Rohit Mahajan
Suresh Menon, veteran sports writer, wrote much of this engaging book during the pandemic, in response to his wife’s recurring query: “Why don’t you write something I might read?”
Dimpy, his wife, is a well-known sculptor — her work ‘In Thought’ adorns the cover of this book. But — unspeakable horror! — she’s not a “great sports fan” and hasn’t read her husband’s books on cricket. It’s a mystery how so many people get through life without being great sports fans, isn’t it? And ignoring a top-notch writer right at home? Perhaps, for some, sport lacks the gravitas and grit of life — 22 men chasing a ball, it must be admitted, can’t be considered a particularly serious intellectual activity, even if Messi’s lob over the goalkeeper or Federer’s floating crosscourt backhand are no less than art. Please don’t trust anyone who says it’s not so.
Menon hopes that Dimpy would like this book — she’s likely to, for there’s very little sport in it, and only incidentally, and the bulk of it comprises delightful literary essays, reviews, ponderings, and sketches of writers he’s engaged with in word and in person.
Menon is a book-lover. In his own words, he was a ‘library addict’, a ‘weird’ kid who collected photographs of writers — along with those of cricketers and scientists — without reading them or even seeing their books.
He became a sports writer because he got that job at age 21 — a career in sports journalism overpowered his literary ambition. “Soon, I realised that the great Indian novel would have to be written by someone else,” he notes. He’s comforted by the words of Gabriel García Marquez, who called journalism “the best job in the world”, and VS Naipaul, who told him: “Don’t look down on journalism.”
Menon has the self-awareness to note that “reading doesn’t make me better than anybody else”, and “I do sometimes come across as a bookish snob” — indeed, the breadth and depth of his reading interest, and his ruminations thereon, are staggering.
His words glow with joy when he writes about books and libraries, writers and ghostwriters, the spoken and the written word — his grandmother’s lost diaries, the ‘treat’ of walking between the shelves of a library as a boy, and “creating stories in my mind” about inscriptions in books bought at second-hand stores…
Excerpts from Menon’s pandemic diaries are evocative, for they are our experiences and our thoughts: the days when we naively believed our leaders when they told us that we’d beat the pandemic if only we stayed indoors for 21 days; the slow setting of despair; the disruption, separation, the bewilderment of the mind — “Sometimes I wonder if even I exist…”
This book is one massive eruption of his pent-up literary ambition — his dash at gravitas, shrugging off the supposedly insubstantial cloak of a sports writer.
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2022-02-06 02:08:00Z
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