Sport in India wept in a quiet corner this week. Two romantics moved on and sport was battered by heartless tyrants claiming to administer it. Raj Singh Dungarpur is no more. Noel de lima Leitao is no more. And in Delhi there is a call to rescue the Commonwealth Games. With a little bit of love, the Games wouldn’t have been kidnapped in the first place.

Raj Singh loved cricket. We all do. But he loved it differently from all of us. In his heart he built monuments to cricket and worshipped them every day; he sent them flowers and stood back, happy with his own romance. It was a wonderful marriage, with lots of love and care. They enriched each other. Raj Singh often said his heart missed a beat when the opposition new ball bowler ran in to bowl the first ball to Sunil Gavaskar. That kind of love. You saw it at the CCI where cricket returned in his reign; there were photographs and books around corners, big names; while he walked, strode its corridors, cricket was respected again at the CCI.

And he told stories, often the same stories but we didn’t mind listening to them; about Bedser and Merchant, Vijay Hazare and Peter May and Colin Cowdrey. But more than anyone else, of CK Nayudu. If Rajbhai was CK’s biographer, he would have emerged as Superman, flying through the air to vanquish the opposition, even Jack Hobbs. For, you see, a little part of Rajbhai was English. It influenced him, sometimes overly so, like when he relied on the opinion of two English umpires to conclude that Srikkanth was no longer the right man to lead India. But I think deep down inside he was Dungarpur and Bombay and India, not the Oval and Surrey and England.

... contd.