Interviews

An Exclusive Conversation with Eminent Journalist Pradeep Magazine

Pradeep Magazine’s memoir Not Just Cricket is a story of lived, real experiences, of joy, sorrow, fear, loss and hope, and about how an uprooted identity shapes one’s attitude towards society and the nation. From the Kashmir of the 1950s to terror-stricken Punjab, from the Mandir-Masjid divide and the impact of Mandal politics to the tragic consequences of the Kashmir situation-Magazine paints a fascinating portrait of modern India.

At the core of the book are accounts of some of the most epochal events in India’s cricketing history, woven around personal encounters with several well-known cricketers.

The HarperCollins team decided to get up close and personal with the author. Read on to find out what he had to say:

You have had an illustrious career as an eminent sports journalist over the last three decades. How did you decide to venture into writing books? 

A. The first book on match fixing, Not Quite Cricket, was not something I had planned to write. After my news story appeared in the newspaper, The Pioneer, in 1997 from Georgetown in Guyana, where I was covering the India-West Indies cricket series, V.K. Karthika of  Penguin approached me to write a book on it. I was reluctant but her persuasive skills prevailed. I am happy I did that book and am thankful to her for pushing me into it.

This book happened after two failed attempts at writing biographies of India’s two fascinating cricket icons – Tiger Pataudi and Sourav Ganguly during my active journalistic career. Even this may not have materialised, had Amit Agarwal not pushed me into signing a contract with HarperCollins to write a Indian cricket history in 2013. The real push came when my proposal to write a book that combined my cricket reportage with the social-political reality of that period was accepted by the New India Foundation in 2019.

Your forthcoming book Not Just Cricket, as the title suggests, is not just about cricket. What led you to weave social commentary with your forte, cricket commentary? 

A. As I have said, I had been long flirting with many ideas of writing a second book, after my first was released just before the 1999 Cricket World Cup began in England.

I was happy writing a weekly column, till a few years later a distracted mind clogged with all sorts of trivialities felt the need to write something more meaningful and satisfying. The impulse came when my friend author Akshaya Mukul persuaded me to apply for the New India Foundation Fellowship, which encourages writers to explore India through politics, history, culture and many more aspects of its history that have not been written about.

I suddenly came alive to the possibility of combining my reportage of  international, domestic cricket with a bit of personal history that I had lived and seen because of the tumultuous happenings in the eighties-nineties, be it in Kashmir or Punjab. To live in the times of the Ram Temple movement, the horrific tragedy of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the implemention of the Mandal Commission and the terror-stricken Khalistani movement in Punjab, were life-changing experiences. Chance had allowed me, by virtue of my birth in Srinagar and later the years I spent in Punjab, to see upclose some of these cataclysmic events and cricket reporting had given me the opportunity to travel across the country and the cricket-playing world. This opened my eyes and mind to different worlds, cultures, religions and attitudes, other than the one I was born into.

Newspaper reporting has its limitations and not everything one sees finds space in print. One also sees connections of one event with another much later, in hindsight. I have had multiple interactions with most star cricketers of my time, be it Pataudi, Bedi, Gavaskar, Kapil, Azharuddin, Tendulkar, Ganguly, Dravid, Dhoni and many others. Like most cricket fans and journalists, I have had many fond and insightful interactions with people and cricketers of Pakistan in my three visits to that country. My own expose of match-fixing and various administrative disasters, which I was privy to but due to various constraints had not written before, were now possible to write about.

I now had the opportunity to combine these various threads into a single, larger narrative. I knew it was not going to be easy, but once the New India Foundation, and Ramachandra Guha accepted my proposal, I put my heart and mind into the project.

While your book covers political issues across the spectrum, from terror-stricken Punjab to the Mandir-Masjid divide, do you think you’re biased when it comes to writing about Kashmir as a Kashmiri Pandit? 

A. I believe we are all prisoners of our prejudices. We accept and reject, believe or disbelieve events and incidents through our conditioned mind . As Gabriel Garcia Marquez puts it so succinctly and beautifully, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”  We are all products of causes and conditions and have no hand in the place and the religion we are born into and the caste and identity label we acquire.

I can’t take away the fact that I am a Kashmiri and born into a Pandit family. That my native place is strife torn and has a contested, violent history and the Muslim-Hindu  divide is a given fact, is not my creation. All I can do, and have tried to attempt in this book is to make sense of Kashmir’s traumatic history and its impact on people. I don’t think I have let my being a Hindu colour my perception of Kashmir’s past or the present. I record the pain of its people, both Muslims and Hindus. I firmly believe that the vicious cycle of  cause and effect that leads to nothing but destruction can only be broken by not letting the perceived or real wrongs of the past decide your present action. That is the only way to move ahead towards  a future that is based on empathy, love and care. We need to uproot the very foundations  of hate and revenge that condition our responses and lead to even greater suffering and pain. I may be labelled as a Kashmiri Pandit but at heart I am a human being first.

As someone who has covered cricket in India for many years, what do you think is the reason it largely dominates India’s sporting discourse? 

A.  It a question not easy to answer. Many feel, like Ashish Nandy, that the slow rhythm and long hours of the game that spill into many days, suits the Indian temperament. But  with India now having embraced the shortest version of the game only goes to show that cricket, like cinema, is now a pop culture that transcends its past and history. Our Colonial masters spread this game in India , making us  believe that  cricket is the ultimate symbol of fairplay and morality, just like the “superior Whites” themselves. India adopted it with great vigour. With each passing year it became bigger and bigger. First radio and then live TV coverage spread its mass base like fire. Revenues earned from selling TV rights made its governing body and the players richer and richer. It is now, perhaps, the greatest mass selling product in the history of sport anywhere in the world.

Tell us about your most memorable encounter with a sportsperson. 

A. Again not an easy question. There have been many, especially at the beginning of my career when I was more a fan than a cynical hard-boiled cricket reporter. If I have to pick one out of many, I would pick the one with the West Indian superstar Brian Lara, which I describe in the book. To watch him sink into his car seat, sighing heavily and utter the words “pressure maan, pressure” was the moment of great realisation that beneath the façade lies the real  picture.

What comes after Not Just Cricket

A. Not sure. I have always been thinking of  writing short stories. I believe that our intentions and emotions when we interact with society and the world are best revealed in how we behave and react in our day to day lives. I might make an attempt to do so. I have another subject in mind where I can explore the caste/class structure of our society where harmony and exploitation exist side by side, almost in perfect balance.

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