THE ORIGINAL GILCHRIST

Turbanator with a Difference

By V Ramnarayan

In the 1950s and sixties, the Board of Control for Cricket in India made quite a few attempts to produce fast bowlers in the country and give our batsmen first hand experience of facing up to genuine pace in domestic cricket. The Alan Moss coaching camp for fast bowlers was one such effort. A more ambitious project was to import four West Indies fast bowlers for the duration of a season, conduct coaching camps for aspiring pacemen in four different parts of the country and have the coaches play for states and zones in the domestic circuit. The four coaches were Roy Gilchrist, Charlie Stayers, Chester Watson and Lester King.

Gilchrist was probably the fastest bowler in the world then, of mercurial temperament, and capable of unleashing illegal deliveries including some off a bent arm, even beamers, at batsmen who annoyed him by playing and missing, or worse still, hooking and pulling. Assigned to Madras on his coaching stint, he briefly threatened to transform the laid back, languorous version of the game practised in the city into a thrilling blood sport. His wards at Chepauk were daily subjected to a rigorous drill of physical training and fielding practice, as well as a liberal dose of earthy cricketing wisdom delivered in an accent barely fathomable to the boys whose English was shaky to begin with. When one of them, however, tied himself into knots when told to hold his ankle and kiss his knee, Gilchrist showed rare empathy while explaining, ‘From today, this will be your knee, and that your ankle.’ The fast bowlers at the camp naturally needed batsmen to bowl to. The thrill of getting some free ‘gaaji’ soon dissipated as the coach frequently decided to bowl at a fair pace off an abridged run-up to demonstrate some finer points. Most of the guest batsmen knew better than to play attacking shots off Gilchrist, but one of them, Benjamin by name, was a carefree soul who imagined he could play in his normal uninhibited style.  A couple of crisp drives he played invited the inevitable bouncer from Gilly, albeit off his shorter run-up, which promptly hooked with some authority. This was a near fatal mistake on Benjamin’s part, as the next couple of bouncers, delivered off the coach’s full run-up, narrowly missed decapitating him.

Though I never watched the camp, I received a daily update from my three fast bowler-uncles, the brothers Sundaram, Venkatachalam and Viswanathan who happened to be Gilchrist’s favourite trainees. The tough regimen meant a few dropouts midway through the course. Medium pacer Inder Mohan was one of them. After playing truant for more than a week, Inder was watching a match at the Govt. Arts College on Mount Road, leaning over a low compound wall, when he saw Gilchrist doing the same a few yards away from him. What is worse, Gilchrist caught sight of the young man, and walked towards him, intendingto make solicitous inquiries about his health. Imagining the worst, Inder started edging away, but Gilchrist followed him, determined to ascertain when he would be able to resume training. Soon, Inder Mohan broke into a trot and then started sprinting, with Gilchrist in hot pursuit, to the amazement of a somnolent Sunday afternoon Mount Road crowd.

Almost a decade later, I played for Rajasthan Club, Calcutta, under the captaincy of another colourful character. Swaranjit Singh, a former Cambridge Blue, was a quality left hand batsman and swing bowler known for his confident demeanour on and off the field. He had the rare distinction of driving Gilchrist for four and following it up with the cheeky if indiscreet query: "How do you like that shot, Mr Gilchrist?" The beamer that followed not only sent Swaranjit's turban into orbit, it also meant the end of Gilchrist's career. The incident occurred during a match between West Indies and a zonal side, at the end of which  Gilchrist was sent back to the Caribbean on disciplinary grounds. In the years that followed, the fast bowler's mental health went steadily south, leading to a tragic end..        

LBW AND OTHER STORIES

Cricket: Watched by umpires and support staff

By V Ramnarayan

Two thought-provoking ideas have recently emerged on the way forward for cricket. The first is the proposal to stage international contests before empty stadiums in order to prevent health risks to players and spectators. The second is the revolutionary suggestion that the lbw law be modified to allow dismissals off deliveries going on to hit the stumps no matter where they are pitched.

The first of these, a result of the Covid 19 pandemic, presents an opportunity to focus on domestic cricket and showcase the best of our talent. Let me explain. Cricketers below the international level are already used to playing in the absence of spectators. You only have to walk into any Ranji Trophy or Duleep Trophy match to realise this fact. List A and T20 matches at the domestic level do not fare much better.  The lockdown scenario therefore offers a superb window of exposure to non-international cricket.  Take a break from the international scene, as the late Bobby Talyarkhan often strongly urged, make it mandatory for all of BCCI's centrally contracted players to participate, and conduct, say Duleep Trophy matches (in the old zonal format, to foster greater spectator loyalties) to start with, exclusively for TV audiences, and glamourise these contests. Advertisers should see value in the option, as, starved of other cricket action, Indian and Indian-origin audiences are more than likely to support these games.

The other proposal, coming from the dynamic cricket thinker Ian Chappell, has the merit of tilting the balance of power in favour of bowlers.  I submit, however, that in the form Chappelli recommends, it leans too far away from the 'batsman's game' tag cricket suffers from. How many batsmen in the world have the technique not to be rapped on the pads while attempting to play? The example Chappell cites, of the way Sachin Tendulkar famously demolished Shane Warne bowling round the wicket into the rough, is an exceptional one, not something on which an amendment of the lbw law can be based. While I welcome any move to empower bowlers, I propose that a batsman can only be adjudicated as leg before under the new rules off balls pitched outside the stumps (off stump or leg) if offering no stroke. I also suggest not more than one close-in fielder behind the crease on the legside, as I fear a return to leg theory otherwise.

One outcome I hope for from the proposed lbw rule is a reduction in short pitched bowling by pacemen, thanks to the increased opportunities likely for lbw decisions. "Oh no, not another Phil Hughes!" goes my palpitating heart everytime I see a batsman felled and collapsing on the pitch. Why would you need to pepper an obdurate tailender with bouncers, for instance, if you can dismiss him without resorting to such tactics?

Another contentious issue is whether to spit and polish or not. Some measure of legalization of extraneous material for ball maintenance seems inevitable.

In conclusion, I feel domestic cricket, played in spectator-free stadia, can be a good platform to try out the amended lbw law on an experimental basis.   

A True Friend

CR Chandran

By V Ramnarayan

“Why don’t you play for us, as anyway you are not a regular in the full SBI Hyderabad eleven?” The man who put this question to me was the captain of the SBI Secunderabad team, a poor cousin of the star-studded ‘first XI.’  I am not sure of my facts 48 years after this conversation took place, but I think all rounder Srinivas was the captain, and the team also had military medium pacer Srinivasan in the team. CR Chandran, a talented medium pacer all rounder, a guest player, was the star of the team. This was a couple of years before Andhra Bank started recruiting cricketers, and Chandran joined them.

Chandran and I hit it off straightaway, one reason perhaps being that I am called Chandran at home. We were to become Ranji Trophy teammates in later years, and in a minority of two as vegetarians amidst a bunch of carnivores. He was a great fan of Amitabh Bachhan, and styled his hair and wore his clothes and shoes to imitate his hero, but I found him to resemble Vinod Khanna much more, especially after he started wearing glasses to correct his myopia. He was a natural ball player, an attacking opening batsman who loved to entertain, to risk his wicket just to set the spectator’s blood racing. A showman, in short. He was also a more than useful medium pacer who became quite an expert swing bowler in time. He had surprisingly small hands, which meant he frequently injured them batting or fielding. Towards the end of his twenties, he started putting on weight, but when I first met him, he was quite an athlete. Off the field, he was a gentle person, soft spoken and almost introverted. With close friends, he enjoyed a good joke, but rarely laughed out loud, doing so silently with his whole body, shoulders heaving. He was the perfect companion of an evening, especially when accompanied by Mr McDowell. He was a smoker, too, like many of us misguided cricketers of the era.

The late Murtuza Ali Baig, an Oxford Blue and Abbas Ali Baig’s younger brother, was Manager, Personal Banking Division, at SBI Secunderabad, where I was serving part of my training period in the bank. Baig knew me as the rather dispensable bit player in the bank’s first XI, and had no hesitation in allowing me to turn out for the B team, which was a motley assortment of Secunderabad staff plus guest players like Chandran.

Our first match that season was against Nizam College, which included the likes of K Jayantilal and Abdul Jabbar. By this time, Chandran and I were thick as thieves, and I wagered him I would get Jayanti’s wicket. I won that bet dismissing the former India opener quite cheaply, and even started dreaming of routing the rest of the college XI. Unfortunately, the lefthanded Jabbar had other ideas, and I have never forgiven him for that. He launched a savage attack against our meagre bowling, scoring 176 in about 150 balls, until, leg-weary and demoralised, we were ready to plead for mercy.  

As I said earlier, Chandran joined Andhra Bank, and I continued in SBI for four or five more years, achieved belated recognition, and became a national level player, things really looking up for me. But, as Bertie Wooster repeatedly assures you, fate has this nasty habit of having a go at you when you least expect it. My boss and his boss took an intense dislike to my face, and launched a merry campaign of psychological harassment against me. Picture this scenario: Superboss wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, and reads the gloomy news of the Prime Minister’s disappointment with his bank’s progress in her 20-point Economic Programme and the unreasonable resistance of unpatriotic Indians to such noble measures as nasbandi and slum demolition, and asks himself, ‘What can I do to brighten my day today?’ Two cups of tea later, he has a brainwave, and calls his underling, the Boss. “I say, when did you last send a nasty memo to that cricketer blighter Ramnarayan? Last week? No, no, this won’t do at all. Draft a juicy one today, no two, better still let’s send him three today. And if and when he replies, fling counter no. 123 at him. Use words like unsatisfactory and unacceptable. What, spelling? Ask your steno Venkateswarlu. Spelling was never my strong point.” 

This game went on for a year, and wonder of wonders, miserable as I was, I could do nothing wrong in cricket. My first season in first class cricket was quite successful, and with help from my all rounder friend Jyotiprasad and his boss CS Shamlal, I joined Andhra Bank as a senior officer after answering a newspaper advertisement. Amazingly, I reported for duty, not at the office, but at the Osmania University ground, where the bank’s team was playing a visiting Ceylon Tobacco Board XI, which had quite a few Sri Lanka players in its line-up. In a fairytale debut, I took eight wickets that day.

The match was made equally memorable by our batsmen, openers Chandran and Inder Raj, both champion hookers (in a strictly cricketing sense) and pullers, not to mention their abilty to drive on the up, and devil-may-care attitude to batting. One of the visitors' new ball bowlers, Ranjan Gunatilleke, was genuinely quick, but ‘Inder and Chander’ were unstoppable.  They hammered him and the other bowlers including left arm spinner Arjuna Ranasinghe to all parts of the ground, taking advantage of the pace and bounce of the matting wicket.

Chandran and I met every day for the next five years, as we worked in the same department of the bank in its Central Office. Both of us reported to Shamlal, who managed the affairs of the bank’s cricket team, one of the strongest in our part of the world. Our work kept us busy, but the load was manageable, and we could leave for net practice at 3 pm. We also enjoyed doing crossword puzzles together and, with his husky voice, Chandran entertained the cricket team with a very decent imitation of John Arlott’s commentary.

We were both involved in two traumatic experiences connected to cricket. In the first of them, we were both on the same side, and Chandran’s team spirit came to the fore. Andhra Bank was given entry into the Moin-ud-Dowla Gold Cup, but with the proviso that we must field four Test players. Our management was very keen on participation, but the players were not, as it would mean dropping four of our regular players. Vijay Paul was our captain in the absence of our only Test player M Narasimha Rao, away playing league cricket in the UK. Our protests went unheard, and the management went ahead and invited S Venkataraghavan, Aunshuman Gaekwad, Surinder Amarnath, Duleep Mendis and non-Test cricketer Ved Raj to turn out for us. The whole experience was eminently forgettable, and Chandran, the vice-captain, dropped himself. I tried my best to dissuade him, offering to stand down myself, but Chandran convinced me otherwise. He warned me that as an off spinner, I could easily be misunderstood to be objecting to India off spinner Venkat’s appointment as captain. It was one of the most wretched days in our cricket, with plots and sub plots being hatched against a team merely wanting to play cricket.

The whole mega plan bombed. Andhra Bank collapsed for 136, with the last wicket partnership the highest in the innings (D Meher Baba 38, V Ramnarayan 18 not out). Angry and unhappy, I batted beyond my ability, especially determined not to lose my wicket to off spinner Shivlal Yadav, soon to play for India, and eventually replace me in the Hyderabad team—in that order! In the course of that innings, I swept Shivlal hard on to short leg L Rajan’s knee, rendering him hors’ d’ combat for the rest of the match. Rajan was replaced at the top of the batting order by skipper P Krishnamurti who hammered us for 126 thrilling runs. I bowled well without luck, but the long and the short of the story was that we got thrashed by a raw young side.

Not long afterwards, I was thrust right into the middle of a huge, unsavoury fight between players and the administration, and this time, Chandran was an establishment man, and I was on the players’ side. Very briefly, the whole Hyderabad team was dropped on the morning of a match against Mafatlal XI in the Moin-ud-Dowla Gold Cup (that tournament again), and a brand new team led by Chandran took the field on the opening day. We were all banned from playing any cricket until further notice, and the events that followed the ban were straight out of a political thriller. I am not going into the details now, but the saddest part of it all was that my ‘best friends’ Krishnamurti and Chandran and I took up adversarial positions. I was angry with myself for things I said in the heat of the moment, but all’s well that ends well, with my friends showing great magnanimity, and we hugged and made up soon afterwards. I could never have forgiven myself if that had not happened, for neither Chandran nor Murti lived much longer.      

Madrasi School

Happy days, and a few sad memories

By V Ramnarayan

Hare Radhakanta Syamalanga was one of the prayer songs sung in the morning assembly at the Madrasi School (DTEA), Lodi Estate, circa 1961 when I was briefly its student. The singer was invariably CR Gayatri (later Gayatri Ramachandran IAS), apparently trained in classical music and endowed with a nice voice and perfect sruti. Bharatiyar's Vellai Tamarai Pooviliruppal was another favourite of hers. I write this today because the song has inexplicably been my earworm since this morning. I never knew Gayatri personally, so she must have been astounded when I "sang" the opening lines of the song minutes after being introduced to her decades later in the foyer of the Music Academy Chennai. My companions, my wife included, burst out laughing, attributing a romantic interest where there had been none. In fact my cousin Ashok Sundaram had taken me to meet her at her Hyderabad office in July 1992 or thereabouts in connection with my benefit match, but Gayatri had no recollection of that.

Madrasi School was a beautiful interlude in the peripatetic lifestyle of my school years, thanks to my father's 'transferable' bank job and his brief stint in an American company in Delhi. For someone whose previous pit stop had been Tuticorin in the deep south, going to Subbiah Vidyalayam, as plebeian a school as they come, Madrasi School provided a comforting introduction to English medium education in the capital city, with Tamil the mother tongue of more than 90% of the students, though Hindi with English (and a smattering of Tamil) thrown in was the lingua franca of the school. My classroom, like other classes up to eighth standard, was a large, cosy tent, and the teachers by and large pleasant if not overtly friendly.

English medium was a challenge, but the young are resilient, and my new classmates were more than friendly and welcoming. Strangely, I ended up doing well in English and Hindi, though I had no business to. Luckily, there was no pressure on us. A Hindi tutor, Yagyanarayanan, came home, but I don't remember learning much from him, because we did not allow him to teach us much, constantly distracting him with empty chatter. At school, I remember Rukmini Teacher, who taught us English, a kindly soul in a madisar nine-yard sari, a lovely person who was easily the class favourite. I don't remember the other teachers from that first year. A silly incident involved my piercing my own left arm with my compasses on a dare by a friend, who also humiliated me another time by kicking me hard on my shin with his booted foot, with me offering no fight, coward that I was.

I had already lost more than a season of cricket during our Tuticorin sojourn, as had my talented left hander brother Nagarajan, just a year younger than me, and with me in Madrasi School. Youngest brother Sivaramakrishnan, was still at the pampered stage of getting to bat three times to our one innings whenever we played cricket near our Defence Colony home. At school, there wasn't much organised cricket, so we lost another season of the game. My dear friend and classmate Srinivasan--later to be known as Delhi Cheenu when he moved to Madras for college studies--introduced me to the other cricketers at school as someone coached by AG Ram Singh, true but with hardly any evidence produced my my feats on the ground. Cricket at school and Defence Colony was pretty uneventful except for a solitary friendly match we played at India Gate, with a confident, almost arrogant young man named Chadha (don't remember his first name) doing the star turn for our colony, which was otherwise a miserable flop.

My cousin Ramu or R Sivaramakrishnan, three years my senior, was a kind of folk hero of the school. Tall and well built, Ramu had a boisterous laugh and a lot of style. He was an ace basketballer as well. Rajamani was another basketballer of the school I knew slightly then, but caught up with years later at our Shastrinagar Madras neighbour's house when he came there as part of the famous Tiruppugazh Raghavan's bhajana troupe. This was a startling new avatar of Rajamani whom I had come to regard, rightly or wrongly, as a school tough guy. Another 'dada' in his juniors' eyes had been a chap called Radha Raman (the Raman pronounced as ramann, not raaman), who once drove the school bus with all of us boys and girls in it. I don't remember what dire consequence ensued.

While I remember that Mr Suryanarayanan or Soori or Choori was our principal, I have forgotten the names of most of our teachers. Vice principal Rajagopalan was our neighbour in Defence Colony, and we were friends with his children Hema and Raman. The VP's upstairs neighbour and tenant/ co-tenant was Mr R Parthasarathy, a Tamil teacher at our school who later taught at Delhi University and became famous as Indira Parthasarathy, an award-winning author of short stories, novels and plays. I had opted for Hindi as my second language, and I.Pa. taught me exactly one class as a substitute for our regular teacher on leave. He left a terrific impact on me with his wit. Example: When an Englishman drops something, he says, "I broke the plate," while in India, we tend to say. "The plate got broken." Over the years, I have been lucky to work and interact with I.Pa. in a number of ways, and it has been a privilege. He is an intellectual of rare humour and courage, and much of his writing is a scathing commentary on our body politic.

The only other excitement I experienced that year in Delhi was smoking a cigarette for the first time in a Defence Colony house (don't remember whose) with classmates Chandrasekhar, Jayaram Rangan, Cheenu and Sivakumar or Chicku, though I think one or two of us did not dare to do the unthinkable that day. Sorry, Appa and Amma, wherever you are watching us from. I was not a very good boy.

Leaving Delhi and the school, as well as my lovely cousins, Ramu and his siblings, and Indira and hers, was a terrible wrench. Appa joined Bank of India at Bombay, and we moved with him, and thereby hangs another tale, but I fast forward to Chennai where we eventually landed up.

I completed my schooling at Vidya Mandir, Mylapore, and so did both my brothers, while our sisters had to go to girls' schools to do theirs. I started playing competitive cricket only at Presidency College where I did my undergraduate course, because Vidya Mandir did not have eleven cricketers in a school strength of about 50, and I was not selected to play for Vivekananda College, where I did my Pre-University Course.

It was while I was at Presidency that Cheenu, now Delhi Cheenu, caught up with me again. He was a nice young man, always smartly dressed, well mannered, and well read. He was now a student of AC College of Technology, and a member of their cricket team, a stylish, correct looking batsman who somehow did not master the art of scoring runs despite occupying the crease for reasonable lengths of time. He was a regular visitor to our Shastrinagar home, where an unruly gang of cousins congregated during weekends. Cheenu was a patient young man who took the teasing of one of my cousins, Venkataraman, sportingly. After college, we all went our different ways, and I lost touch with Cheenu except to know that he worked for TCS for quite a while. Just a couple of years ago, I asked his aunt Vimala, who is also related to me, about Cheenu's whereabouts, only to learn that he had died quite young of a heart complaint. My smoking initiator Chicku, too, did not live long.

Add to this gloomy story the tragedy of cousin Ramu's death in a car accident in December 1968, and my Delhi memories are tinged with sadness, though we also enjoyed good times as a family there.

Ajeeb saneha and my friend

A Selfless Cricketer

By V Ramnarayan

Today, I googled the meaning of an Urdu word that my first ghazal 'guide' swore to me back in 1973-74 did not exist in the language. The word is saneha, which Google tells me means: Accident, Adventure, Affair, Appearance, Circumstance, Condition, Contingency, Emergency, Episode, Event, Exigency, Existence, Incidence, Incident, Instance, Juncture, Manifestation, Materialization, Occasion, Pass, Piece, Routine, Scene, Situation, State, Thing, Transaction, Transpiration and Proceeding.

The captain of the SBI Hyderabad cricket team, the diminutive Abid Zainulabudin—a great fan and friend of Hyderabad's own celebrated ghazal exponent Vithal Rao—my go-to man whenever in doubt on such monumental issues, had assured me, with complete authority, of the non-existence of the word, when I spoke to him of Hariharan's Ajeeb saneha mujhpar guzar gaya yaaron from the movie Gaman. Strangely, Abid was my assistant in the bank from the clerical or award staff cadre, and I his officer, while he was my captain on the cricket field. Abid and I sat side by side in a corner of the Hyderabad Main Branch next to a large window that opened to our practice ground. At 3.30 pm most days, we both closed shop and went to the nets where our roles were so dramatically reversed. We were both comfortable in this curious identity switch which never interfered with our work, cricket or friendship, all based on mutual respect and tremendous affection, laced by a shared sense of humour and pet aversions. As for the authenticity of the word saneha, it never occurred to me to seek expert advice on it, not even on the one occasion I sat next to Hariharan himself--in a Mumbai auditorium a few years ago--and he sang the mukhda sotto voce when I told him how much I liked the song. The ghazal was my earworm this morning, and I finally decided to consult Sadguru Google. I told my wife about it, because the Gaman LP had been a wedding anniversary gift to us in that glorious Hyderabad chapter of our life, and we both loved the whole album. We talked about how similar the opening of the song was to Kabhi khudpe... from Hum Dono (no wonder, the music for both films had been by Jaidev) and I mentioned Abid to her. She said, "Yes, I know Abid." 'No, you don't know him, I am not talking of Syed Abid Ali," I corrected her, confident that I would have the last word at least in matters of cricket. The look of pity masking triumph in her eyes would have put Jeeves to shame while overruling Bertie Wooster's sartorial choice. "Of course I know Abid," she said. "Zainulabudin. Short smart chap."

Abid was short, wiry, smart, quite good looking, in fact, long-haired like most of us in the seventies, balding. Clean shaven in the morning, he tended towards a 5 o’clock shadow by 3 pm, and,  “Forgot to shave this morning, Abid?” was the usual greeting from his friends at the nets. He was a very good captain, quietly authoritative, calm and unperturbed when things did not go our way. He had been a champion of my cause when I was still an unproven quantity, and this was before he had joined me in the Small Industries Business Division. In typically undemonstrative style, he never revealed to me that he had played that particular role in my career. As captain of a star studded side slowly losing out to Anno Domini, he commanded respect though he was not one of the stars, but always pulling his weight as batsman, fielder and strategist. He rarely failed with the bat when the team was in trouble, but was never interested in personal landmarks. He scored many fighting 40s and 50s, but not many hundreds in the years we played together. In all those years, I don’t remember Abid suffering a bad patch, or seeing his fitness or fielding slip. He was probably the only truly selfless cricketer I knew.

Under Abid’s captaincy was forged my partnership with Mumtaz Hussain, the left arm spin wizard, who was slow to acknowledge my potential but eventually accepted me and grew into a trusting spin twin. The three of us spent many a quiet evening along with some of our teammates at the end of a day’s play. Both were at their witty, sometimes sardonic, best, over a glass of beer. I spoke of pet aversions earlier, and Abid could take down reputations with unconcealed glee. He could not stand dishonesty and hypocrisy, and he gave his distaste expression in fluent English curse words and chaste Urdu in a deep gurgling voice. Throughout the time I played under his captaincy, I enjoyed his trust and support, and I like to think I did not let him down. 

The only time I thought our professional relationship was put to test was in the office, not in cricket. Those were the notorious days when the bank’s ‘award’ staff was often guaranteed some 120 hours of overtime wages per quarter, regardless of whether there was workload to justify it. Our seat involved precious little daily ledger work, and Abid could finish his work in an hour or two most days. One day, he came hesitantly up to me, and awkwardly stuttered the question: “Do you think you could arrange some OT for me?” I was very embarrassed. How could I justify such a measure when there wasn’t enough work to fill our regular hours? Now it was my turn to turn red green and blue in the face. Thankfully, Abid put me out of my misery by grinning a sheepish grin before walking away. Any worry that the brief conversation might affect my cricket prospects would have been ungracious and disloyal on my part. Abid was too much of a gentleman to let that happen.

During my last season for SBI, Abid’s tall, gangling teenage nephew would join us at the nets, entering through the bank’s rear gate from his Vithalwadi (?) home, and bowl fairly impressive leg spin. He was to join the bank years later, play as a batsman, and eventually lead the side. His name was Mohammed Azharuddin. On the occasions I met Azhar the Test cricketer, he always brought news of Uncle Abid.    

   

Express Estates Part II

Learning from Master

I spent only a week in the sports desk, editing copy relating to the Guindy Races, learning from the expert advice that Chandrasekhar gave, some football copy with help from Mr Nair who took time off his reporting duties to guide me. Master encouraged me to go out and report, so I covered a few football matches, with the cricket season in a mid-season lull peculiar to Madras. My knowledge of soccer was only marginally better than horse racing, but I sailed through the MFA league matches thanks to the generous help I received from S Thyagarajan of The Hindu.   

After a week, I went up to Master and asked to be shifted to the general news desk, as I was bored with my sports routine, and  Master readily agreed. The young man who took my place in the sports section, Partab Ramchand, became a leading sports journalist who also wrote on films. Unlike the general run of journalists, Ramchand has always been keen on writing books and has written many.

Master was a cult figure at the Express.  He was probably in his late forties when I first met him, and it was a close fight between him and Tushar Kanti Ghosh of the Amrit Bazaar Patrika group of Calcutta to decide who was the longest serving newspaper editor in India, until Seshadri passed away in the late nineties (?), with Ghosh still in harness. He was always the first to arrive in the office and never went home until the paper was put to sleep. There was perfect discipline in the office and at the same time a relaxed air, with no worry about the boss looking over your shoulder. Anyone who has worked in the Express knows that it was a perfect training ground for rookie newsmen, who were quite early in their careers thrown in at the deep end. I had been in the paper for less than a month when Master said to me, “Your title may say sub-editor, but don’t stay cooped up in the office. Go out and do stories.” Excited and nervous, I stepped out with nothing besides good journalistic genes (hopefully) and Master’s blessings in my armoury. A series of fires broke out in a few Madras slums, and I was one of the reporters on the scene. Interviewing slum dwellers was no easy task, as some of them were as worldly wise as the London cockney of My Fair Lady fame. The genuinely stricken, mostly women, were hardly in a state to answer silly questions from English-educated upstarts like me. I even managed to gain access to Mr Madhavan, a minister in the DMK government, and he spoke with confidence about the steps the government was taking to alleviate the sufferings of the residents and to try and prevent future accidents. Unfortunately, I was no impartial observer; my mind was made up against the government of the day, and I was convinced that it was doing nothing to save the day for the fire-ravaged poor of the city. My report was naturally one-sided and tended to editorialise. Somehow the report went unnoticed, luckily for me. 

I also did a story on IIT Madras, in what context I don’t remember. I was soon afterwards assigned a politically sensitive story, which took me to the Government Arts College, then located within a stone’s throw of Club House Road, where was situated Express Towers. The moment he knew I was from Express, the principal had me and my photographer colleague thrown out of the college. He was angry because of a recent report on the college whose details I cannot recall now.

Work at the Express was a lot of fun. For some strange reason, my own copy was invariably edited by Master himself, and stranger still was the fact that it was hardly ever touched. Once he called me to tell me he was changing a word I had used. “Harangued” is an Americanism, we don’t need such words, here, he said.

Why was he called Master? He lived on the Express campus, and tutored Ramnath Goenka’s schoolgoing children, I learnt from my colleagues. The children called him Master or Masterji, and in time, he became Master to everyone. When he found some breathing time amidst his hectic daily routine, he made conversation wth his senior colleagues, with his face often lit up by a brilliant smile.  When he walked home after the night shift, he was accompanied by a colleague or two, walking towards the gate to go home. On the occasions I did night duty, meaning I pottered around doing nothing of importance while others slaved, I usually walked to a teashop near Odeon cinema, which offered a delicious mango juice, manna from heaven after night duty tea, and came back to sleep on newspaper stacks. My companions one night were senior colleague Mathew and Master. Knowing his wife was in the family way, Master solicitously asked Mathew, “How is your wife? I hope she is not alone.” Mathew’s reply, made with a solemn face, was, “I hope she is.” Master’s reaction was endearingly typical of him when amused. He put his index finger on the tip of his nose, his eyes twinkling in mirth.

Twice during the night shift, I was almost caught on the wrong foot, with the teleprinter clattering away major headline news: the invasion of Prague by Soviet troops during the Dubcek regime, and the Robert Kennedy assassination. On both occasions, I thought I was alone in the newsroom, and froze in panic, but help arrived in the form of seasoned journalists returning from cigarette breaks.

Chandrasekhar, Nair, Krishnaswamy, Krishnamurthi, Nagarajan, Partab and Rishikesh were among the friends I made in the newsroom. I have been in touch with many of them, while one or two are no more. 

Surprise visitors to the office included Lala Amarnath and Veenai S Balachander, and, graciously included by my seniors, I had the good fortune to listen in while these idiosyncratic personalities told some uproarious stories, some of them quite unprintable. Amarnath said of a notable personality that he murdered his wife, and described the wife of a famous cricketer as an alcoholic. Nair was generous enough to let me accompany him while he interviewed Amarnath. The Railways’ cricket coach then, Lalaji advocated playing on matting wickets to improve your technique against fast bowling, and he was conducting a camp for the Railway team at Madras as the city had plenty of matting wickets. I was quite puzzled by this prescription, as lack of practice on turf pitches was often cited as the reason for the Madras (now Tamil Nadu) batsmen’s inadequacies when they travelled outside the state. In recent years, Amarnath’s view has been endorsed by other experts, who even attribute Rahul Dravid’s excellence abroad to his early training on matting.

The idyll was too good to last. Two newcomers, let’s call them Uma and Raja, started throwing their weight around, perhaps emboldened by their social—not journalistic—pedigree. Neither of them was good at the job, but they both tried to teach me mine. At the same time my friends urged me to return to do postgraduate studies and play cricket for the college again. All of 20, I needed no further inducement to quit. Master was disappointed, but as I was stubborn in my resolve, he let me go, saying his doors would always be open for me. Years later, he told my wife Gowri that I had been one of his favourite trainees, and also that he had learnt his trade from my grandfather V Narayanan when he was editor of the Express.  

     

Express Estates part I

The old man in the Kamaraj khadi shirt and veshti, a fading namam on his forehead (with no air conditioning in the sweltering newsroom, the red mark lasted no more than a couple of hours), and wisps of grey hair making a token presence on his otherwise bald head, looked forbiddingly at me as I handed him my resume and tried to impress him with the sterling attributes I was offering the newspaper under his watch. ‘Sorry we have no openings,” Mr CP Seshadri, the editor, said quite firmly, dashing my hopes. Disheartened, I made to leave, but remembered in the nick of time that my uncle PN Sundaresan had asked me to convey his regards to him. 

The mention of my uncle’s name had an electrifying effect. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier that you are Raja’s (Sundaresan’s) nephew?” the editor, who was “Master” to everyone said. “Are you Ramani’s son, then? I thought you were some vadakkathian (north Indian). You can join straight away. Go and sit there next to Chandrasekhar in the sports desk.  

Thus began my newspaper career—as Apprentice Subeditor—with a monthly pay packet of Rs. 200, peanuts even by 1967 standards. 

My landing at Master’s doorstep was an accident, a happy one, as it turned out. I      had had to miss my BSc Chemistry exams in March 1967, thanks to a mystery illness, characterised by unbearable headaches, that lasted more than a month, and left me weak and exhausted. “I think he’s having a nervous breakdown,” I overheard my father tell my mother, and, not knowing what those words meant (Can you imagine such an ignorant 20-year old today?) I duly informed my friends in college of this diagnosis, feeling suitably important. Of our group of five classmates, only one, Meenakshi, who later went to medical college, seemed to find my confession strange. She laughed her head off.  

Not only had I lost preparation time, I was too weak to sit down and do any overtime swotting. I therefore decided to take the exam in September—with my parents’ blessings—and actually acquitted myself quite well. At least three people, Prof. Jayanti Lakshminarayana, my former schoolteacher R Srinivasan, and a young doctor helped me through this period, and I will write about them later.

Richard and Dayle Hadlee:

A memorable day with the brothers

[My friend Deepak Tembe’s recent Facebook post expressing concern for Sir Richard Hadlee’s health prompted me to share my own Hadlee moment here ahead of another story I had earlier scheduled].

Little did we know during his days of express but raw pace that Richard Hadlee would outperform elder brother Dayle—and almost every other fast bowler in the world in the 1980s. Though, of the four great all rounders of the era,  Pakistan’s Imran Khan had a superior record as an all rounder and played a major part in the successes of the team he led, and Kapil Dev probably gave greater aesthetic pleasure than Ian Botham, it was Hadlee’s masterly reinvention of his bowling and enhancement of his batting skills in midstream that made the cricket world sit up and take notice of his startling transformation from good to great. 

It was but natural that I, like other cricket followers, eagerly anticipated Richard Hadlee’s arrival in Chennai during the 2000-01 season as the manager of a young New Zealand Cricket Academy team invited to take part in the annual Buchi Babu memorial tournament, for, away from the razzle-dazzle of international cricket, he and coach Dayle Hadlee might find time to interact with the local cricket community in a relaxed atmosphere.

As it turned out, I did get to meet the brothers a few times. “Your wife has made me sound intelligent,” Richard Hadlee told me on one of these occasions, after she had interviewed him for The Hindu at the bidding of Sports Editor S Krishnan, an old cricketer friend of mine who must have imagined cricket was the favoured conversation piece at the Ramnarayan dining table. Gowri was at the time one of the paper’s music critics, and Krishnan sometimes sent her out on  ‘human interest’ assignments involving visiting cricketers.

Another time, the Hadlees and I visited Kalakshetra, a premier arts institution. , "Raam! Does the protocol allow a couple of my boys to take off their shirts?" Richard asked me soon after we had been treated to an exquisite  demonstration of bharata natyam by a couple of girls and a boy, all three students of Kalakshetra.

      This story is akin to the apocryphal (non) relationship between Abdul Khader and Amavasya. I had decided that a bunch of cricketing visitors from the antipodes needed to have their education enhanced by a visit to Kalakshetra among other places in Chennai. On a busman's holiday from my day job of sports editor at a city portal, I had taken a few days off to follow the trail of the New Zealand boys. The academy went on to win the championship, though I don't remember if they did it that season or the next. Many of the players in that side went on to play for New Zealand with the big boys in Test cricket, while some had already done so.

      As a regular at the NZCA's matches, I got to know the Hadlee brothers and some of the players well. During one of our conversations while watching a game, I asked Dayle Hadlee if he and his team had got round to seeing anything of the city. The answer was in the negative. The boys just went from their hotel rooms to the cricket ground, gym or swimming pool and back, when they were not attending boring parties, formal and prim and proper.

      Dayle readily accepted my offer to take the cricketers on a tour of Kalakshetra and Vidya Sagar, formerly Spastics Society of India. I almost regretted my impulsive offer when I considered the logistics and expense of carting 20 New Zealanders all but two of them energetic youngsters whose idea of a day off from cricket would have been slightly different from a visit to such strange places! I struck gold when TA Sekar of the MRF Pace Foundation immediately offered the use of the foundation's bus free of charge to ferry the cricketers that September morning.

      My next great piece of luck was the prompt response I received from Kalakshetra Principal S Rajaram. He not only enthusiastically agreed to my request, but also arranged a 20-minute dance recital in one of Kalakshetra's classrooms.

      The New Zealand boys were a cheerful lot in the bus, but to my nervous eyes they seemed supremely indifferent to the entertainment I had laid out for them. There were a few moans and groans as some of the youngsters expressed reservations about an alien classical dance, which was sure to be a far cry from the entertainment of their choice.

      The Kalakshetra atmosphere earned me my first brownie point with my visitors. They found it beautiful and remarkably peaceful and quiet in the heart of our urban chaos. The Spartan classrooms and the lovely young ladies only strengthened their positive feelings. The crowning glory was provided by the impressive performance by the young students. The cricketers were totally bowled over, particularly by the dancers' obviously high level of physical fitness.

      Then came the climax of the morning. My reply to Richard Hadlee's query about the cricketers' proposed striptease act was that a bare torso was absolutely mandatory for men in Indian classical dance. What followed was an authentic display of the Maori hakka, complete with high jumps and war cries. The threesome including the Marshall twins, James and Hamish, received a standing ovation from the small crowd.

      More groans and growls of protest prefixed our next stop, but the Hadlee brothers did not offer the cricketers the choice of opting out. The team trooped reluctantly into Vidya Sagar, at Kotturpuram. My friends there were thrilled to receive the cricketers as most of their wards were crazy about cricket. Unfortunately, the air-conditioner did not work, or the hall where we met the kids had none, and a very warm, sweaty session of interaction followed. The children, however, were unfazed by such minor inconveniences and put up quite a riveting show of entertainment. The crowning piece was a bright little speech by a seven-year-old. One-day cricket was very similar to life, he told us. Just as the batsman enjoyed great freedom in the first 15 overs, helped by the field restrictions, in life, too, children enjoyed freedom for the first 15 years, before the cares of life caught up with them, he said. The cricketers gave him a standing ovation and were visibly moved by the spirit and courage of the children. To a man, they came up to me and thanked me for giving them one of the most memorable days of their lives.

     

                

May Day Madness

Good Afternoon, Chennai!

My career as a journalist began and ended in 1968—or so I thought—when I briefly sparkled as the Indian Express’s star apprentice subeditor, not  counting my second innings as editor of Sruti, a performing arts monthly, from 2006 to 2018. In between, I wrote quite a bit as a freelancer, until I unexpectedly re-entered the newsroom in 1992, when I joined the editorial team of an eveninger I shall call Chennai Afternoon, for reasons of self protection from the libel laws of the country. I do not wish to be slapped with defamation charges for merely having a good laugh over incidents that occurred nearly three decades ago.

I had been a struggling entrepreneur for some four years when, heeding my father’s advice, I took the momentous decision to shut shop and try to find employment all over again. That is when my wife Gowri, then a reporter in The Hindu, alerted me to the possibility of Afternoon absorbing me after she spoke to its editor Mr Swamy (name changed), who had in his heyday helmed a famous national weekly, and, now 72, agreed not only to lend his name to the fledgling tabloid, but actually came on board to run it hands on. With my morale rendered rather low by the harsh challenges of business, I entered the Afternoon office with trepidation one morning, but the distinguished looking Mr Swamy made me feel comfortable with his warm welcome. I felt encouraged by the even warmer greeting from Mr R Ramachandran, a recent retiree from The Hindu, and now the senior deputy editor at the evening daily. I had met him earlier at the office of Sruti, where he had been part of a think tank the editor Pattabhi Raman had enlisted, and we had got on very well, for all that he was perhaps twenty years my senior. Another veteran in the Afternoon was Mr Neelkant, who had decades of experience as a Bombay-based journalist.  A taciturn man, Neelkant was a good foil to the more gregarious RRC—as Ramachandran was widely known. 

Neelkant actually had a wicked sense of humour, which he carefully hid most of the time under his stern exterior. Krithika, the most experienced and capable among the youngsters, carried her workload as news editor efficiently and cheerfully. A smart editor at the desk, she was a good manager of people as well. The tabloid and its Tamil twin were owned by a man well connected politically and an avowed loyalist of the ruling party  and the chief minister of Tamil Nadu. In the Afternoon office he was known as 'MD' or 'MD Saar'. This list more or less completes the dramatis personae of the story that follows.   

Everything was hunky dory for a few months, work starting at six am or thereabouts. Tea, samosas and bun maska from a nearby "Irani" cafe run by Malayalis helped a voracious young team tackle the hunger pangs while feverishly working to put the paper to bed early in the afternoon. Though the drama of the front page consisted of a daily countdown leading to the once-in-12-years spectacle of the Mahamaham at Kumbakonam climaxing in thousands of devotees taking a holy dip in the river Kaveri led by the charismatic chief minister of the state, I was in luck, responsible as I was as sports editor for the coverage of  less momentous happenings elsewhere--the 1992 Cricket World Cup in Australia and New Zealand.

It was the time the child prodigy Sachin Tendulkar was coming of age; of South Africa's tragic exit from the tournament done in by a cruel rain rule; of innovative captaincy by Martin Crowe who transformed Mark Greatbatch into a cult hero let loose on unsuspecting opposition new ball attacks and who created other sensations like opening the bowling with Dipak Patel, the off spinner. Crowe's batting too went smoothly into top gear and New Zealand were soon tournament favourites.  We all know how after a dream run, New Zealand went down in the semifinals. If veterans Imran Khan and Javed Miandad and young tyro Inzamam-ul-Haq did it with the bat for Pakistan, Wasim Akram was magical with his left arm pace and swing, as Pakistan cruised to their first World Cup after a rather late rally.

Though India flattered to deceive, Tendulkar won the hearts of fans and experts with his breathtaking batting. To me, it was a case of unabashed adoration of this fearless kid whose flashing blade and boyish demeanour dazzled enough to bring the fan in me to the fore, journalistic detachment be damned. Sachin aura about him, one of my headlines shamelessly punned (my ardour was to dim somewhat in the years that followed: he was to become arguably the best batsman in the world, and I watched many of his great knocks, yet respect and admiration replaced my early romance with his batting, interspersed with occasional disappointment with the apparent diminution of joie de vivre in his approach to the game in his mature years.

Cricket on the Brain was the title of a very readable 1960s book by Bernard Hollowood, a 'minor' county cricketer and much else, and I am reminded of it now by my own obsession with the game that has caused this huge digression from my main story--that of our Indian summer at the Chennai Afternoon, which came to an abrupt end on 1st May 1992, a holiday dedicated to labour. I had a mild fever and chose to relax at home rather than join my colleagues at Narada Gana Sabha, Alwarpet, and attend the inauguration of a weeklong theatre festival of Tamil plays, now an annual feature. The indefatigable RRC, obviously more energetic than me, and enjoying the outing with his team at the event, called me on the phone and persuaded me to make my way to the sabha. I reluctantly tore myself away from a cosy family bonding session and reached the venue in about half an hour. 

Though the chief guest of the morning was yet to arrive, and the inauguration was yet to start, there was high drama in the aisles. Even as I entered the hall, RRC was leading a walkout of the entire Afternoon editorial team in protest against some disrespect shown to Mr and Mrs Neelkanth by the organisers of the festival. "Vaanga Ram pogalam! Intha pasangaluku mariyadaiye illai. They have insulted Mr Neelkanth and his wife." The volunteers had asked the senior couple to vacate their seats which they, the volunteers, claimed were reserved for 'Mrs MD'. It  was an extremely hot day, and the Neelkanths, still recovering from the exertions of a long autorickshaw ride, were slow to respond.  Panic stricken by the prospect of Mrs MD arriving with her seats still occupied, the ushers perhaps tried to hustle the old couple into some nifty footwork, unfortunately catching the eagle eye of our team leader who sprang into action, revelling in the situation that reminded him of his early trade union days, in the best manner of a sprightly Uncle Fred in the springtime.  

Soon all of us trooped out like schoolchildren delighting in an unexpected holiday courtesy the expiry of the school correspondent or some such worthy. We reassembled in a coffee shop across the road (now an ice cream joint) again like schoolkids on a picnic. An uproarious time was had by all, with nervous giggles and excited laughter giving the staid old cafe the appearance of a boisterous pub. In the midst of all the drama, the Neelkanths quietly slipped away, with our senior colleague brushing aside our apologies with a near wink and half smile, the most animated I had seen him so far. "I am glad I have an excuse for going home in time for lunch and siesta," he declared almost gleefully.

A most exciting week followed at the office. The editor called us all to his room on the morrow and asked us to apologise to the MD for our 'insubordination' at NGS. While the younger lot stayed silent, all the villains I named earlier laughed our heads off. Swamy was really caught between the devil and the deep sea. He did not want to lose face before fellow journalists, while MD Saar seemed to have him in an iron grip from which he could not extricate himself. The meeting ended on a stalemate of sorts, with Swamy apparently moved by Lord Ickenham's impassioned efforts to reawaken his, Swamy's, pretensions to journalistic integrity. He left the decision to us, but appealed to us to fall in line and save the day for the paper. He also promised to convince MD Saar that the incident had nothing to do with the management or staff of Afternoon, as it occurred on a holiday at a public function, and at any rate, we did not recognise 'Mrs MD' as a power centre.

Unfortunately, Swamy displayed a total lack of backbone in the whole affair, like Lord Emsworth before his formidable sister Lady Constance Keeble, if I may be forgiven yet another Wodehousian analogy. So it turned out that after a week of vacillation, the editor gave us an ultimatum Apologise or face the consequences. RRC, Neelkanth, Krithika and I stood steadfast in our resolve, while the rest of the team capitulated under threat of dismissal.

What followed was a classic in official correspondence, quite easily the most hilarious letter of "separation" in history. The one addressed to me read somewhat as follows.

Dear Mr Ramnarayan, it has been a pleasure and privilege to have you work for Chennai Afternoon. Your management of the sports page and your articles on music were outstanding, and you wrote some brilliant editorials when asked to do so. Under the prevailing situation and with you refusing to explain your recent conduct satisfactorily, I am constrained to dismiss you from service with immediate effect. I wish you good health and success in all your endeavours.        

As I was preparing to leave the office, never to return, RRC stopped me saying, "Let's go and say goodbye to the old man," with a dangerous twinkle in his eye that forewarned me of a spectacular Uncle Fred moment. I tried my best to dissuade him, for I didn't want to set my eyes on a man for whom I had lost all respect, even if I was prepared to take the sympathetic view that he was to be pitied rather than censured. Uncle Fred was however not be deterred, and I followed him meekly into the boss's den like nephew Pongo Twistleton, imagining the worst possible scenario to unfold  inside. Would some oversized underling take matters into his own hands and rearrange our features?

A slightly built man with a pleasant countenance,  RRC wore the most beatific smile as we entered the room and sat down without waiting to be invited to do so. He looked the editor straight in his eye and said, 'Thank you very much for your lovely letter. I must say it is very well composed? Did you get it drafted by your assistants or write it yourself? Full marks, either way.." 

RRC's smile was getting more and more angelic even as Swamy, a fair complexioned man. went redder and redder in the face. 'Mr Swamy, you are a disgrace, an insult to the profession," beamed RRC, "I am ashamed to have been your colleague. I wish you well but I hope our paths never cross again."

As we came out, RRC looked pleased with himself, a good day's work done. I struggled to control  an outburst of laughter that threatened to explode. 

It had been a perfect morning.

Murugan Bhai

My friend Abdul often spoke of his visits to Palani, the abode of Murugan, the Tamil deity symbolizing simple living and high thinking. Still, it never occurred to me that he was a devotee of the lord of the hills. I put it down to his great love of nature and travel, his concern for the ecology of the hills, constantly under threat from mindless development. I was more than a bit surprised, therefore, when one day last month, he expressed his disappointment at his inability to place his wedding invitation card at the lord's feet at the Palani temple.

"Somehow, I couldn't get the card ready in time. I, however, promised to bring my wife on my next visit, provided, of course, that I could persuade her to visit a Hindu temple," he told me, to my growing surprise. Abdul had always been fascinated by the mythology of Subrahmanya, he explained. There was nothing unusual about his interest either. Back in his hometown, there is much intermingling between the two communities, who not only respect each other, but also participate in each other's festivals to an extent. During the annual temple chariot festival, the honour of being the first to pull the car is by tradition reserved for the head of the Muslim community.

It was his wife Salma's turn to spring a surprise, soon after the wedding, just when Abdul was about to broach the subject of the promised temple visit to her, knowing that she was a devout Muslim.
"I have a confession to make," she said, "My father has vowed that he will take me to the Tiruchendur Murugan temple after my wedding, even if you won't consent to go there with us. Do you think, you could accompany me just this once?' Abdul was thrilled. He was quite convinced that it was Providence that had brought him and Salma together. And to think that he had been so reluctant to get married, that too through the old-fashioned route of arranged marriages! Abdul reminded me of an old conversation we had had on my own religious beliefs or lack of them. I had told him I was no great temple-goer, though I sometimes enjoyed visiting old, not so wealthy temples that attracted few devotees. Listening to my wife sing a couple of songs before the sanctum on those occasions had been an elevating experience, I had told him, maybe because of the spirit of surrender in which these offerings were made, embellished as they were by the superb acoustics that invariably featured these temples. I had described how moved I had been by the tears that ran down the cheeks of a priest as he listened to her rendering of 'Varadarajam upasmahe', a song in praise of the daily object of his puja. Abdul told his new bride how lucky he thought he had been to marry someone with such a wonderful, eclectic outlook as hers.

"But I also expressed my one regret in my happiest hour," he told me, "I told her how much I regretted not being able to listen to her sing at a temple." Salma's reply stunned him: "Oh, I have learnt Carnatic music. I haven't sung for years, but I'd love to take lessons again, practise hard, and sing for you one day at the Tiruchendur temple," she assured him.

At the Tiruchendur temple, Abdul who performed an archanai as he had done many times before, sidestepped the priest's usual question as he always did, by saying, "Please do it in Swami's (the lord's) name." But this time, the priest insisted on full disclosure of the names of the beneficiaries of the archanai! "Abdul and Salma," my friend said and then added their parents' names as well, fearful that the priest might take umbrage. Nothing of the sort happened, and the priest listened with a straight face. And after doing the puja, he blessed both of them, extracting an assurance that they would come back with their baby next time.