VVS: MR NICE GUY
V.V.S. Laxman is a nice guy; the sort that finishes first. In Test matches against Australia in his heyday, Laxman certainly was the first among equals.
Now, seven-odd years after he flexed those magical wrists to send a fast bowler to the mid-wicket boundary one last time, he has an autobiography out: 281 and Beyond. And you wonder—what can the affable Laxman have for us? He hardly seems the type to call a spade anything but a spoon.
The book will surprise you. Laxman does not beat about the bush, and he tackles controversial topics, he names names… but, through it all, ‘Mr Nice Guy’ shines through. The book explores this aspect too. Laxman writes about his upbringing, the values ingrained in him by his parents—both of them doctors—and the importance of being a good person first. At a book launch in a Kolkata hotel, Sourav Ganguly and Zaheer Khan, even though
they tried their best to get a few laughs out, but couldn’t think of a single incident that makes him come out looking anything other than Mr Squeaky Clean.
Doesn’t that come in the way of being a commentator or the writer of an autobiography? “It’s natural. I am not trying... to be artificial… or trying to portray a different image. When I talk about the game, I don’t have to be critical of the players. It’s important to be honest, whether I am writing an article or speaking on a TV show. As a former cricketer, my job is to identify if something is going wrong, and be constructive with my analysis,” he said in a freewheeling interview.
In the book, Laxman talks at length about being disappointed with certain teammates, or coaches, during his career—even Rahul Dravid at one time, would you believe it! But among the most fascinating insights is Laxman’s description of the demons in his head, dealing with crises of confidence, which led him to contemplate quitting before he had turned 30.
He dives into touchy topics early on in the book. An instance of this is his examination of the senior versus junior culture in the Indian dressing room. People close to Indian cricketers have always known about this—how coteries form, how newcomers must do their time, so to say, before they are admitted into these. By most accounts, this changed in the 2000s, and giants like Sachin Tendulkar and Anil Kumble, Sourav Ganguly and Dravid, and Laxman, of course, did their bit to make it happen. “When I entered the team, Sachin and Anil were great at that, trying to go that extra yard. Most of us were in awe of them. So they would make the effort. When you play for your country, it is important to be comfortable, so you can do your best. The atmosphere has to be right, and no one needs to be under pressure, no one has to worry about feeling wanted. I think when we became seniors… the juniors came in, they all became our friends... we performed better because of that.”
The other subject that players of the previous era tend to pussyfoot around is matchfixing. Laxman focuses on the aftermath, of the team being pulled out of the abyss by the Ganguly-John Wright combine, the 2001 series, the fantastic run through the 2000s.
But how seriously did that episode hit a young cricketer? Laxman made his international debut in 1996. Skeletons started tumbling out in 1997, reaching a clattering crescendo in 2000, when he was 26. Was there a feeling of gloom and doom? Or, for a kid who could have chosen a career in medicine as per the wishes of his parents, the feeling that cricket wasn’t the way to go? No, not for a moment, he says. But it was tough. Working with the now-defunct Indian Airlines meant interacting a lot with customers, and there it even got nasty. “Some of them used to be quite harsh, abusing me... saying that we were playing with their emotions… we were as disappointed, we were frustrated... it wasn’t easy, for sure. But never did I feel I had chosen the wrong career,” he says. But, and he reiterates, “it’s what we did in 2000-2001… getting back the love... of the fans—they are the biggest stakeholders. It was the lowest phase for Indian cricket, but we came out of it, and that was more important.”
There is still the one dream he couldn’t chase down—winning a
Test series in Australia. “They have kicked the door open,” he says of Virat Kohli’s team. “We are the No. 1 side... and Australia is not at their best.
The team can do it now.”
Laxman hasn’t lost that big smile, the demeanour of a man still in touch with reality despite achieving great success. “It’s what I am naturally,” he says. Natural—he was that as a batsman.
It’s a word he uses a lot to describe himself. And, really, it’s the word that sums him up—almost as well as ‘nice’.
Laxman hasn’t lost that big smile, the demeanour of a man in touch with reality despite achieving success