Dubai: The then CEO of Rajasthan Royals, Raghu Iyer, was startled as he was woken up by his wife at 5am in his Mumbai hotel room. A posse of policemen from Mumbai Police, including an assistant commissioner, was apparently waiting at the hotel lobby with an arrest warrant of three of his team’s cricketers — including Indian paceman Shanthakumaran Sreesanth.
“We had a sponsor shoot with Cyrus Broacha [a television anchor and video jockey] the previous day and my first thought was this was a prank. I was being made a ‘bakra’ [sacrificial lamb]. I even said so and tried to laugh it off. That’s when I was told [by the duty manager] it wasn’t a prank and that I was being summoned,” Iyer recounted about that fateful May morning, in 2013, to Boria Majumdar in the latter’s book Eleven Gods and a billion Indians: The On and Off the Field story of cricket in India and beyond, whose launch in India has coincided with the nation’s favourite pastime — the Indian Premier League.
Several anecdotes in Majumdar’s new work, which promises an insight into the modern history of Indian cricket, is devoted to IPL — but the volume of over 500 pages is worth more than just that. “It’s the first book ever that will take readers backstage and talk about what really happens in the world of Indian cricket — from controversies to humour to inside stories to disclosures,” the author, a cricket historian and sports journalist, told Gulf News. The book was launched with much fanfare in a Kolkata hotel last Saturday with Indian skipper Virat Kohli and Sourav Ganguly figuring in a chat show with Majumdar.
The arrest of Sreesanth & Co — certainly one of the darkest chapters of the league and what was the tip of the iceberg of the match-fixing scandal — has been described with a sense of drama. To go back to the book: “They [the police] were in no hurry and only after explaining to me in detail did they tell me that they were going to Ankeet Chavan’s room to pick him up,’ said Iyer. There was very little for him to do but feel gutted and apprehensive. The two others, S. Sreesanth and Ajit Chandila, had already been nabbed and were waiting in a police van outside. For Iyer, the happenings seemed more reel life than real, but the truth was he was one of the central characters of the drama. He was caught in the middle of the biggest crisis the IPL had ever seen, and as chief executive, he was expected to take charge of a situation that was on a downward spiral.”
Majumdar, describing the scenario in Kolkata — the City of Joy — when Kolkata Knight Riders won their first title in 2012, reflects on a high from the IPL. “It was around 11pm and KKR had just won the IPL for the first time in 2012. It was a Sunday night; it wasn’t supposed to take me more than 15 minutes to get to the television studio from my house. That’s what I had assumed but I was totally wrong. Central Kolkata that night was a sight to behold — people on motorbikes and in cars with KKR flags, running havoc all over the city.
“It was no less than India winning the World Cup and was an eye-opener of sorts. I was stunned. As the words ‘Korbo, Lorbo, Jeetbo Re’ [the team’s theme song] reverberated through the air, it was borne out to me that the IPL, a domestic cricket tournament, had indeed captured the fan’s imagination in a manner never seen before.”
It has indeed...and the magic still endures after 10 long years.
