Three days before India played England at Lord’s in the first of the four Test series in July 2011 a dinner was held in honour of Mahendra Singh Dhoni at the London Hilton in Park Lane. Dhoni was at the height of his career. His team was ranked No. 1 in both Test and one-day cricket, having just fulfilled the great dream of Indian cricket fans by winning the 50-over World Cup four months earlier, with Dhoni himself hitting the winning run.
Following that victory Dhoni, his team and their spouses had been invited to high tea with the then president of India, Pratibha Patil, on the grounds of the Raj Bhavan in Mumbai. Prizes had been showered on them by the BCCI, various state governments, and public and private companies. Ferrari had given Dhoni a 599 GTO India edition. Uttarakhand had offered Dhoni a residential plot or a house in the hill station of Mussoorie and it was announced that a stadium would be built in the state in his honour.
The dinner was to launch the MS Dhoni Foundation and the event, backed by high-profile business names such as Citibank and Asprey, saw a room full of rich Indians, drinking champagne and spending vast sums on cricket memorabilia. The highlight of the evening was the auction of the bat with which Dhoni hit the six to win the 2011 World Cup for India. The price rocketed, reaching £60,000, making it easily the costliest cricket bat ever.
A young man went up to the stage to receive the bat from Dhoni. You could see he was nervous. What he did on meeting his hero was sensational. He was so overwhelmed that as he held Dhoni’s hand and took the bat from him he said that he would pay not £60,000 but £100,000. I was sitting not far from Farokh Engineer. He raised his eyebrows and confessed he had never seen anything like this before. It showed how rich some Indians were and the impact Dhoni’s success had had on them. This tale would have a curious postscript.
I narrated this story in an article I wrote for the Financial Times discussing how Indians had taken over this very English game. A few days later I got an email from Delhi asking me whether I had got the facts right. Did the young man who went up to collect the bat really pay £100,000 despite the fact that the winning bid was £60,000? I confirmed he had, and it emerged that the real bidder was a man in Delhi. He had asked a friend to bid for the bat and told him he could go up to £100,000. The young man, clearly overwhelmed by holding the hand of the man who had won the World Cup for India, decided that paying £60,000 was not enough, he should go all the way and pay £100,000. Nothing could better illustrate what Dhoni meant to those who follow Indian cricket.
***
Mihir Bose’s The Nine Waves is a tour de force. The most entertaining and comprehensive book on cricket in this country to be published yet, it tells the story of the nine great waves that have rolled through the history of Indian cricket, from India’s international debut in 1932 to the incredible achievements of Virat Kohli’s team today. Each wave or era was chock-full of mesmerizing stars, thrilling moments, great victories, heartbreaking losses and significant turning points—this book tells the story of each of them in great detail.
***