Drafts and Paintings
The change of g̶u̶a̶r̶d̶ brush
Four incomplete drafts are sitting in my writing folder as I type this. Some sketched for framework, others written to various degrees. Their working titles - Rohit-Exit, England Series-Youth, MUFC-Magic, When Talent Met Courage - make me wonder if I’ll have to lose them to relevance by next Sunday.
Rohit Sharma retiring from Test cricket is significant, even if not shocking. In a recent podcast episode with ex-Australian captain Michael Clarke, Rohit had sported a wide grin while speaking about India’s Test series in England this summer. In the time since, reports emerged that the BCCI were looking to move on from him as captain, after a disastrous run of personal and collective form. The farce in Sydney did not help. At his stature and age, being nudged out from the throne, however gently, must’ve cut deep. With Rohit’s departure, the third domino from a formidable, ageing Test team falls - Ashwin and Pujara being the first out of the gate.
The fourth followed on Saturday morning. IndianExpress’ excellent Devendra Pandey and Venkata Krishna B broke the news that Virat Kohli has formally communicated his decision to retire from Test cricket. His reasons remain shrouded, but one might hazard a calculated guess given the timing of it all, his own Test-batting form, and leadership ambitions. Having watched him sprint four laps of the pitch for an all-run boundary during this season’s IPL, I refuse to believe fitness or preparation could’ve been a factor.
The BCCI, caught wrong-footed by this exodus of their oracles, has pleaded Virat to reconsider, at least until the English summer concludes.
Should Virat stick to his decision, India will start the England tour with a batting lineup straight out of a university farewell party. Yashasvi Jaiswal, Shubman Gill, and Sai Sudharshan - all 25 or younger - are likely to be in the top four, with KL Rahul as the wisened elder to hopefully plug a little bit of the gap left by Pujara and Kohli. And there isn’t a tougher baptism for their techniques than swinging, seaming, wet English pitches under ash-coloured skies. None of Jaiswal, Gill or Sudharshan have played a Test series there before.
A five-Test tour with such untested youth evokes trepidation, yet it also throws wide the gates for cricket’s next generation to announce themselves.
**
There isn’t much magic left with Manchester United these days. The team is languishing at 15th in the Premier League table, closer in points to the bottom than the top. Every new game is another arduous rep in a futile workout. The old United is nostalgia; today’s reality is this landfill of disappointment.
The last time they won three consecutive games was in January. Two of their opponents in those games were Rangers FC and Basel. Decent teams but hardly the kind to induce sleepless nights. To draw a perfect frame - that stretch of three was sandwiched between home thrashings at the hands of Brighton and Crystal Palace.
Their head coach is young, a bit too young, someone you can picture in a Brylcreem ad. He is ambitious and earnest, easy to like. But his report card isn’t sparkling with As or even Bs. Not yet, at least. Under his reign, the arid patch of mediocrity has stretched wider, sometimes to a point where you wonder if there’s a way back to the green. His league record is amongst the worst ever by a Manchester United coach.
United once turned ordinary footballers into champions, buoyed by a dressing room packed with world-class players and stands filled with voices demanding perpetual excellence. The same dressing room is now a graveyard for playing and coaching talent.
On the night of 17th April, Olympique Lyonnais - nicknamed Lyon - came over for the second leg of the Europa League quarter-finals. The first leg had finished 2-2. United were expected to win this home game and advance to the semi-finals.
On cue: 2-0 before half-time. Easy United wins are rarer than uncut diamonds these days, so it was a good time to count the blessings and run. Then, midway through the second-half, Lyon scored two and brought the game back to parity. Ninety minutes of regulation time finished; another thirty painful minutes of extra-time beckoned. Lyon, with a numerical disadvantage due to a red card, scored twice more in extra-time. 2-4. This was 2025 Manchester United distilled into one game: decent until absolutely calamitous.
Six minutes remained between them and another self-inflicted defeat, another tide of recriminations from supporters, another week of television experts gesturing in all directions to apportion blame.
United pulled one back, kindling the faintest hope, but the equaliser proved elusive. The clock showed 120 minutes - just a few breaths left. And then, this club with whole libraries dedicated to its comeback stories, scored twice in ninety breathless seconds. One goal from a player who has been at United since the age of seven; another from an expensive buy who has endured relentless criticism over his inconsistency, nearly lost his place in the squad, but never their admiration for his professionalism.
5-4 United. Game, set, match. If this isn’t magic, what is?
**
The other draft I had in mind was about the Champions League semi-final between Internazionale and Barcelona. Both the legs, but especially the second leg. A game that went one way, then the other, then looked to be decided until someone who hadn’t scored a goal in god knows how long pinged one in. For 120 minutes, two supremely gifted teams, built to different blueprints but equally versatile, traded blows like heavyweights. Big semi-finals and finals are often drab, aren’t they? The stakes climb too high, and coaches become turtles retreating into shells. Not Simone Inzaghi and Hansi Flick, not Internazionale and Barcelona. It was football that left you wired at 4 a.m., adrenaline still coursing as the night’s darkness yielded its first reluctant glimmers of dawn.
This was a frame-by-frame recreation of Novak vs Nadal at the French Open in 2021. If you know, you know.
**
Sports is central to my life. It is what I have breathed for as long as my memory can go back. Everything I treasure about human ability, endurance, grit, tenacity, I first found here. My exposure to the wonders of the written and spoken word was through sports too. I have no shame in admitting - I read Rohit Brijnath before Enid Blyton, heard Bhogle and Benaud before Attenborough.
By the same token, I owe a lot to sports. It got me conversations with writers I had read in newspapers and magazines, hear from cricketers I had seen taking five-wicket hauls, interview an Asian Games gold-medallist boxer. Sport gave me a chance to shoot the breeze with Milkha Singh and even feel his generosity of spirit, as he saw through my early-20s nerves and asked me to dunk a tall glass of non-sugared nimbu paani.
As the title of the drafts will tell you, I would’ve written about sports this week too. But, something in the mind glitches when the backdrop goes from Test cricket’s Victorian aesthetic to drones and air raids. As you read reports of two stalwarts moving away from a game they cherish the most, you stumble onto footage of people running for cover and a reporter being asked to keep giving updates even as a projectile goes over his head. Through a friend comes word of his family being stranded 5 kilometres away from an airbase under attack.
Meanwhile, anchors in creased suits and luxury watches are frothing at the mouth, demanding destruction like the crowd at Old Trafford demanded goals that night. One panelist, a major, says, “Aaj Pakistan ke sar pe maut ka nanga naach hoga.” I think of the time when India and Pakistan cricketers teamed up as one side and played an exhibition game in Colombo, a mere fortnight after the LTTE blew up the Central Bank, just to advocate the radical concepts of sanity and peace. Not once, in three feverish days of television and news channel coverage, have I heard those two words getting used.
On April 25th, three days after twenty-six tourists were gunned down by terrorists in Pahalgam, director Siddhartha Anand tweeted a clip from his movie Fighter. The clip shows Hrithik Roshan as an air force pilot thrashing a Pakistani terrorist. Fighter is an action film. There was ample acreage to pick from to express anger, rage, or any other emotions Anand could’ve been feeling. The dialogues in the clip revealed quite a bit about his choice.
Ten seconds in, Hrithik holds the other guy in a headlock, and starts, “PoK ka matlab hota hai Pakistan occupied Kashmir. Tumne occupy kiya hai, maalik hum hain.” (PoK stands for Pakistan occupied Kashmir. You’ve occupied, we are the owners.)
Maalik, owners, masters. Interesting verbiage.
Anyway, moving on. In the next frames, Hrithik delivers the coup de grâce. “Tum jaise terrorists ki wajah se, agar hum badtameezi pe utar ayein, toh har gali, har mohalla, chappa chappa, IoP ban jaayega. Indian. Occupied. Pakistan.” (Because of you terrorists, if we start behaving without restraint, every street, lane, nook and corner in your country will become IoP.) This entire sequence is garnished with a Jai Hind, of course.
Fighter is one in a convoy of films from the past decade deliberately stoking patriotic and nationalistic fires. Almost without exception, they position Pakistan or some Islamist extremist state as the enemy. Most, if not all, have harvested hundreds of crores in revenue, revealing a country’s willingness to bite the blue pill. The volume of this hypernationalist, let’s-destroy-Pakistan movement has been amplified immeasurably by multiple ceasefire violations and terror attacks that can be reliably traced back to heavily-guarded office compounds in Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Watch the news, scroll your socials, and you’ll know - that major, demanding death to dance naked on a country’s corpse, is evidently not the only Indian with such sentiments.
Rahul Bhattacharya’s Pundits From Pakistan is a seminal book in so many ways, not least in the picture of Pakistan it paints for Indian readers. What starts as a cricket tour diary soon becomes the story of an Indian reporter experiencing the country while the cricket plays on as ambient music. With every chapter, you get drawn further into people we might never get to meet, a culture we may never experience. The book is peppered with examples of locals - auto drivers, artists, and poets alike - opening their hearts and homes to him and fellow Indians on that tour.
It has only been twenty years since Bhattacharya collected his visa at the last minute and took the flight to Lahore. Two quick decades, during which social media and 24-hour news have become part of the information consumption funnel. Two quick, long, damaging decades.
With every passing clip, I wonder what the last three weeks will do to our collective psyche about the neighbour. And whether we will even be granted the possibility of decoupling our perception of their people from their mortar-addicted, stable-as-a-cokehead military administration.