Bilingual cricket commentary, can we be more even handed?

I don’t know how many of you, dear readers, were following the recently concluded India – Sri Lanka Test and limited overs series played out in the emerald isles. For the record, the invincible Indians completely annihilated the severely emasculated Sri Lankans. In the process, Virat Kohli’s band of buccaneers broke all kinds of records, but we will leave that to the statisticians. And the Cassandras won’t be uncorking the champagne till we win a major Test series outside the subcontinent. Trotting out figures has never been my favourite pastime, and there’s always Google and Wisden to provide any kind of arcane and inconsequential cricketing information you seek  how many wickets did Ashwin bag through LBWs, the number of times Kohli has been dismissed steering to first slip, the frequency of Lasith Malinga’s expectorations on his way to the top of his bowling mark, how often Dhoni behind the stumps drawls “aur dheere, Jaddu”. I think you get the picture.

I am more concerned with the running commentary on television that covered this particular series between the friendly neighbours. In case you hadn’t noticed, the entire commentary was delivered bilingually in Hindi and English, on two separate channels. Normally, you would have two different sets of commentators for English and Hindi, but on this occasion, the same group of Sunil Gavaskar, Ajay Jadeja, Murali Kartik, Zaheer Khan and Harsha Bhogle did the honours in both languages. Most of these worthies have in the past done a fair job commentating in English, and now putting up a spirited but less than fluent performance with their halting Hindi. In the Hindi channel, keeping them all honest was a specialist Hindi commentator, whose name escapes me but who appeared to be afflicted with a severe case of verbal diarrhoea. This gentleman would keep up a non-stop chatter on all kinds of issues barring the actual happenings on the field of play. He was totally in awe of ‘Sunny Bhai’, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if he was standing up when Sunny was doing his stint in Hindi. In the event, Gavaskar and the others were lucky to get a word in edgeways. As for the loquacious Harsha Bhogle, his dental work is impressive but he really should smile a lot less.

All of this begs the question, ‘Why not provide specialist Hindi commentators for the national language? It’s been done before. If we must have a separate Hindi channel, why not the likes of Kapil Dev, Jimmy Amarnath, Atul Wassan, Akash Chopra and others of their ilk? Even those of us who have but a working knowledge of our ‘rashtra bhasha’, were tolerant of this imposition when English and Hindi commentaries alternated on the same channel, tiresome though it was. Interestingly, when the commentators gathered at the studio during the lunch and tea breaks, and at stumps, the discussions were conducted almost entirely in English, interspersed with small doses of Hindi.

It will also be instructive to contemplate on what the harvest will be when Ravi Shastri returns to the commentary box, post his coaching stint with the Indian team. How will the tall one go with his untested brand of Hindi? Will we get a suitable vernacular alternative to ‘went like a tracer bullet’? Or, memorably, ‘Dhoni goes big’ – ‘Dhoni bada jaata hai’. I think not. A former Indian Prime Minister, whose Hindi was decidedly dodgy, was reported to have once said, ‘Agar hum jeetega ya loosega……’ It was apparently not in a cricketing context, but we could expect more such unintended hilarity if someone like Kris Srikkanth was at the microphone, holding forth in Hindi. In fact, I have heard Cheeka frequently complain, ‘Yeh kaisa ‘oga, boss?’

All of which gets me somewhat nostalgic and misty-eyed as I reflect on those wonderful radio commentators from India and abroad, who brought the game alive to us at all hours of the day or night, depending on the time zone. 

A lost art that died with these stalwarts. The names just trip off the tongue. From abroad, Alan McGilvray, Lindsay Hassett, Richie Benaud, John Arlott, Brian Johnston, Jim Swanton, Christopher Martin Jenkins, Trevor Bailey, Fred Truman, Tony Cozier, Omar Quereshi, Chishti Mujahid and many more. As for India, who can forget Vizzy (Maharajkumar of Vijayanagaram), Pearson Surita, V.M. Chakrapani, Berry Sarbadhikari, Dicky Rutnagar, Anand Setalvad, Suresh Saraiya and Ananda Rao, amongst a host of others. 

Ananda Rao had some singular quirks. At the end of each over, in his distinctly nasal tone, he would metronomically intone, ‘And that marks the end of Nadkarni’s 43rd over, 34 of which have been maidens, he has conceded 27 runs and is yet to capture a wicket’. Those numbers will change after each over, but not by much given Nadkarni’s propensity to trundle maidens as if they were going out of fashion. When Rao became really excited he would exclaim, ‘An exquisite cover drive by Tiger Pataudi, scorching every blade of grass on the way to the boundary, hugging mother earth’. Most memorably and exasperatingly, the scholarly Rao would suspend all live commentary to summarise proceedings ‘thus far’ for world service listeners, just after the tea break. 

We anxious followers had to endure 15 minutes of this tedium amidst huge periodic roars, live, from the stadium. At the end of his erudite world service summary, Ananda Rao would casually say, ‘In the meanwhile, England have lost three more wickets and the score is now 62 for 4’.

Pakistan’s suave Omar Quereshi, in a dreary Pakistan-India Test series, repeated six times in an over, ‘Haseeb to Borde, Borde forward’, in a sing-song tone. Haseeb Ahsan was Pakistan’s leading off-spinner in the ‘60s, and Chandu Borde the stoic defender. And Suresh Saraiya was an absolute scream with his unique, nonsensical brand of delivery, ‘Kallicharan plays the ball back along the bowler to field as he delivers the next ball to which a defensive push is offered and no run can be contemplated to a ball that is pitched….’. He never completed a sentence, speaking in an endless, stream-of-consciousness loop. And because Clive Lloyd had two ‘Ls’ in his surname, Saraiya would call him ‘lllanguid Lllloyd’! Finally, for guest commentator Salim Durrani, Binny was always ‘Rogers Binny’.

We miss the magic of radio commentary these days, warts and all, and only hope that on television, the quality of bilingual commentators is more even-handedly spread between the two languages. Speaking for myself, if I don’t hear another ‘Baal, baal bacch gaya’, it will be perfectly all right with me.

(The author is a brand consultant with an interest in music, cricket and good humour)