Nayudu to Saurav: Flannel Vision

The stories are delightfully illuminating. They tell you, perhaps more strongly and with more anecdotal evidence than other accounts, that the big names and immortals of Indian cricket — Mankad to Amarnath, Nayudu to Merchant — could, just so often, be downright mean and petty. In contrast, Ganguly and Dravid seem almost Biblical saints.

Bala scores with his fund of apocryphal stories and plain gossip. It can be engrossing. He writes about why Deepak Shodhan, a young Gujarati who scored a century on Test debut, had such a short career: ‘‘In the West Indies in 1952-53… Mankad asked him (Shodhan) as to which side he was on — his or Hazare’s. And when Shodhan replied that he was on the Indian side, Mankad had the knives out for him.’’

The next tour was to Pakistan, with Mankad as captain. Shodhan didn’t go.

A whole new angle to added to the Gavaskar-Kapil battle of the 1980s: ‘‘If Amarnath didn’t get the captaincy (after Gavaskar was sacked in 1983), he decided that Kapil, who hailed from the North Zone, could be manipulated to his advantage. This situation was envisaged by a long-serving national selector and later president of the Board, Raj Singh Dungarpur, who once remarked to me, ‘Mohinder is the master at using Kapil’s shoulder to fire his gun’…

‘‘On the eve of the Ahmedabad Test against the West Indies (in 1983), I had gone to visit Vengsarkar at the team’s hotel. As I came out of his room, I saw Kapil, who invited me to his. He asked me what Gavaskar thought of him. I was shocked. Later, I met Gavaskar, who asked me what the young man was saying about him. I was even more shocked.’’

Occasionally, Bala betrays a quirky turn of phrase. One priceless observation from page 16 is: ‘‘Considering the status of some of his predecessors, (Jagmohan) Dalmiya is a sort of Dick Whittington.’’ Er, what does that make Ranbir Singh Mahendra? The cat?

Great reading, this book — Stardust meets Wisden.