A life well lived

The Hindustan Times' Pradeep Magazine pays tribute to Ashok Mankad, the former India allrounder who died on Friday aged 61.

He was a thickset man with a ponderous gait, leaving you in little doubt that he would be slow on his feet. Engage him in a conversation, no matter what the topic, and you knew he was a thinker. Myriad thoughts would cross his mind in a flash and the man himself was not averse to putting them in words with a kind of lucidity seen rarely in sportsmen.

Had he done justice to what he promised as a teenager, he could have ended his career not only among India's better known batsmen, but also a shrewd and wise leader of men.