I have just finished re-reading Sebastian Junger's great book, The Perfect Storm — a true story which makes one marvel at, among other things, the way events separated by vast distances and times, and decisions made in isolation, can conspire to produce unpredictable and unmanageable results.
At the same time I was well into Richie Benaud's latest, Over But Not Out: My Life So Far. I'd just reached Benaud's account of a highly eccentric figure in the history of Indian test cricket, a character called the Maharajkumar of Vizianagram, or Vizzy, as he became known.
Vizzy's path crossed Benaud's when, in the second test of the 1959–60 tour, India defeated Australia — the first Indian win against Australia on home soil. Generously recognising the importance of the occasion, Benaud went on to the ground to shake hands with the victorious Indian captain, Gulabrai Ramchand, then lined the Australian team up to form a guard of honour for their opponents and joined them in the dressing room celebrations.
It was a splendidly sporting gesture which Vizzy, reporting for the local paper, praised extravagantly, while rating the victory itself as equal to that other epic event of 1959, the first moon rocket.
In a different and contemporaneous article, however, written for the distant Northern Indian Patrika and a different audience, Vizzy slated the Australians and Benaud as cheats and poor sportsmen. When Vizzy visited the Australian dressing room before the start of the third Test at Bombay (Mumbai), Benaud confronted him with both articles and threw him out when he refused to apologise.
As far as Benaud was concerned, that was that. But in an eerie way, their fractious meeting and Vizzy's acrimonious entanglement with an Australian test cricket captain was like the perfect storm: distant events and forces seemingly buried in the past had inexorably found their moment ...
... In 1930, the year in which Benaud was born in far off Penrith, NSW, Mahatma Gandhi's civil disobedience campaign began in India with the famous Salt March, and the resultant tumultuous civil unrest forced the cancellation of a planned MCC tour of India.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man: Vizzy stepped into the breach with a team of his own to tour India and Ceylon. Pre-dating the seductive IPL by some 80 years, he induced two of England's greatest batsmen, Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe, to play for this team.
The tour was a great success, with Hobbs and