In Conversation with Vedam Jaishankar - On his Book 'Courage, Conviction, Controversy and Cricket'

 The Hyderabad Literary Festival organised an online book discussion of Vedam Jaishankar's third book 'Courage, Conviction, Controversy and Cricket'. I was in conversation with him on the 16th evening at 7 pm in a zoom call which was attended live by a secret, unseen audience.

We began with Vijay Kumar of HLF introducing us both and leaving the stage for us. Vedam is a well-known journalist with three decades of experience in covering sport so it was great fun discussing cricket with him. My network was bad initially and I could hardly hear him for a while and then I lost connectivity. But then with some quick support from my technical support head Anjali, I was back online and this time we went ahead without a hitch.

I quickly introduced the book to the audience. It had about 40 stories covering controversy, courage and conviction and we started with why he wrote the book in the first place. Vedam said he thought about writing about one controversy and going deep into it but then he realised there were some 250 controversies that he found worth mentioning, picked those that changed policy and stayed with 40. To not make ti a dark book, he added courage and conviction stories. We began right at the beginning with the Bodyline series and I asked Vedam whether it was a gentleman's game ever and he elucidated on how the British had a public house connection and made a 'gentlemen' and 'amateurs' distinction and how they would twist everything to their convenience. We spoke about other controversies like the Smith-Warner ball-tampering issue and how much the Boards are also culpable by setting the wrong values. Vedam agreed that values have to be clearly set by the Board and then the captain and others must practice them. He also spoke of how the administrators were vilified but how they have actually transformed the game and how the Lodha Committee recommendations may have messed it up further instead of making it better. We briefly discussed Paddy Upton's controversy about his sex dossier which was written with all good intent but blew up unnecessarily. There were questions on how to stop corruption at school level and Vedam was very passionate that the right values have to begin at the school level itself.

Overall a very nice and animated discussion that I enjoyed and from a couple of reactions that I got, some of the audiences also enjoyed. It was absolute fun chatting with Vedam who knows his cricket and I am very keen on reading his other books on Rahul Dravid and on Karnataka Cricket. Thanks, HLF for giving me an opportunity to be in conversation with another cricket writer once again.