Sunday, January 5, 2014

Captain Cool, The M.S.Dhoni Story - Gulu Ezekiel

This book was a huge disappointment. There is tons of stuff to write about Dhoni. What Gulu Ezekiel did was to turn it into a narration of all the events that happened to Dhoni in his career in a linear and chronological manner that one gets the feeling that one is looking at a compilation of statistics with some description of each event thrown in. From this tour he went there and from there to here and scored so much....it is a compilation of his career statistics which is a huge disappointment because one could have written so much about India's greatest cricketing captain and perhaps one of the greatest performing icons who brings all of cricket's highest principles alive - responsibility, humility, courage, nobility, compassion, resilience, efficiency and so much more. To reduce him to numbers and facts, is not doing any justice to him at all.

The one line that stayed with me was the one line that Gulu quoted - The Cup is ours - Dhoni said before the 2011 World Cup edition and it was for this setting the team's goal, the common purpose that I have been searching high and low. Sehwag said it I know but now I know Dhoni said it too and its a wonderful change from captains who always said that they will play good cricket - one would think that is their job. But to set the goal - to win - that is what makes great captains.

I was zipping through the stats, the order of the matches with the odd opinion or comment thrown in and it was like breezing through a list of all that he did. Now that is one way not to do justice to MSD because his greatness has been that he has never been about figures - it has always been about the team. He has sacrificed his game, absorbed the pressure, let others take the credit, balanced the energy so well that in the end it was the team that won. What any book on MSD needs to do is highlight that aspect, that rare aspect of this person, which is what makes him so special. His sacrifice, selflessness, at putting the country ahead of him always, his magical capability to win matches, to make match winners out of mediocre performers, to instill self belief into performers who are losing hope and belief, are all out there. The wins, the magical moments, the twists, the choices he made, the words he said - to me that is what makes Dhoni. That is what makes him an outstanding leader and an outstanding citizen worthy of the highest praise. That is where Gulu missed the trick and stuck to the safe route of chronicling the journey.

I'd think that even if there had been a collection of Dhoni's words in the press, he makes amazing sense each time he speaks, making a statement even in the manner he spoke in Hindi after the first T20 World Cup win, the book would have been far richer. One need not even analyse what he said, a mere presentation of his quotes is good enough. I was seriously looking at the making of the man, what he thinks and why he does what he does, and in that respect I was pretty let down. 'Captain Cool' is not what I was looking for certainly when I wanted to read about MSD. I am also surprised that there are very few collections of his quotes, his interviews, on the net, which are a wealth of information. There is one site that seemed to have some though. Check this out.
http://www.greatpersonalities.com/mahendra-singh-dhoni/

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