5 cricket books to read while you are in quarantine
It has been almost eleven days of survival in a cricket-less land. As a fellow survivor, I feel what you are going through. But enough of that World Cricket Championship game you've been sitting on for long. Enough of this Netflix binge watching. The Amazon Prime subscription you got is now probably redundant because you have finished watching the Australian cricket documentary series. Now, let's get serious, do something real, something more meaningful and far more productive.
Get a cup of coffee, tell your mates that you've got important work to do, lock yourself up in your room, and open an e-reader on your phone because we're about to do something just as exciting as watching cricket.
Reading cricket is almost the same as living the sport all over again. It opens doors to new possibilities and new perspectives. How in the world did we hear about the great Sir Donald Bradman? Literature survives the test of time and holds a sweet bower constant for you to revisit when you need a dose of nostalgia, and nostalgia is all that is carrying us forward through these times.
So here are five cricket books that you should ponder over during these days to keep yourselves hooked to the gentleman's game. Binge over them losing all your earthy sense of day and time and nobody will complain. Because unlike Netflix and WCC2, this is an addiction worth cultivating.
#5 Eleven Gods and a Billion Indians by Boria Majumdar
If you have read Sachin Tendulkar's autobiography, you would know this feeling. Playing It My Way was a poignant drive down 24 years of Indian cricket history, through the highs of the 2011 World Cup win and the lows of the turn-of-the-millennium match fixing scandal that rocked Indian cricket, centering around the life of one man who saw it all from the best possible seat.
In Eleven Gods and a Billion Indians, cricket scholar and academician Boria Majumdar takes you through the history of cricket in the country, from the times of British rule to the Kumble-Kohli saga that pockmarked India's coast to the 2017 Champions, Trophy final.
With a lot of courage, Majumdar provides great insight and insider information into the many scandalous events of Indian cricket, like the 1983 World Cup win that propelled India up into the world of big-three cricket, the tussle between Sourav Ganguly and 'Guru Greg', 'Monkeygate', Lalit Modi and the coming of the IPL. If you are a cricket nerd, this book is the perfect fit for you.
Also, here is something you may already know, guess who co-authored Playing It My Way.