How Sachin Destroyed My Life: but gave me an All Access Pass to the world of Cricket by Sathaye Vikram

Author:Sathaye, Vikram [Sathaye, Vikram]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Popular Prakashan
Published: 2014-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

10

I Got An Exclusive

Sourav Ganguly exclusively spoke to the Telegraph and said, “No comments.”

This is a popular joke amongst the journalistic fraternity that signifies the desperation to get exclusive coverage. However it’s not the Indians alone but journalists from across the world who face the same pressure to get exclusive stories. Senior journalist Clayton Murzello once told me about an incident about a post-match press conference at Pietermaritzburg during the 2003 World Cup when India took on Namibia. This is one of the few cricket arenas with a tree inside the ground which the authorities have consciously decided not to uproot. A South African journalist who realised that not much had happened during the match asked Sourav Ganguly, “Sourav, did India have a specific strategy for the tree and can you share it with us?” Namibia may not yet be a great cricketing nation but giving the tree more importance than the team was a little harsh. But that’s the nature of the beast. Ricky Ponting once said to me, “It’s interesting that I once gave an interview three years back and I am still seeing newspapers in India printing parts of that interview as exclusive coverage.”

Sometimes foreign journalists also play truant when trying to get headlines out of the Indian team. During a warm-up game in the Australian tour of 2011, a local journalist kept on asking about various cricketers caste and background. Unknowingly people told him where the cricketers came from and which state they belonged to besides other such details. The next day there was a big headline in the papers which read, “THE CASTE SYSTEM STILL EXISTS IN THE INDIAN TEAM.” It was completely uncalled for but that’s the way it is.

As a student, I never imagined that someone could actually make a living out of sports writing and clicking photographs at sporting events. For some reason, one assumed these things got automatically printed. So when I finally met a sports journalist, I was shocked that such a profession actually existed. Get paid to watch and write about cricket! How unfair is that? But who knew that in a way one day I would be part of this privileged club.

I believe that even today more than 70 percent people read the newspapers backwards like an Urdu book, starting from the back page and working their way to page one. The right wing may misuse these stats to highlight the impact of the Mughal rule in India, but such was the effect of the sports page on many of our lives. It took me forever to accept that there was anything more important than sports. For years my parents and teachers tried to inculcate the habit of reading the editorial page but I just couldn’t go beyond cricket news. To me the scoreboard was my editorial which I would religiously digest. I came from a generation that collected centre-spread posters of cricketers from magazines like Sportstar, Sportsweek and Sportsworld. As a student, anyone who had a large collection of such posters was considered a dude.

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