Pundits From Pakistan

Infobox Book
name = Pundits From Pakistan
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = Cover of Pundits From Pakistan
author = Rahul Bhattacharya
illustrator = Shreya Debi
cover_artist = Moonis Ijlal
country =
language = English
series =
subject = Cricket
genre =
publisher = Picador
pub_date = 2005
english_pub_date =
media_type = Paperback
pages = 344 pp "(first edition)"
isbn = ISBN 0-330-43979-0
oclc =
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"Pundits From Pakistan" is a book on cricket by Rahul Bhattacharya. It covers the Indian cricket team’s tour of Pakistan in the year 2004. While the book is largely about cricket, it also tells of how the tour had an impact that went far beyond sub-continental cricket in terms of the goodwill and sense of bonhomie it created between the people of the two countries, thereby encouraging peaceful relations. [cite news | title = The cricket teams have been recognized for serving as catalysts of peace | url = http://www.un.org/sport2005/newsroom/cricket_team.html | accessdate = 2008-02-15]

Published in 2005, it was Rahul Bhattacharya’s first book, and received wide appreciation within cricketing circles. [http://content-www.cricinfo.com/reviews/content/story/296281.html Book Review by Mike Marqusee.] Retrieved on 2008-02-15. ] [http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/wisdencricketer/content/story/212684.html Book Review by Marcus Berkmann.] Retrieved on 2008-02-15. ] He covered this tour for the Guardian and Wisden.

Overview

India’s last full tour of Pakistan had been in late 1989, although the Indians had visited for three one-day matches in 1997. Pakistan had toured India in 1999, before sporting ties were severed by India because of growing political hostility. [cite news
first = The Associated Press | title = India-Pakistan cricket tour raises new hopes of peace | publisher = USA Today | date = 2004-03-10 | url = http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-03-10-pakistan-india_x.htm | accessdate = 2008-02-22 ] The tour of Pakistan in 2004 was a part of the ongoing peace process between the governments of the countries. [cite web | title = Emily Crick examines whether cricket can be used as a way to improve the relationship between India and Pakistan | url = http://www.sportanddev.org/en/articles/cricket-for-peace/index.htm | accessdate = 2008-02-16] The itinerary included seven one-day internationals and three Tests. [cite web | title = Tour itinerary on the PCB website | url = http://www.pcboard.com.pk/Pakistan/Events/India_in_Pakistan_2003-04.html | accessdate = 2008-02-16]

The book progresses with the tour, providing detailed accounts of the matches and recounting the journeys and off-field encounters. It is illustrated with a number of colour photographs from the tour. The scorecards of all the matches played as well as the statistical records related to the tour are given at the end of the book. It includes a conversation with Intikhab Alam, the former Pakistani cricket captain, and interviews with Danish Kaneria, the Pakistani leg spinner, Sabih Azhar, Shoaib Akhtar’s first coach, Aaqib Javed, the former Pakistani fast bowler, Andy Atkinson, the English pitch consultant who had been hired by the Pakistan Cricket Board, Abdul Qadir, the former Pakistani leg spinner, and Sourav Ganguly, the Indian captain on the tour.

The book briefly traces the cricketing relations between India and Pakistan over the years through Bhattacharya’s conversations with cricketers, officials, and fellow journalists. It also alludes to politics and the historical relations between the two countries. Bhattacharya provides numerous accounts of Pakistani hospitality, narrating how taxi drivers and shopkeepers refused to charge fans that had come over from India. Peppered with deep insights and cricketing trivia, it is partly in the form of a travelogue and provides a fascinating account of contemporary Pakistan.

Popular success

"Pundits From Pakistan" was selected among the top ten books published on cricket in the year 2005 by the staff at Cricinfo. [cite web | title = Top ten books of the year at Cricinfo | url = http://content-wi.cricinfo.com/review2005/content/story/229364.html | accessdate = 2008-02-22 ]

Reviews

Mike Marqusee wrote of the book in Wisden Asia Cricket:cquote|"Thankfully Bhattacharya does not suffer the tunnel vision that is the occupational curse of the press box. On the contrary, the strength of his book is the sophisticated sensibility he brings to the experience of the tour as a whole. He conjures up the poetry of cheap hotels and late-night bus stands, the anguished search for cybercafes in provincial towns, the charm of fleeting but intense human encounters."
"Above all, he is intensely aware that this series was about far more than cricket: the tour's most intense drama is found in the meeting between the two countries that the cricket facilitated. He pays tribute to the crowd at Karachi and the pride of Multanis but it's Lahore that steals his heart. "Those five magical days" spanning the pair of Lahore ODIs, he describes as "days of epiphanies, of closures, of small kindnesses and large, of rediscoveries and new discoveries ... For younger generations, it was an emphatic tearing down of stereotypes that had been fed to them, in their textbooks, their movies, their media." Fittingly, the book concludes with an anguished account of the militarist histrionics at the Wagah border crossing."

"Pundits triumphantly demonstrates that genuine emotional involvement in cricket has nothing to do with the hysteria of national chauvinism. He is not out to prove a point about either country, but to chronicle and savour an encounter in which, for once, "India and Pakistan were playing without fright, playing with expressiveness."

Marcus Berkmann wrote of the book in The Wisden Cricketer:cquote|"Bhattacharya's prose style is rarely restrained but he really lets rip during the matches, with flurries of metaphor, simile and allusion. Like most of the batsmen he admires, he takes bold risks. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, sometimes both in the same sentence. Stylistically, at least, he is the anti-Swanton. But his judgements are remarkably sound and he knows his onions."
"There are flaws. Pundits From Pakistan is, like nearly all books these days, too long; it often rambles; sometimes you have to read a paragraph three times to work out what he is talking about. But it has life and energy and youthful optimism and I salute it. Like the tour it describes, it is something a little bit special."

Contents

* Prologue
* 1. "Dawat"
* 2. The longest day
* 3. The Express is in town!
* 4. There’s grass on them thar’ frontier
* 5. Blue fading into green
* 6. A nation went potty
* 7. "Kaunsa" top spinner?
* 8. Champagne
* 9. "Safar"
* Acknowledgements
* Illustrations
* Scorecards & Statistics
* Index

References

External links

* [http://content-www.cricinfo.com/reviews/content/story/296281.html Book review at Cricinfo.]