It was the summer of 2009, and the Cathedral High School ground in upmarket Bengaluru was buzzing with young cricketers in sparkling whites. The occasion was the launch of EAS Prasanna's spin academy, which was inaugurated by his friend and team-mate B S Chandrasekhar.
A few minutes before the formalities of the launch were to begin, Prasanna was interacting with curious parents and their eager children. The usual Prasanna humour had some in thrall while a few others were nervous wrecks, unable to grasp his jokes delivered in characteristic deadpan fashion. Suddenly, Prasanna picked a boy and took him to the 'nets'. He directed the boy to mark a spot just outside the off-stump, asked him to stand on the other side of the net and watch the ball closely. With hardly any run-up, Prasanna bowled six deliveries and then asked the boy, "Where did they land?" The mesmerised kid said, "Sir, all inside the circle."
Prasanna, 69 then, had just given a glimpse of why he is held in such admiration and awe by his mates and rivals alike. Those impeccable lengths that he maintained made him the bowler he was. That's why you could see him, at that age, land ball after ball on the same spot with the precision of the engineer that he studied to become.
Like a typical middle-class South Indian parent, Prasanna's father wanted his son to put studies ahead of cricket. He apparently didn't budge even when Prasanna was selected for the 1962 tour of West Indies. Only at the intervention (at the behest of doyen of Karnataka cricket, M Chinnaswamy) of a person of the stature of the Maharaja of Mysore, Jaya Chamarajendra Wodeyar Bahadur, did he agree to allow his son to travel. But it was subject to the condition that Prasanna would complete his engineering course.
Prasanna did so at the NIE, Mysore, to fulfill the wish of his father who had passed away by then, but lost out five precious years in the process. By the time Prasanna returned to the Indian side against West Indies in 1967, the other three members of the famous spin quartet -- Bishan Bedi, Chandrasekhar and S Venkataraghavan -- had all made their India debuts. In fact, Prasanna had the company of Bedi and Chandrasekhar in his return Test. And what trail-blazers the quartet turned out to be!