so. Its USP is the wonderful mix of the personal and the detached, raw emotion and cold statistics complementing each other and playing their parts in the pretty picture painted with such élan by the author.

At once the sentimental fan and the astute story-teller, Bhattacharya has weaved a wonderful story. India vs Australia is his favourite theme, and his tributes to the Fab Five of contemporary Indian cricket — Tendulkar, Kumble, Dravid, Laxman and, of course, ‘Dada’ — make for compelling reading as more than occasionally, your head starts nodding sub-consciously in agreement.

All that You Can’t Leave Behind doesn’t necessarily tell you what you didn’t know. What it does is allow you to look at what you do know in a different, and fairly resplendent, light.
R Kaushik