Mahendra Singh Dhoni is a man of many fetishes. One of them, like Sarah Jessica Parker’s character in Sex and the City, is for fancy footwear. He will return home with 20 new pairs, at least, that he’s bought Down Under.
He is fascinated by the armed forces. He has special camouflage wicket-keeping gloves, he scales the wall of Ramgarh cantonment to see the jawans go through their daily drill, and he gets excited, just like a kid, when he fires a gun.

He is a biker at heart with 11 mean machines in his garage back home. The entire town discusses the sightings when he goes for an occasional spin wearing his black helmet.
Fans love these quirks. Hundreds flock to the saloon when he decides to get a haircut. Here in Australia, Leanne calls herself his biggest fan and has an elaborate scrap-book to prove just that. But she’s jealous of Surabhi, who got him to sign a t-shirt with a marriage proposal on it.

Little wonder then that Corporate India was willing to shower its millions on him in the Indian Premier League (IPL) auction this week: Six crore rupees for a 45-day tournament. It doesn’t get any bigger than this.
The story of MS Dhoni is a story of defiance in the face of the lopsided odds. He has played his cricket like he lives his life — flouting traditional norms and backing his instincts. Normal, to him, is excruciatingly boring.

Captain Courageous
In no aspect of his game does this come to the fore better than in his captaincy. The whole country may have been clamouring for experienced players in the one-day and Twenty20 teams, but Dhoni opted for youngsters because he had a feeling about them. He backed his instincts and his faith never wavered. No matter what, he said, Yuvraj Singh would continue to be in his team. And Yuvraj, after a string of failures, returned to form at the most critical time last week against Sri Lanka to prove his skipper right.

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