Skip to main content

Gautam Gambhir: Tribute to a Persevering, Honest Man and Career

There is a news coming out of Delhi Daredevils' dressing room that Gautam Gambhir has decided to forego his $550,000 salary in the wake of disappointing performance of the team so far in the season. For the first time in history of IPL, a player would play for his team 'absolutely free'. For ones who are busy converting this figure into Indian rupee, that's close to INR 3.5 Crores. A game and tournament that are solely based on the premise of earning 'loads of money', that's exemplary gesture from one of the finest and hardworking cricketers from India. You wouldn't expect anything less anyway from Gambhir. He wears his heart on his sleeves. A pretty chuffed up guy who wouldn't tie the shoelaces until and unless he is prepared to win a game of cricket. Moreover, his humanitarian works off-late has endeared him to masses. He is nationalist and hasn't made a fuss out of it.

I know him from the time he was grinding it out in domestic cricket. He was in for the national reckoning back in even 1999. There were always two three names in domestic cricket who were hovering around for national call-up and Gambhir was one of them. I remember his debut, against Aussies in Mumbai Test, 2004. He was out for 3, caught behind on McGrath bowling and it wasn't a good shot. I thought at the moment: was this guy really deserving of all this hoopla? Now 14 years after that, he has amassed thousands of international runs and I have become more understanding of our great game. Dhoni always says that it's not always about the result, process must matter at the end of the day and Gambhir was part of a renaissance of Indian cricket. He has served his country well and with distinction.

And for that, I and many of my compatriots shall be grateful and humbled. This post offers a fitting, three fingers royal salute to a great man and competitor.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Love and Friendship

Friendship is an aspect of life that’s not controlled by its beholders. Ideal friendships, well they are the things of past now. Many a times we have seen our parents or their parents talking about their old great friends and how amusingly they tell us about their bonding, the moments they spent together and we see a ‘priceless’ twinkle in their eyes…..that’s something which is missing from modern friendships. There are terms & phrases like ‘yaar tu to apna bhai hai’, ‘yaar tu to ghar ka aadmi hai’ which even today invoke something very beautiful inside our hearts but we all know that the feelings underneath them are ‘hollow’, they are just mere words, ‘emotionless’ and ‘impassive’. Well who am I to comment on such an indefinable ‘qualitative’ perspective? I’m one of you, those wretched creatures that are still in need of true, great friendships. Well I certainly can’t say that I haven’t got friends. I’ve got friends, plenty of them in fact, and some of them are real great. I s...
1 comment
Read more

Racing Extinction (2015) : A Commentary

It's really hard to switch on to a different language from the one you have constantly been tinkering with. I grew so accustomed to writing in Hindi in last few days that it started dawning on me that I might never be good again with my English. So this is a tester, ladies and gentlemen. Yesterday, one of my movie group friends, an American by nationality, questioned my fondness of documentaries. I specifically wrote in one of my columns that documentaries demand your unwavering attention and once you gave 'that' to them, you are rewarded much more handsomely than a proper, narrative, fictitious film. My reasoning for believing so is that a documentary is an experience of a creative process. It doesn't get made to 'entertain' you. They are there to reveal something to you. They teach you something. You get overwhelmed by them. 'Racing Extinction (2015)' was one such documentary. I watched it in last couple of days. I couldn't complete it in one ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Virat Kohli Could Learn from Sourav Ganguly's Career

This IPL season might be dubbed as 'Kohli's IPL' in years to come. He is unarguably the best exponent of white-ball batsmanship going around. However, for someone like me who places a great emphasis on longest form of Cricket i.e. Test Cricket, until and unless he proves himself in seeming and swinging conditions of England and New Zealand (I believe in him and thus shall wish him luck), I shall still rank him behind Kane Williamson and Joe Root. Just to make sure I'm impartial to this debate, I put my favorite cricketer of all time i.e. Sourav Ganguly behind Sachin, Sehwag, Laxman and Dravid when it comes to rank him in FAB FIVE of Indian Batsmanship because he simply wasn't as good as them in test cricket. Many call him a very good test cricketer and maintaining an average of 40 in test cricket from the very beginning till the very end signifies their reasoning but still, he fell short of 45/50 that makes a batsman statistical behemoth in purest form of Cricket. ...
Post a Comment
Read more