Letter from '83

From Santanu Chakraborty, United States
Seeing Dr.Kamath's "Memories of 1983", I could not resist myself to share my own memories with you all. Cricket entered my life nearly 30 years ago when I was almost 10. But till that historic day (25th June, 1983) and even in the next four years, there had not been any occasion of my watching international cricket (even through television).

Cricket used to reach me through the articles of Shankari Prasad Basu, Shantipriya Bandopadhyay, Mati Nandy, Mukul Dutta, Ajay Basu or through the voices of commentators like JP Narayanan, Sushil Doshi, Murli Manohar Manzoor, Suresh Saraiya or the voices of news readers like Krishna Kumar Bhargava, Ramanuj Pratap Singh etc. The use of words in those articles or news or the same in those running commentaries along with the added excitement gave me the charm of cricket in those days. Those descriptions, those uses of words and those pulps of emotions were mainly responsible for building up my feel for national and international cricketers at that time.

It was a time when I could only imagine what could be an off-cutter or a full toss or a good length delivery or a googly. To me, there was not much difference between a square cut and an on-drive or between a leg glance or a fierce pull. It was such a time that India won the World Cup. Without understanding even 1% of the technicalities of cricket, without even listening to 50% of any of those cricket commentaries in that historic tournament, I enjoyed every bit of it through the documented descriptions in the newspapers. Those printed lines were not just some amalgamation of words for me - they actually were the World Cup for me. It was a time when those articles and reports were also not written with a professionally minded approach. So, the emotions reached the sky's limit in those articles and there were attempts to establish India as the best team in the world after the World Cup.

Although logical thinking told me that it was not so in spite of the fact that I was only in my adolescence at that time (14 years old). But to me, at least for that tournament, India really deserved this victory because of the sheer emotion, self belief, determination and patriotism. There were not too many superstars in the 1983 team. The 1987 team in the Reliance Cup had more superstars. There were no plans or tactics or strategies involved in those 1983 victories. Sourav Ganguly's India in 2003 was a much better team in terms of planning and strategies. But still India could not win in 1987 and 2003 because they probably did not have that self belief. Therefore, even after 25 years, that unplanned, strategy-less, superstar-less victory has remained India's sole victory in the World Cup.