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June 2 - June 6, 2023
‘There are a lot of people who claim to have been responsible for the Mahi phenomenon. Some claim to be mentors, others claim to be coaches. But, according to me and Mahi himself, he’s had only one coach, and that’s sir,’ Chittu says, pointing at the elderly gentleman seated on the other side of the wooden desk.
Dhoni’s style of studying, like every other aspect of him, was unique. The night before the exam, his sister would read the notes out aloud while he closed his eyes and listened. That was all he needed. Banerjee isn’t too surprised about how Dhoni approaches run chases in limited-overs cricket. He’s seen him employ the same ‘cool as ice’ demeanour to the examinations he faced off the field. ‘He realized that the more tense you are, the more nervous you get and your performance gets affected. He employs the same mindset to everything in life. Exam and cricket ka funda are the same. If out ho
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‘A lot of people tell me, “Dhoni se maangte kyun nahi ho, money and gifts? (Why don’t you ask Dhoni for money and gifts?)” A student–teacher relation is very different. Guru dakshina nahi poochna chahiye. (A guru should not ask for any offering from his disciple.) The only thing I ask of him is to keep performing at his best or at times to win the World Cup,’ says Banerjee.
As regards the power his disciple generates, Banerjee puts it down to his pahari origins. ‘He always had powerful arms. Pahari people are generally strong mentally and physically. They’re used to going up and down (the hill trail), and in Mahi’s case, woh khaata bhi bahut tha (he used to eat a lot). Back then, he would eat whatever he got. Now he’s a raja. He can eat whatever he wants. Dildaar hai khaane mein! (He has a voracious appetite!)’
‘His nazar (eye) is all around, even when he’s on the ground. I’m sure he can even spot things that happen in the crowd in the biggest stadiums in the world, and even remember a few faces. On (his Ranji) debut when he was batting (Dhoni made 40 and 68 not out in that game), his father, as usual, was peeping through one of those grooves on the boundary wall. And he spotted his father in spite of the pressure of playing his first high-level knock,’ Chhotu recalls. You almost want to believe this to be true.
‘Uss raat hamara banda sahi jagah pahunch nahi paaya, lekin aakhir mein sahi jagah pahunch hi gaya life mein. (That night, our man was not able to reach the right place; but eventually, he did reach the right place in life.)’ Chhotu-bhaiya couldn’t have put it better.
While describing some of Dhoni’s shots from those knocks, Chhotu gets up and cleans the photos with a cloth and a lot of care. It’s something that he has to do often, considering the proximity to the bustling and dusty Sujata Chowk. He also has thousands of newspaper clippings dating back from 1995–96. ‘You’re the real Dhoni chronicler,’ I tell him. Chhotu smiles.
‘Woh run maare, tabh mere saath hoga, jab nahi maarega, tabhi bhi mere saath hoga. (If he scores runs, he’s with us; if he doesn’t, he’s still with us.) It was the same in his schooldays. Tabhi bhi mera dost tha, aaj India ke liye khel raha hain, abhi bhi mera dost hai. (Then too he was my friend, and now that he’s playing for India, he still remains my friend.)’
He was in many ways, India’s first and only fauji captain.
Dhoni himself has often said it’s the ‘bitter taste’ of liquor that puts him off from drinking it. But he also has never had an issue with others around him indulging in it. Those in Ranchi recall how in his younger days he would make it a point to ensure that his closest friends always had a nice time while celebrating one of his cricketing achievements, and he would sit in the middle with a glass of drink which he rarely sipped out of even as others guzzled away. But this pales in comparison when he plays the overindulgent host whenever his fauji friends visit him. According to someone very
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On most other occasions, it’s the housekeeping staff or the waiters in the restaurants who end up as the beneficiaries. It’s rather common for the last guy who cleans Dhoni’s room to be asked whether anyone at home would want to watch that night’s match, or for a waiter on the morning shift to receive a call from the restaurant with a simple message: ‘I’ve kept two tickets for you at the front desk.’
Shankar would soon take Dhoni along to various military establishments around the country but there would be a lot of protocol to be followed. Around a year later, they began discussing how to get the new World Cup–winning captain officially associated with the army so that, among other things, he could visit even more military establishments. Col Shankar and a few of his colleagues approached the then army chief General V.K. Singh with a proposal. Kapil Dev, the last man to have lifted the World Cup trophy, and the legendary Malayalam actor Mohan Lal had already been made honorary lieutenant
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‘He wanted to join the Parachute Regiment. Number one, because it’s a volunteer force. Number two is that it’s pan-India. So, they are not people from one particular state or region. That intrigued him,’ explains Col Shankar. There were other perks as well. Being a paratrooper is considered elite. So, Dhoni knew that they would have more exciting missions than the regular army. Moreover, most of his friends from the NSG were paratroopers.
who isn’t at all surprised to have seen Dhoni proudly donning his uniform and marching towards the podium to receive his Padma Bhushan award in April 2018.
He also quickly recalls the time Dhoni beat former Australian pace great Glenn McGrath, a lifelong hunter, at a clay-pigeon shooting face-off in Kimberley during the 2009 IPL which was played in South Africa. And he did so as clinically and cerebrally as he finishes off a run chase.
‘We also have the usual yardsticks ranging up to “outstanding”. But if your boss writes that you are a good asset both in war and peace, then you have achieved the highest honour,’ says Col Shankar. Like Dhoni did when former India coach Gary Kirsten said, ‘I want to go to war with this guy,’ a few months after the two had seen India lift the World Cup on that famous night at the Wankhede stadium.
The army, Dhoni is said to believe, is always put on a pedestal because they’re expected to have an unreasonable level of moral uprightness, and as a result, any negative news about them alters the rest of the country’s opinion of them greatly. And it’s this reason that pushes him to try and promote the positives of the army to a greater extent.
‘His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.’ No, this is not Col Shankar raving about his friend again. That’s Dr John Watson summing up his good friend Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, the first of their adventures. In the novel, the good doctor, like the good colonel here, is astonished at how Holmes is not only ignorant of famous philosophers and theories; he also claims to not know that the earth travels around the sun or what constitutes the solar system.
‘If he’s in England, Mumbai bhool gaya. Mumbai gaya toh Ranchi bhool gaya. Woh jahaan hai, woh waheen hai. (When he’s in England, he forgets about Mumbai. When he’s in Mumbai, Ranchi is forgotten. He’s present wherever he is.) At that point, nothing else matters to him. That’s why everyone says he lives in the present.’ If true, then it kind of adds some gravitas to his peculiar, even infamous, comment on the New Zealand tour of 2009 about getting ready for a Test in Napier only eighteen hours after arriving in the city.
‘Because the future is planned in his head, he can afford to live in the present. We’re not surprised by any decision he takes, like the rest of the world. Uske pet mein rehta hai. (It remains with him.) Nobody else knows. It’s only after he takes a decision that you’ll be like, wow, how long did he have that in his head,’ says Chittu.
‘He’s able to savour every moment and relish it more than others, whether it is good or bad, because woh saas leta rehta hai (he keeps breathing). You notice him, he’ll always take deep breaths despite being the fittest cricketer in the country as if he wants to make the most of everything, rather than rushing through life like most of us do,’ says another friend.
‘But his journey was different once he took over as Test and ODI captain. Before that, he was a general manager with around seven to eight CEOs in the team, all former India captains or superstars in their own right—Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Sehwag, Laxman, Bhajji (Harbhajan Singh), Zaheer Khan, Nehra, to name a few. And overnight he gets promoted to being the MD and suddenly he has to look after all those CEOs,’ More says. Dhoni took over as ODI captain for the seven-match series against Australia in September 2007.
There has been one time, though, the first and only so far, when Dhoni himself initiated a conversation over WhatsApp with the colonel. It happened the day the Indian army carried out cross-border attacks into Pakistan. ‘He messaged asking for the numbers of those guys. I said, “They won’t have telephones now but I’ll get them for you.” He got through to some people and said, “Well done, we are proud of you.” Look at the motivation the chief officer would have had after M.S. Dhoni’s call. He understands what is important in life, which is a rare quality.’
Some of the cricketers he grew up playing cricket with in Ranchi recall him having only one rule about run chases which shockingly was: ‘Never take it till the last over. Finish it off before that.’ Maybe Dhoni was still to discover his penchant for sudden death back then.
Col Shankar reasons that Dhoni is able to be the same because of his two staunch principles in life—‘control the controllables’ and that ‘no man can have everything in life, there’s always that one thing you will never be able to have’.
‘This was Mahi’s way of saying it’s no big deal. My bowlers got them all out for 160 and we are chasing it down, usme kaunse badi baat hai (there’s no big deal in it). If we celebrate wildly, the Aussies will be vindicated in their belief that this was an upset. We wanted to tell them that this is not a fluke. This is going to happen over and over again. The Aussies simply couldn’t handle it. They were shaken,’ a player from that tour revealed much later.
‘He doesn’t believe in overt displays of aggression. He believes that if you want to hurt them, do it in your style, not in their way. If they believe in swearing, you don’t need to do it,’ he adds.
The team was under the pump. The players had been in a lockdown at the hotel. As the CSK players prepared for the customary huddle near the boundary ropes, Dhoni sensed the tension around him. Vexed faces, local and foreign, all waiting for their captain to speak magic words of inspiration and motivation. Dhoni stuck to his straight-faced approach. He said, ‘Boys, we are second on the IPL Fair Play Award rankings. I want us to do everything we can to finish on top of that list. Good luck.’ And he was off.
But back in 2008, Indian cricket was just getting used to their new captain. He did things differently. He wasn’t in-your-face like Ganguly or passive-aggressive like Dravid; he wasn’t laid-back like Azharuddin or a genius expecting everyone else to be one, like Tendulkar; and he could never match Kumble for his intensity. He had his own ideas, and in all likelihood, more conviction than any other Indian captain before him, about his own ideas.
For all his singular and awe-inspiring attributes, you can never quite ignore the right-time–right-place serendipity that tails the man.
And while all three Pakistanis missed the target, the three Indians hit bullseye, including Uthappa. The young opener doffed his hat to the crowd too for good measure. But in that instant, maybe Indian cricket was doffing its hat too, to a new era, an era of expecting the unexpected.
It wasn’t only on the field that Dhoni could pull a fast one on the opponent. He’d done it with the Pakistani team before that very final. On the eve of the match, Dhoni had spoken at length about the importance of Sehwag to the Indian team whenever they were playing Pakistan, even mentioning his great record against them. Sehwag, it would be later revealed, was never in line to even play having pulled his hamstring a couple of days before the final. ‘Getting Viru to just face a few balls in the nets was Mahi’s googly. He said, “Why do we need to make it public or let the Pakistan team know
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So, Chittu makes quite a revelation when he says that there was a time when Dhoni was close to the local journalists. ‘It was in my house where he would often call them over after each of his early cricketing feats, and I have served chai to them myself. But the reactions after the 2007 World Cup and a few unsavoury comments changed everything. After winning the World T20, he didn’t bother about them and came straight home from the airport,’ Chittu says.
Dhoni, though, would make it a point to be there whenever the team lost. Kohli has started doing the same these days. This wasn’t always the case in the past.
Dhoni ‘uses force to absorb force’ with his hands. Most keepers do what other mortals do, which is, push their hands back to cushion the blow after catching the ball. That’s how they absorb the force. That’s how they produce the ‘give’ to ensure the ball doesn’t pop out. Dhoni, though, is pushing forward, as in, generating ‘give’ in the direction from which the ball is coming.
In addition to the strength, the technique and the positioning, Dhoni’s eye for detail is what makes him such an unforgiving judge, jury and executioner from behind the stumps. It is, in Col Shankar’s opinion, another one of his friend’s fauji traits.
In the 2016 edition of the IPL, he created not just a new trend but a new position for a wicketkeeper. It was a physical demonstration of inscrutable innovation. That bizarre-looking concoction he’d stewed by lifting his right leg at a right angle and parallel to the ground to thwart a batsman’s late-cut attempts. I’d called him cricket’s Pythagoras at that point and even described his manoeuvre using the primordial theorem to back the coinage. Dhoni’s Pythagoras move first appeared during Rising Pune Supergiant’s outing against Kings XI Punjab on 17 April 2016.
It’s perhaps the fact that batsmen aren’t as anxious to score or play more shots in the longer format that didn’t work in Dhoni’s favour as a Test captain. Unlike in ODIs and T20s, he rarely seemed to be a step ahead of the game. In most cases, as a Test captain, he was playing catch-up. And he never seemed at his best doing that. It must be said that he didn’t always have the kind of bowling attack required to generate pressure on the opposition on away tours.
‘There was no point asking them to cheer for CSK. They’d do that anyway. So, we decided to show them how to cheer. And whistle was the obvious thing. On the first day, first show of any superstar movie in Chennai you’ll hear only whistles. Whistle Podu was born,’ says Chocka.
The story goes that on the night of the World Cup final, once all the festivities had ended, Dhoni was in his room with his little entourage and a couple of teammates. While the conversation and jokes raged on, Dhoni disappeared into the bathroom. Some fifteen minutes later, there was a bit of concern around the room. There was no sign of Dhoni and even repeated knocks on the door were being ignored. But just as worry was about to turn into panic, they heard the door open. Sakshi was the first to spot him and is learnt to have screamed in surprise. For, there stood the man who’d won India the
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Perhaps the answer to our quest for discovering the real Dhoni lies in that must-be-made advertisement. For, his journey has been one based on self-education, and along the way, he has learnt that he’s just Dhoni. A man who was not born to be a cricketer but became one. A man who was not born to be a captain but became one. A man who was not born to be a legend but became one. A man who was born to be an enigma and will always remain one.
Rarely did he take off his pads and come on to bowl without it being a signal to the selectors about what he felt about the bowling arsenal at his disposal.
But less than a week later, he was back in the then united state of Andhra Pradesh for what would prove to be a seminal moment not just in his life but in the history of Indian cricket. The 148 against Pakistan in Vizag on 5 April 2005 signalled the emergence of India’s new cricketing superhero. ‘I remember the Rajasekhara Reddy stadium in Vizag then was not finished and they had makeshift stands. The ball kept disappearing out of the ground very quickly, very often. Until then I had only seen Tendulkar’s bat look as broad as a wooden bureau while connecting with the ball, especially when he
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When Mumbai took it up to USD 1.4 million, Chandrasekhar hesitated for so long that he recalls that the Ambani-led auction table almost began to celebrate, and that’s when he pulled the trigger again and took the price up to 1.5 million. That was it. Mumbai backed out. Dhoni was a Super King. It’s only fitting that Dhoni was bought by CSK with a very Dhoni-esque bidding strategy.
Chandrasekhar says there’s a similarity in the way both of them always thrived on being in the present and not worrying too much about what had taken place in the past. ‘After that loss in Jaipur where I had lost my cool, I came back to Chennai still smarting. Srinivasan looked at me and said, “Why the long face, VB? Let me tell you something. These guys are paid professionals. They are paid to perform and that’s what they will do. No point in you sitting like that,”’ VB recalls.
But Dhoni’s biggest strength has been that despite being a paradox to the rest of the world, he’s always known exactly who he is. Perhaps that’s why he’s never cared much about what the world has to say about him. And he doesn’t need to knock on your door in the middle of the night to tell you that. For, he is Dhoni.
