A love lost, A life gained

An Escaped Ray of Gold

I think there is no one who really did what Suresh Raina and MS Dhoni did with their retirement. There will never be another pair like them, in their seperate ways they did what no one else would ever. 

Let us start with our dear Sonu. I love this man so much, Rahul Dravid is right, there is no team man quite like Sonu. He is always there for his teammates in their ups and downs though quite often only a few stay with him through both ups and downs. Him choosing to retire with Mahi, with a simple tweet, no fuss, no great caption or anything, speaks so much about the man that he is. Mahi is genuinely very lucky to have a man like Sonu by his side, who loves and looks upto him so much that he gave up the spotlight he deserved at a time like his retirement to retire with the man he fought to win for. This is not something I am making up by the way, Sonu himself said that seeing Mahi's downcast face in that 2011 quarter final made him all the more determined to win that match for him. Mahi enjoys undying loyalty from one of the very best men in cricket ever, he enjoys the comfort of having this one man always understand him and support him, and it is for good reason; Mahi is a man you would reserve your unconditional loyalty for. Going out with his captain when he could have chosen a seperate day to say goodbye and receive the adulation he deserved, what a guy man.

And then there is Mahi. It is always the case with him, rest of the world on one side, Mahi on a completely different side. There is no one quite like him, the best we can do to describe what this man is, is to say quite simply that Dhoni is Dhoni. His name is now more than a noun, it is a verb, an action so characteristically him that nobody else will ever be able to capture it. Dhoni now is an adjective, nothing will ever describe his own eccentricity other than his own name. Humans have a tendency to repeat history, each statue of the past has its reflection in the future generations. Dhoni is obviously again different, there will be cricketers who will one day inevitably break his records, who may be able to play better than him, but there is no one who will ever pull off a Dhoni and embody everything cricket all at once and still be something more. Look at his retirement video, the personal touch there is in each of the frames. The simple fact that he matched images of his old team with "Mujhse pehle kitne shayar" and his new team got "Kal aur ayeinge nagmo ki khilti kaliya chunne wale" just shows how much thought and care was put into this "most casual retirement announcement" as some stunned people chose to call it. When infact it was anything but casual. He painstakingly collected each and every photograph to include everyone he has played with, there was not one important player he missed in the entire compilation. Here some people like to point fingers at him, blame him for their own inadequacy while Mahi being Mahi doesn't forget to include them in a moment that was his and his alone. This was his retirement, one of the hardest calls of his life, he could have celebrated himself, HIS journey, HIS accomplishments and no one would have faulted him for it. Instead Mahi went the Mahi way and included every man who played an important role in his career, instead he gave a tribute to each player who played a role in his matches. There will never be someone quite like Dhoni. It is unexplainable, he is just a different man, way beyond any words.

Okay so about this chapter, I wrote this in connection with the story only but realized that it had no relevance to the plot and it was more of a one shot than anything else. It was however of the immediately after of the main plotline. The story ended with the Zimbabwe tri series tour and then the next thing that happened was the entire letter scandal. The actual letter did not have Rahul's hand in it, his only mistake in the entire mess was trying to appease everyone when he should have chosen a side. He was the one after all who stopped Sourav from leaving right after the letter leak happened. BCCI had already chosen a side and it was not Sourav.  Even later, when Sourav was sent in at six, a last chance at earning back his spot during Sri Lanka's test tour of India, the team was hugely disbalanced and Sourav didn't score, sealing his exit. In that match too, the team would have been balanced if Sourav had opened like he had said he would do if required of him. But Rahul didn't want to send him in like that, feeling that it would be unfair to Dada if he was forced to play out of his position to prove his worth during a time when form seemed to slip by him. Dada felt he should have, and so do I. He was being forced to prove his worth anyway, why not do it in a way more favorable to the team and spectacular both in failure and success. But Rahul chose to give him the comfort of familiarity. Rahul can't do diplomacy, period. His one and only attempt made the shitstorm shittier.