Dravid and the lost beauty of slowness
Ajaz Ashraf, in his article in the Daily Times , pays tribute to Rahul Dravid, who announced his retirement recently
Siddhartha Talya
25-Feb-2013
Ajaz Ashraf, in his article in the Daily Times, pays tribute to Rahul Dravid, who announced his retirement recently. He writes in praise of Dravid's style of play - something he says India "as a nation mastered, and then subsequently banished from our cricketing repertoire".
Some of Dravid’s batting essays are to cricket what, say, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or Llosa’s The War of the End of the World are to the literary world. Like them, Dravid hoped to conceive his stay at the wicket on a mammoth scale, in terms of endeavour, intent and beauty. He succeeded mostly; at times he failed, as he disappointingly did at the fag end of his career. A typically successful Dravid innings did not have the spectators in raptures, on their feet, for every moment of his presence at the crease. His oeuvre wasn’t of the page-turner kind, those books you thumb through cover to cover on a flight or during the inordinate wait at a railway station for a train long delayed.
Siddhartha Talya is a senior sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo