(Excerpts from the diary of an old Sanmar friend)
“India. A land of rich culture and ancient tradition. The birthplace of Buddha, the inspiration for the Mahabarata and the Kama Sutra. And, as I discovered, the mother of the three hour visa queue (in London).”
(Tim Wade, Managing Director, AMP International, at the time of the launching of the joint venture AMP Sanmar, continues to be a friend of the group. A cricket fanatic now based in England, Wade reminisces in delightful prose here.)
India. A land of rich culture and ancient tradition. The birthplace of Buddha, the inspiration for the Mahabarata and the Kama Sutra. And, as I discovered, the mother of the three hour visa queue (in London). In many ways, my visa experience proved to be a perfect initiation into the stoic patience which is required of batsmen and bowlers alike on the slow turning, dry and dusty Indian cricket pitches. Or it would have been perfect, had I remembered to secure my visa before arriving at Heathrow for my scheduled flight to Chennai to watch the Second Test between Australia and India.
On my many previous business trips to India, visas had been a matter of routine for the corporate machine. And so, after I was ever so graciously turned away from the check-in counter, in true captain of industry style I looked around for someone to blame for this cock up. Not a single candidate presented himself.
After I grumpily made my way home, Ruth, my wife, had me carry on with some of the tasks associated with having recently moved house (one of the reasons for my trip to India). This included hanging a mirror in one of our daughters’ bedrooms. I suspect this was her none too subtle judgment on where I might want to look for the attribution of blame over the visa incident.
The visa expedition
Suitably chastened, I re-booked flights for the next night, and the next morning I nervously made my way to India House, on Aldwych in London, to negotiate the visa process. Expecting the worst, I wasn’t disappointed. Forty five minutes to queue for
a queue number (outside, in the rain, naturally), 90 minutes before being summoned to make my humble petition, and another 45 minutes while the formalities were completed on my passport (it is a rather nice stamp it must be said).
Whatever happened to the fraternal bonds which should exist between sister Commonwealth colonies? I harboured a sneaking suspicion that Australia’s crushing win the week before in the First Test in Bangalore added at least an hour to my Passport Office pilgrimage.
Still, I was an indecently happy man when I clambered aboard my flight to Colombo and Chennai that night. This was a genuine frolic, an unambiguous indulgence. I was flying to Chennai to enjoy Test Match cricket at the invitation of a former business partner, who was also a friend sharing a similar religious devotion to cricket.
Madras vs. Chennai
Madras (let’s call it Madras – it has a far more resonant ring than the unlovely ‘Chennai’, and locals seem remarkably unperturbed about what you call their home town) owes its early development to the British, who started trading here in 1639. It is not quite in the top tier of Indian cities, made up of Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta. Nor does it seem to be part of the emerging pack of thrusting metropolises like Bangalore and Hyderabad. Madras’ chief claim to fame is as a major port on the Bay of Bengal with best access to Asian sea routes.
Its second claim is as host of one of the only two tied Tests in cricket history. Incidentally, it shares this latter distinction with Brisbane, another city which seems to be searching for a clearer modern day identity in the shadow of more clamorous sister cities. Madras is frenetic, noisy, dirty, friendly, industrious and endlessly watchable. And that’s before you even leave the airport. The traffic is of course emblematic of the city. Never moving faster than 30 kilometres an hour, but never becoming totally jammed, the traffic somehow seems to work – floating on a non-stop sea of almost uniformly superfluous tooting.
Lane markings on the road are clearly regarded as colonial era hangovers, to be totally ignored. Shashi Tharoor famously describes India not as an underdeveloped country, but rather – in view of its ancient heritage – as a highly developed country in an advanced state of decay. It was great to be on the way back.
Australian collapse
Transiting in Colombo on the first day of the Test, I was pleased to see that the Australians were comfortably placed at 180-2 just before tea time. All the acrimony of missing my earlier flight evaporated instantly. Arriving in Madras, I raced through Customs (after London visas,the space time continuum had made quantum relative shifts,you must understand) only to find that Australia had collapsed to be all out for 235.
Anil Kumble snared 7 wickets. I settled disconsolately into my hotel room to be drenched by the saturation media coverage. My rather more chipper host asked mischievously if I had checked for earlier flights home. At one am, the next morning in Madras, British Summer Time was urging my body to get out of bed and get on with my life. I filled in the hours by catching up with local news.
‘The Hindu’ is the paper of record in Madras, and I was reminded of what an intelligent readership it must attract and foster. Just one example that morning involved an editorial lauding the arcane Nobel Prize winning work of two American economists attempting to reconcile business cycles with efficient market theory. I’m not making this up.
As the economic theory in question relied in part on an individual’s predisposition to maximise leisure time, I was feeling even better about my jaunt to India. Chepauk Stadium is like nothing I have seen. It holds 40,000 endlessly noisy supporters (who had engaged in their first Mexican wave within 20 minutes of the start of play). The ground is huge and beautifully maintained, but the noise and activity tend to magnify the oppressiveness of the heat which envelopes players and supporters alike. It has major stands which circle the boundary line and add to the not unfriendly feeling of claustrophobia.
Day 4 of the Test
It is difficult to imagine the heat which suffocates Chepauk on Day 4. While the air temperature is a mere 33 degrees Celsius, it reaches 43 degrees on the heavily sheltered field, and must be close to 50 degrees under the batsmen’s helmets. Drinks breaks come every 40 minutes, and herald the arrival at the wicket of two chairs and an umbrella for the batsman to relax on and under (what would Fred Trueman have said?). You half expected a sitar player to emerge for the players entertainment. (More of the diary will follow in a later issue of Matrix).
“Australia had collapsed to be all out for 235. Anil Kumble snared 7 wickets. I settled disconsolately into my hotel room to be drenched by the saturation media coverage. My rather more chipper host asked mischievously if I had checked for earlier flights home.”
M S Sekhar , K Shankar