A letter from Bradman

Good things tend to happen when you least expect it. It happened with me around 10 years ago. An engineering student then, I had come back home for a vacation and was helping shift stuff from one room to another because the house was being whitewashed. I agree, that's not a very exciting thing to do, but it does give you an opportunity to have a look at the old stuff lying around untouched for years and stir up memories. Sometimes it's even better when you find something precious, which you did not even know existed.

This precise thing happened to me when an old envelope lying among other documents caught my attention. The envelope had a faded appearance, like its colour had changed from white to cream. The envelope was addressed to Mr VN Varma (my father), and had a stamp on top right corner. The stamp said the envelope was from Adelaide and was posted in 1969. Adelaide? To the best of my knowledge, we didn't have any relative in Australia.

Inside the envelope there was a greeting card and a small note. The note said: "Dear Mr Varma, I thank you for your kind letter. Unfortunately no photo is available. Your father was very charitable in his judgment of me. I only hope he is right."

At the end there was a signature, which I didn't recognise. I asked about it and to my utter surprise, turned out the letter was signed by none other than Sir Donald Bradman. Something as priceless as this was found while shifting things around to colour our walls. I was amused, curious, happy and angry at the same time. But curiosity outweighed all other emotions, and I asked my father to tell me the story behind it.

It so happened that my father was quite inquisitive in nature during his teen years. His father, an avid reader, told him about exploits of Bradman. My father somehow found Bradman's address, and wrote a letter to him asking for his signed photograph. And then came the reply from the master himself.

Although it's not rare to write to your hero and get a reply from him/her via email/Facebook/Twitter today, it was totally a different thing in that era. That my father had the enthusiasm to find Bradman's address and write a letter to him and that Bradman had the generosity to reply to a fan in India was incredible. The letter - you can view it below - is with me since then, and is one of my most prized possessions.