(Mukul Kesavan is the author of Homeless on Google Earth. This column first appeared in NDTV on September 8, 2021)
- Root’s rout was one for the ages. One of the perks of growing old is that long-ago victories and contemporary triumphs become mystically meaningful merely because you were around when both happened. When Kohli’s men demolished the English team at the Oval yesterday, 50 years after Wadekar’s team had first won on the same ground in 1971, remembered delight merged my dead 14-year-old self with a whooping near-retiree. The child in question had heard India win in 1971 courtesy John Arlott and Brian Johnston and BBC’s Test Match Special. Given the historic resonance of this Test at the Oval, I had gone to some lengths to make sure that victory, when/if it came, was described by competent commentators. A VPN and a borrowed subscription piped Nasser Hussain, Michael Atherton, Shane Warne and Mark Butcher into my ears. In this way, double-glazed against the deference and din of Sony’s studio-bound pundits, I heard knowledgeable, well-spoken partisans describe an epic match…