Book Review | In Love with Life, Cricket & Women
What sets Shikhar Dhawan’s ghosted autobiography apart is the honesty with which he has recounted his life as well as his time in the game
The refreshing candour takes the breath away. Books by retired cricketers are as inevitable as night following day as stepping away from the game gives them the time to sit and recognise and thank all those who were part of their heady journey. India’s ‘cricketdom’ is a thickly populated universe with a high place for the demigods of the game.
What sets Shikhar Dhawan’s ghosted autobiography apart is the honesty with which he has recounted his life as well as his time in the game. While sportsmen’s books follow a regular pattern of recounting experiences, praising colleagues and opponents they rated higher and a few comic situations they were in, frankness about everything is not necessarily highly sought after.
This Delhi cricketer dares to be different. He recollects in detail his saga of wine and women, his flings, his romances and his marriage to Aesha, a divorcee with two children, and the painful split from her. Having begun life as a prankster who was once taught a lesson in honesty by the school’s tuck shop owner about a piece of cake, ‘Babbu’, who was also known as ‘Gabbar’ for speaking Sholay dialogues on the cricket field, comes through as a simple guy who loved life, cricket and women.
Not the type to introspect over every ball faced and every stroke played, he allowed his easy-going personality to dictate his batting as much as he did in his romances during the first of which he even dared to bring home a Polish girlfriend as a live-in and then went through a painful experience as an English girl ‘ghosted’ him.
How many dark-skinned Indian men would confess that they find it difficult to build a relationship with Indian women, maybe because of their preference for lighter-skinned men. So, they preferred foreigners whose outlook towards men was not shaped by the colour of their skin. How many would dare take on their dearest ones in their own family to wed someone when they opposed the match?
On the field, as an opening batsman, Shikhar was also different and not only because he was a southpaw. The angles he created in striking the ball were unusual and which the opposing teams may have found bewildering. He admits he riled the Aussies the most — he made a splash in his first Test with the highest score of 187 on debut by an Indian — with his dynamic approach to batting that he leavened with the discipline needed to make the bigger scores.
What makes his account endearing is he often takes off to air thoughts about life, not with a philosopher’s heavy touch but in a very simple way and yet manages to bring out the quality that can enable anyone best to cope with life’s arrows and curveballs. “In life, resilience takes on a deeper meaning, because it is about staying strong in adverse situations and being able to adapt to the adversities you encounter. Resilience is about being able to rise again and again after falling.”
There may be a touch of Serena Williams’ philosophy in taking on adversity with a daring smile. A never-before revealed secret that he had pulled Sachin’s hair when the Master was on the massage table in a case of mistaken identity went to show how the prankster in him got away with that too. And this practical joker achieved so much without giving up that attitude of always having fun in life, including in a heavy social media presence.
The One: Cricket, My Life and More
By Shikhar Dhawan
HarperCollins
p. 288; Rs 699
