Sridharan Sharath

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन |
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि ||

Translation: You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.

If a decent cricketer like N Gautam* confers the moniker of an "all time great" of a state which has produced quality cricketers incessantly, then you should have done something right. But what enrages me is when players who played alongside him and were nowhere close to his calibre got call ups for the national side and the deserving guy missed out. This week we are discussing the tragic+ uplifting story of Tamilnadu's greatest Sridharan Sharath.

Sadagopan Ramesh and Sharath, both were southpaws. Ramesh's first class average was 42 and Sharath's average was 51. Ramesh ended up playing 19 tests and 24 ODIs for India. On the contrary, Sharath kept chasing the coveted India cap.

I am a sucker for good stories. I grew up in the 90s, which was all about recuperating from an injury and winning at life, cinema wise, for me. I only saw Jean Claude Van Damme's movies. If you remember "Blood sport"(Bollywood's version of it is Ajay Devgn's starrer "Jigar")- in the ultimate fight, when the antagonist uses a certain powder to blind Van Damme, he struggles for a wee bit, then closes his eyes, concentrates a little and kills the menace. Something similar happened to Sharath in 1993. He suffered a deadly accident, resulting in the tibia and febula of his left ankle breaking into two pieces. Few months prior to this, he had scored a hundred and two fifties against the NZ U-19 side, which featured Dion Nash and Stephen Fleming. Life is so unfair, you would think, but the guy makes a Van Damme-esque comeback and scores a hundred in his very first match. What a champion!

When you have had vanquished pain and rejection, nothing deters you. He was the first Tamil Nadu player to play 100 Ranji matches. W.V. Raman and K Srikkanth have heaped praises on Sharath and both wanted him to play for India, but both have diverse views on why he didn't get the India cap. Raman feels that the accident was the reason he couldn't play for India and Srikkanth feels it was between Dravid and Sharath, who were the contenders for the Indian cap in the 90s and it went to Dravid, because both batted in the middle order.

When a player stuggles and gets dropped, he/she goes back to the drawing board and starts working on his flaws, because he/she is aware of what they are lacking, but my heart goes out for people like Sharath who did everything right, but fell short. A classic case of "NEKI KAR AUR DARIYA KE DAAL".

*N Gautam was a Tamilnadu cricketer who passed away in 2002. He played 23 tests for Tamilnadu from 1988-2002. He was battling cancer.