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~ Temjenrenba Anichar ~
The choice of Cheteshwar Pujara, India’s No3 batsman in Test matches, as the visiting candidate at the on-going BCCI-sponsored coaching camp for under-16 payers at Dimapur could not have been more welcoming. Recently, the cricket boards of five NE states (albeit without big brother Assam, which is the only state from the region with representation in Ranji Trophy) formed a united front to push for more development programs from the BCCI in the NE states. If setting up a coaching camp for under-16 players at Dimapur was a statement of intent from the BCCI, then the visit of Pujara was one that came loaded with lessons worth learning. Not just in the context of cricket but in life as well.
Hailing from the state of Saurastra in Gujarat – away from the traditional bastions like Mumbai, Delhi or Karnataka – Pujara’s path into the playing eleven of the Indian Test team was never easy. In an interview with The Indian Express, he himself said that he had made it the hard way. There were no godfathers to push his case amidst the power-politics that dominate selection in Indian cricket. For him there was only one way out – to rise through the ranks right from the academy. So in that way, he is a product of the system and he knows it better than most.
His story is not of glitz and glamour that has come to be associated with Indian cricket players these days. His is a tale of a boy from the backwaters knocking down the gigantic wall of Indian cricket’s disregard for players from the fringes, brick-by-brick. The stylish batsman, who is a traditionalist’s delight with a water-tight technique modelled on Indian cricket’s most iconic wall, Rahul Dravid, has stayed true to his principles even after his entry into the Test eleven. In this age of the IPL gold-rush, Pujara is one of the rare players who are giving something back to the game that has made crorepatis of them. He runs a cricket academy near Rajkot that offers free coaching to under-privileged children.
This is a blue-print worth emulating and pursuing. Even more so in the case of young players pursuing the game in academies today, because such stories are easily lost in the smoke-screen that is the IPL. For a person from the NE states, it would be easy to identify with the road taken by Pujara’s from the backwaters of Saurastra to the dizzy heights of the Indian Test eleven.
The struggles will be similar, one suspects. The barriers will be even more formidable for those kids attending the under-16 camp now at Dimapur. But as long as they can revisit the day when Cheteshwar Pujara came calling, they will always have a reason to keep playing on the V or bowling in the corridor of uncertainty. Not all heroes come with capes or IPL contracts.