Straight From the Heart - Kapil Dev

I remember eagerly buying and reading, as a schoolboy in the mid-1980s, Kapil Dev's two earlier shots at autobiography: Cricket My Style, written with the assistance of R Mohan of the Hindu, and By God's Decree, written with an Indian journalist settled in Australia, Vinay Verma. The most gifted cricketer India has ever produced was then at the height of his popularity; people in all parts of India claimed him as one of their own. As schoolboys we could imagine no greater man in all of history. Kapil was the bowler who had shown that Indians could also bowl fast, the batsman whose incandescent hitting we all held in awe, and the leader who had brought home the World Cup.

Both Cricket My Style and By God's Decree were slim books - the latter just over a hundred pages long. From these books thousands of Indian cricket fans learned, from Kapil himself, of his background and early life as the son of a timber merchant in Chandigarh, his comparatively late entry into organised cricket, his hard work under coach Desh Prem Azad, and his rapid development as a national prospect. From this platform he took off - one chapter in By God's Decree is called "I Find my Wings" - capturing the Indian cricketing imagination on his debut tour, to Pakistan in 1978-79, during which he made the Pakistani batsmen call for helmets, and lashed the bowlers for sixes even as a night-watchman. We read about Kapil's memories of the 1983 World Cup, and carefully noted his opinions on various matters of interest: his thoughts on captaincy, what it meant to be an allrounder, his relationship with Sunil Gavaskar. By God's Decree ended with these striking words, almost like a volley of fierce strokes: "My philosophy is simple. Play to win. Get your runs and your wickets. Never stop trying. Hit the ball, over the slips, over the ropes. Runs on the board count. After seven years of non-stop cricket I have achieved more than I set out to ... Cricket has been good to me and for me."

The autobiographies of cricketers are complicated and often multiple affairs: players often have to deal with the approaches of publishers when in mid-career, at a time when their popularity is at its peak, and then sit down again when their decade or two in the spotlight is over, and produce another book that traces a longer arc and supplies opinions on the major issues of the time. Certainly there was much in Kapil's career post-1986 that was worth describing at length: he played two more World Cups, bowled as well as he had ever done on a tour to Australia, and passed Richard Hadlee as the highest wicket-taker in Tests. These matters, his career in business post-retirement, his embroilment in the match-fixing affair, and his selection as Wisden Indian Cricketer of the Century, are all dealt with in Straight From The Heart, a weighty 374-page tome.

Cricketers are rarely good writers, nor are they expected to be, and the preparation of a readable cricketing autobiography, therefore, usually requires the involvement of some competent support staff, such as a good sports journalist or a capable editor. But the only investment made by Kapil's current publishers in this book appears to have been in a dictaphone and some tapes. Much of this book reads like an unedited transcript, and this explains its rambling and somewhat tedious character. Perplexing statements, of the kind that sometimes enter into speech but not into writing for publication, litter these pages.

Curiously, some portions of this book, especially those that deal with Kapil's career in the early and mid-eighties, seemed to read much better than the others. It required a little background work to explain why: the source for all these events is Cricket My Style, from which enormous chunks have been lifted almost verbatim. Straight From The Heart has made its precursor redundant by consuming it whole.

The book's emphases and omissions are rather irregular. Kapil speaks at length about the events leading up to his overhauling of Hadlee's record, but there is little insight into Indian cricket in the early nineties. The World Cup in Australia in 1992 is not even mentioned, and nor is Kapil's blistering century, his last in Tests, against South Africa at Port Elizabeth. There is a long section about the match-fixing allegations levelled against Kapil by Manoj Prabhakar, and the sense of grievance he felt at what seemed to be a trial by press. In this book, as in his responses to the press at that time, Kapil seems to feel the need to make a protracted defence against these charges. One almost sees him glower at his detractors as he once did at opposing batsmen.

This is a lengthy book, but as a cricketing autobiography, it offers little that is new, and in fact there is much of interest in the second half of Kapil's career that finds no mention here. Someone with no personal memories of Kapil, and desirous of finding out what was really so special about him, would gain more from reading the two previous books, even if they cover virtually the same ground, than from this one, which ostensibly covers his whole career.