Vivek Kaul: Ravichandran Ashwin and the winter of ’24 in the summer of ’69
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It’s the morning of 19 December. I am just staring out of my sixteenth-floor hotel room on the Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai.
It’s a clear day. There is a chill in the air. And the cars are flying by with not a care in the world.
On 18 December, a day earlier, my favourite cricketer of the current era, Ravichandran Ashwin, unexpectedly announced his retirement from international cricket. Ashwin is 38, so, that retirement decision would have come sooner rather than later. Nonetheless, some surprises do hurt.
It reminds me of a lovely Hindi poem written by Ashok Vajpayee, which I tend to remember on such occasions. Hamari banai duniya
nasht nahi hoti
hamare baad;
woh nasht hoti hai
hamare hi saamne
dheere dheere
aur kayi baar aise ki
ham samajh bhi nahi paate ki woh nasht ho rahi hai. (The world we create does not perish after us; it perishes right in front of us, slowly, and sometimes in such a way that we cannot even understand that it is perishing.) In a few hours I will be leaving for Abu Dhabi to see Bryan Adams perform. Adams is 65 and unlike Ashwin he doesn’t need to be chosen by a coach and a captain to show his abilities and perform.
But what they have in common is that in their respective highly competitive fields they have managed to remain relevant as long as they have. And that’s something. Adams’ first album released in 1980.
And 44 years later he is still around performing concerts all over the world. Of course, like most other rockstars his popularity has waned over the years. But that hasn’t stopped him from producing newer material and singing new songs.
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