Good Reads: Gully Gully by Aditya Iyer

TL;DR: Excellent book, great storytelling.

If you were to ask me, right now, about the most popular tournament in cricket, my instinctive response would be the Indian Premier League. For eight weeks every summer, the IPL is the hottest thing in sports. It holds India captive, hypnotises it to its beats, and tells it stories about Kohli, Kingfisher, and confetti.

The IPL, you see, fits snugly into cricket’s 21st century evolution: four-hour matches, guaranteed results, constant drama. For the romantics, there’s always Test cricket with its idyllic tempo and baroque aesthetic. Between these two sits the ODI format, with a long tradition but increasingly difficult to justify now. It’s neither as quick as T20 nor as deep as Test cricket. An ODI takes longer to complete than both formats in a single day. Like finding a Mainframe Server at an Apple keynote, its presence feels almost apologetic, kept alive perhaps solely by the gravitas of those two words: World Cup. The ODI World Cup is still the most prestigious tournament in men’s cricket.

India has a fraught relationship with world tournaments. For such a rich history in the sport, for all their resources and advantage from being the epicentre of limited-overs cricket’s explosive growth, they have just two ODI World Cups in their trophy cabinet.

The 2019 edition in England should have changed that. They arrived at the Manchester semi-final looking like champions-in-waiting. Then, under skies that seemed to have borrowed their mood from a Gulzar poem, they crumbled chasing 240. That generation, the most well-rounded collection of ODI cricketers India has ever had - Kohli, Rohit, Bumrah, Dhoni, Dhawan, Bhuvaneshwar, Hardik, Shami - watched a coronation turn into a prank show.

By 2023’s autumn, these fumbled races had accumulated like bad memories, becoming a punchline that even South Africa (cricket’s original C-word bearers) might have found excessive. Malcolm Gladwell, writing for the New Yorker in 2000, distinguished between choking and panicking - one a freezing, the other an overflow. India had mastered both arts in tournament knockouts between 2015 and 2022.

So here we were, at the 2023 World Cup, the concluding bars of a long orchestral piece. A home tournament, promising a final in front of 100,000 people, offering one last shot at the tall, golden mantlepiece. We know how it ended — a lot like how this weekend will, at the same venue.

Sportswriting has a blindspot: the tendency to get lost in scoreboards and statistics, turning every piece into a blow-by-blow retelling. This serves newspapers and cricket websites well, meeting the demand for basic reportage. For books and features, such pieces are a waste of both words and time.

The real story lives in the flesh and blood beneath those polyester jerseys. It lives in the fan sitting a hundred yards away, covered in sweat and breadcrumbs, his bum parked on a seat dressed in dried pigeon discharge. It lives in the hawker selling counterfeit jerseys outside the stadiums; and the bespectacled coaches who raise hordes of aspirants knowing that most of them have a one in a million chance, at best, of getting to wear the original, players’ edition jersey.

Aditya Iyer belongs to that rare species who can smell these stories from a distance. When news broke of his book on the 2023 World Cup, my fingers performed their Amazon pre-order dance with the kind of agility only muscle memory can bring.

Devotion in a Temple City

In the pre-tournament press conference, India head coach Rahul Dravid taglined the World Cup as “Khushiyon ka tyohaar” (a festival of joy). And there wasn’t a better place to kick it off than Chennai. Here, fandom gets both depth and breadth.

I speak with some authority here, having experienced the full spectrum of what the city has to offer: from the mechanical engineering student in his proud yellow Chennai Super Kings jersey (number 7, obviously) weeping at the mere sight of MS Dhoni, to the septuagenarian who hasn’t missed an international game since ‘94 and who, between reminiscences of Richards and Kapil, mourned the dying breed of maverick cricketers.

The MA Chidambaram Stadium (fondly called Chepauk) holds far fewer people than the stadiums in Mumbai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad, but you need to experience the loudness to believe it. During the 2024 IPL, when Dhoni walked out to face Punjab Kings, the decibel meter inside the stadium hit 112 dB - a number that is both exact and inadequate to describe the sound.

India’s World Cup journey began here against Australia. Before this match, Iyer sought out Saravanan Hari, the body-painted superfan now synonymous with Chepauk.

Saravanan Hari, in his natural habitat. Credit: Sportzpics

In one of those rare, cards-on-the-table conversations that occasionally grace sports journalism, Hari delivered the line that possibly best defines Chennai’s relationship with cricket: “Ennoda Kannu Maathiri” (Chennai Super Kings and MS Dhoni are as precious to me as my eyes).

It is poetic now, but at the Chepauk game, Virat Kohli and KL Rahul had to rescue India against a rampant Australian bowling attack. And they did it with such aplomb, with such little sweat even under sweltering humidity, you wondered what the rest of the tournament held.

Virat’s World Cup, Virat’s Generation

Virat Kohli’s innings in Chennai stamped his imperious form, and over the following weeks, he would repeatedly prove why the ODI format might as well be renamed in his honour. The Indian batting lineup was a feast of runs, but Kohli was its master chef, the axis around which everything else rotated. He finished with 765 runs - the most ever scored in a single edition of the men’s ODI World Cup.

Having grown up in Sachin Tendulkar’s era, when India literally paused for one man, I can say this - the reverence for Kohli is the closest echo we’ve heard of those times. Aditya hauls us into many of these moments of collective rapture: Eden Gardens trembling like a leaf, Wankhede’s roar reaching Pune, and Pune itself embracing Kohli’s cheekily-crafted century with the warmth of a supportive relative.

In Delhi, before India's match against Afghanistan, Iyer meets Rajkumar Sharma, who runs the West Delhi Cricket Academy, but is better known as the alchemist who transformed a chubby West Delhi kid into Virat Kohli. He now bears celebrity status, in a way similar to Ramakant Achrekar, who coached Tendulkar. Iyer observes parents arriving with their children, all singing variations of the same hopeful tune: “Make my child the next Kohli.”

Over an hour, Sharma unspools his story - from failed cricketer to a man who simply wanted to teach children the game he loved. His coaching philosophy, when laid bare, seems almost laughably simple for someone who now has TV channels camping outside his door.

By the second chapter of the book, where this interview with Rajkumar Sharma lives, these conversations emerge as the book’s backbone. Each city, each section, carries a parallel narrative, unconnected to India’s match that week yet equally compelling. And the author seems to have this remarkable quality, something between a confessor and a comfortable old armchair, that makes people share their stories with unexpected depth and texture.

Periphery

Some stories hit harder than others. Gary Sobers once said something about India losing more cricketers than the West Indies produce - a statement that shape-shifts between compliment and jibe depending on your mood. But Sobers wasn’t wrong. Beyond the small island of the fifteen players who dominate television screens exists a vast pool of hopefuls and veterans, who remain on the fringes of public attention, most times outside it.

Two of Aditya’s interviews in the book are with Rishi Dhawan and Ravikant Shukla.

Rishi Dhawan’s international career took off and landed before we could notice, spanning a mere four games. He is still playing the Ranji Trophy and other domestic cricket, even as his face starts showing the wrinkles of a 35-year-old, and hopes of an international comeback become slimmer than a hair’s breadth.

“I wasn’t playing cricket to one day play for India,” Dhawan tells Aditya with candour that makes you lunge forward. “I was playing cricket because I loved cricket. That’s it. I was as happy playing cricket there in Paddal as I am now playing for any IPL franchise or when I found out I was picked for India. I will tell you a secret, I actually never cared about playing professionally. Tennis-ball cricket was enough for me, but my friends and family thought I had some talent so they forced me to go to the selection trials.”

Ravikant Shukla never wore India’s baggy blue cap, but once captained Rohit Sharma, Cheteshwar Pujara, and Ravindra Jadeja in a World Cup final. Shukla was the captain of the India U-19 team in 2006. He led them to the final, watched his bowlers destroy Pakistan on the big day for a measly 106, and then saw, with wide eyes and a churning stomach, as his team fell apart during the chase. And that was it. His Ranji Trophy career was sturdy without the solidity or explosion of runs that would force national selectors to look at him.

Aditya writes, “Top-flight cricket may have turned its back on Ravikant, but the game is still his life, his passion and his career. He continues to play club cricket and helps out with a little bit of coaching at the Arjuna Cricket Academy (in Lucknow).”

The book meanders beautifully, through one interview with Sourav Ganguly (who appears in the Calcutta chapter) and another with Mayanti Langer in Bangalore, who has been as much of a game-changer in Indian sports broadcasting as Ganguly once was for the cricket team.

By the final chapter, Aditya serves up something similar to a grand Indian thali of cricket stories - each dish distinct, yet forming a complete meal. The World Cup, it turns out, was merely his excuse to excavate India’s layered relationship with a sport that has long transcended being just that.

Ahmedabad I & II - Tears In Heaven

India’s World Cup may have begun in Chennai, but the marquee ICC event had to start and end at the same station: the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. A giant, orange colosseum, claiming to hold either 110,000 or 130,000 people, depending on which side of the stadium you enter from and which plaque you read. Some people - not me, for legal purposes - affectionately call it The Modium. For those six weeks, it wasn’t just Indian cricket's headquarters but the nucleus of the cricket universe, conveniently hosting all the marquee fixtures of its biggest tournament - the opener, Australia vs England, India vs Pakistan, and the final.

During the India vs Pakistan game, in front of a taut sea of blue, the stadium DJ forgot his usual Bolly-patriotic fare and turned to a recent song from the Bollywood movie Adipurush, called “Jai Shri Ram”. The crowd erupted, and the song became a weapon to attack the eleven green-jerseyed enemies with. Aditya records a young fan yelping, “Yehi hai asli Amdavaadi!” (This is the real Amdavad!) and many others pointing the loaded chorus at Pakistan wicketkeeper Mohammad Rizwan.

Sharda Ugra’s revelation about BCCI’s desire to clothe India in all-orange that day feels less like news and more like an inevitability - the world's most powerful cricket body attempting to turn an India-Pakistan World Cup game into a Hindu Nation vs Islam gladiatorial spectacle.

There is no depth of pettiness too low for BCCI. And it showed through the tournament, especially at Pakistan games. An incredible mass of seven Pakistani journalists were granted visas in time for this match. Including the commentators, the total number of Pakistani nationals to add flavour at a World Cup game added up to, let me check my notes quickly here, ah yes, twelve. Global tournament, eh?

There is so much to say about the final, and yet, so little that needs to be said. Another congregation of the loud blue sea, another dream that took flight, and, on the hands of an exceptional bowling attack, came crashing. It ended with tears streaming down a lot of faces, not least those who came within a whisper of ultimate glory.

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The subcontinental fan is the cricket’s most coveted commodity. Watching cricket in India, Pakistan, or Sri Lanka reveals this old game’s emotional grip on these nations. Yet, if you are looking for the fuller story, you must take to the streets. In 2004, Rahul Bhattacharya’s “Pundits From Pakistan” (written during India's return to Pakistan after fifteen years) showed us how - it remains, at least for me, sportswriting’s gold standard, where the author takes us into the gullies of Karachi while narrating the cricket like a background score.

“Gully Gully” is a worthy companion to Pundits From Pakistan. For what it attempted, and gloriously achieved, it stands as a rare triumph in Indian sports literature. On an email thread, Aditya had told me about his fatigue with hagiographies, so I knew his book wouldn’t be one. But, god damn, I wasn’t expecting this. 10/10.