The great India spinner was a fine sportsman (if, self-admittedly, no athlete). And as a man, he was one of the best
Shamya Dasgupta26-Oct-2023″Oh, Bishan Bedi died!”He was a good man, wasn’t he?”Cricket’s not my wife’s thing, but she knows a bit about “Bishan ji”. She and I don’t talk cricket and cricketers usually. But Bishan ji wasn’t just a cricketer. Yes, of course he was a giant of the sport, but he was much more. So after each phone call with him, I would give her a bit of a lowdown – the conversations were usually that interesting.Was he a good man?Where to begin?Related
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How about how he would forgive and forget? (And do forgive and forget the self-indulgent tone in this personal account of a larger-than-life man.)I was working with a news channel in Noida in early 2010 when Bishan ji was a regular expert on our cricket programmes. Garry Sobers happened to be visiting Mumbai. Since they were both at an event to felicitate India’s class of 1971, Bishan ji decided he would interview Sobers – whom he called “Garry boy” – for the channel.It was a wonderful idea. We set everything up. The interview went well. It was broadcast. (It’s on the internet somewhere.) And then we were in a pickle, since Bishan ji felt that he ought to be compensated for it separately. He was right, of course. He had spent many hours researching and preparing the questions, and not just gone into it like a celebrity might. But budgets are budgets, and no provision had been made for such a payment because there had been no discussion about it beforehand. One thing led to another and he severed ties with our channel.Bedi after the win against Australia in Sydney in 1978. He took five wickets in that match•John Patrick O’Gready/Fairfax Media/Getty ImagesCut to a book launch around six months later where he was in attendance. We hadn’t spoken in the interim, and I wasn’t sure it would be a good idea to initiate a conversation with the burly Sardarji, who had cause to be less than cordial.But then I heard my name hollered from across the room. And there was Bishan ji. Big smile. “Remind me to get you a the next time we meet,” he said, guffawed, and out came a bear hug. (I had grown my hair long in the interim.)The squabble was never mentioned again.Then there were the phone calls in the evening, typically around 7.30pm. Having wound down for the day, he would be in a relaxed, happy, expansive mood. (He was always quite expansive, actually.)I didn’t know when he would call. But I knew a call would come sooner or later, and always looked forward to the conversation. Of course, I wasn’t the only one fortunate enough to get those calls. Maybe he had a roster of friends and journalists and friend-journalists, and called people by turn.He liked to listen to what the other person had to say. But, even more, he liked to hold court. I suppose everyone does.Often we’d talk about cooking, a shared love. He developed an interest in it over the last ten-odd years of his life.With friends and former team-mates MAK Pataudi and Syed Kirmani in 2000. Bedi picked Pataudi as the captain of a notional team of the best cricketers he played with•Sondeep Shankar/Getty ImagesAnd current affairs. Most certainly, the news of the day, or days. Something that had piqued his curiosity, or more likely made him angry. Talk about these typically started with laughs – guffaws, gaps between the ha-has – but before long, the Punjabi in him would come out and the language would become progressively more colourful.”, where his son, Angad, an actor, had a big role. The calls always ended with “salaams for your lovely wife”.We know about his support – deteriorating health meant it had to be from a distance – of the farmers’ protests, but while that may have been close to home for him, Bishan ji had strong opinions about plenty else. If he didn’t like something, he said so, consequences be damned.Common knowledge, wasn’t it, that Bishan ji was outspoken, that he called a spade a shovel, didn’t suffer fools…He was long the first port of call for journalists who wanted a real byte, not the hemming and hawing others were likely to deliver. But I wondered often if he trapped himself in that public persona.It may not have been obvious, but he was humble to a fault. “I was a very poor athlete. You know that. Everyone knows that. Not kidding. Forget modern cricket – even then, that was my biggest handicap,” he told me once in a formal interview. “I had to do something extraordinary with the ball to stay in the side. Chandra, Pras, they were way ahead of me. And Mankad, before. Anil [Kumble], after my time.”And there was another side to him – a rare ability to see the good in everyone, and equally, to hold everyone to a high standard. He once said to me, “Listen, if a life spent in cricket doesn’t teach you to be upright and honest and humble, nothing else will. Cricket is all about honesty. ‘This is not cricket’ – why do we say that? Why? Because if you have given yourself to cricket, if you are true to cricket, you have to be humble and honest and upright. And grateful. There can’t be any other way.”Bedi wasn’t quite as elegant with bat in hand as with ball – though you couldn’t quite tell from a still photograph•Fairfax Media/Getty ImagesThere are oh so many stories and memories. Happy ones. For a change, we don’t have to make an effort to speak well of the dead.Like the first – and only – time I watched him bowl. Early 1990s. Calcutta. The CC&FC ground. It was an exhibition match, with Graeme Pollock and other luminaries in attendance. Could Bishan ji get the ball over to the other end? I don’t remember if he did, but he did give it a go for a while. And then, when I went up to him to get his autograph, he signed the book, and stopped me for a word or two before letting me run off to the next autograph-giver.Later, while I was working with a newspaper in Delhi, I remember travelling to his farmhouse on the outskirts of town in a bus to transcribe his regular column as he dictated it. The conversations carried on well after the dictation was done.Then, several years later, I tagged along to the elite Delhi Golf Club to meet a publisher for a book that never got written. It was tentatively titled .There were so many meetings and conversations over the years. Till his health went downwards. “I need to come to Bangalore,” he said during one of our last evening chats. I had moved to that city by then. “My best friends are there: Chandra, Pras, Vishy, Kiri…”You know why they are my best friends? Because they are the best people. Venkat too, but he is in Madras.”With the Indian high commissioner and his wife at a reception in Australia on the 1977-78 tour•Gerrit Alan Fokkema/Fairfax Media/Getty ImagesHe was around for a couple of years after that, and was well enough to make a trip to Kartarpur Sahib, across the border in Pakistan, with old friend Intikhab Alam and others last year. But we didn’t talk much. Just a couple of times, for maybe a minute or so. He tired quickly.And now he’s gone. With so much still left to outrage and laugh about.A small project also remained unfinished. No, not ; what a book that might have been! – but a list for the .Once, while I was working with another publication, we published a Greatest Indian Test XI, where he was one of two frontline spinners alongside Anil Kumble. He called angrily after reading it: “You have me and you don’t have Vinoo Mankad? You don’t have Subhash Gupte?” Erm, well, we decided to only include people we saw play, I ventured. “So what! You’ll have a World XI and not have Sir Garry or Bradman, because you didn’t watch them play?”This time, I wanted him to put down a list of either the greatest XI of players he played with or one of players he played against. The “against” list started with “Sir Garry and ten others” and we got to a grand total of nine players after five or six conversations, as he kept making tweaks. And the “with” team was: “Tiger has to be the captain, and he can pick the others.” It’s no wonder we never got around to finalising those teams.Perhaps – and I did get that sense – he didn’t want to include some people but was wrestling with the thought of the critique that would come – “What, Bedi doesn’t have A, B, C in his XI!” It was also clear he was not going to pick a great player if he didn’t think the man was also honourable. “That’s not cricket!”So yes, he was a good man. One of the best. A man of honour. Traditional. But not conventional. The sort you’d want in your corner always. The sort, to use a cliché, they just don’t make anymore.