Seasoned selector and former cricketer Jatin Paranjape once said he could tell whether Sachin Tendulkar was in form or not with his eyes closed. All he needed to do was stand next to the nets where Sachin was batting and hear the sound of his bat when he played his famed cover drive. Paranjape elucidated that with an in-form Sachin’s bat, the sound that arose was like that of a spring let loose after pushing it back, which therefore carried a lot of tension within. Yes, to Paranjape, all that the chiming of the willow as it met 5.75 ounces of leather on its sweet spot was like a spring let loose. That, according to him, was the sound of form.
I can’t claim to be an expert on cricket or have played it with passion, but I remember an exceedingly overcast afternoon while I waited for my turn to bat at West Ham Park cricket ground. The pitch was artificially made and had the zip you would associate with Kiwi pitches, on which an experienced batting side could tumble with less than 100 on the board.
My knees were shaking while seeing my teammates go one after the other, barely reaching the double-figure mark. At that moment, Sadiq, a British-Pakistani seamer who played for the same team, looked at me and said, “You are nervous, innit mate?” I blurted, “Yeah mate. Lack of form, I guess.”
He replied, “Form, mate, is nothing but the absence of self-belief.” He went on throwing the leather ball from his left hand to the right, without speaking another word during the innings. Unknowingly, he had thrown my mind in a tizzy. I really wondered if form is only the lack of self-belief. How could a world-class batsman, who would punch an out-swinging delivery through the covers and mid-off, drag a rank wide delivery back to his stumps trying to cut it for a boundary?
Would you call it lack of form, or just plain bad luck?
I am always reminded of the words spoken by filmwriter Salim Khan on The Kapil Sharma Show, whenever I hear someone talk about luck or good form. He said that Salim Durani, the swashbuckling former India Test player, had told him, “Salim miyan, achha form jab hoti hai toh bat wahan nahi chalta jahan ball girti hai, balki ball wahan padti hai jahan bat chalta hai (When you are in good form, the bat doesn’t reach out to the ball, rather, the ball is pitched where your bat is.)”
How charmingly explained, conjugating two important factors in sports and life. Form and luck. It is hard to explain even in life whether your luck shines because you work hard on your form, or whether your form arrives at the right time when luck sides with you. It is hard for sports psychologists to explain why a person keeps scoring big consistently over a long period of time, and then suddenly finds himself unable to score.
In my little, cocooned world of writing, I have miserably failed to grasp my lack of words sometimes, when I need to write on a subject I have been thinking of for weeks. I sit around my writing desk, dreading the same way I did years ago in West Ham Park, while waiting for my turn to go out and bat.
A looming, deathly power rises while I think (and sometimes overthink) about the opening line for my piece. I imagine that in the same way, a batsman thinks of a shot he needs to play desperately to get his first run. I remember this feeling of vacuity that Professor Neerja Mattoo, the celebrated Kashmiri translator, described about her uncle, himself a translator. She spoke about him staring at the pieces of paper he was writing on with a blank expression, as if looking at a corpse. She said, “The words eluded him.” He would wait for the right word to manifest while holding the ink pen in his hand, waiting patiently like a seasoned batsman would for a half-volley to be dispatched to the boundary.
I have often asked poets about the style and functionality of their poetry, and almost all of them said they had composed their most beautiful poems in a span of minutes. They also claim that even in this short burst, almost always, they face no problems with the rhyme or meter of the poems. Spiritual Urdu poets of yore described this phenomenon as “aamad”, an interesting Islamic explanation for a seemingly mundane event.
Aamad can be loosely translated as “divine intervention”, a flow of words from the divine, with their pen acting merely as the recording instrument of the message. Today, we would explain this as writing form, arriving for champions just at the right time. The more I dwell on this, I wonder how the beautiful lyrics Faiz Ahmad Faiz wrote—apparently in an hour—have reverberated across the globe for decades.
How the devil of procrastination never bit him or Pablo Neruda or Mirza Ghalib, who wrote scores of ghazals and nazms, many of which resonate with people even today. I wonder how long it took Momin Khan Momin to write the couplet, against which Mirza Ghalib was ready to give up his entire “diwan” (book of poems).
Tum mere paas hote ho goya
Jab koi dusra nahin hota
…which closely translates to…
You are close to me [as if]
When no one else is
The simplicity of the couplet is unmissable, its beautiful interplay between innocuous looking words “goya” and “jab” is breathtakingly simple yet exquisite, like a well-timed straight drive that looks easy and delectable at the same time.
In the world of sports and writing, I believe the anxiety and the dread about performance is pretty similar. To sit down looking at a monitor for hours without writing a word, or perhaps even avoid the thousand chores that need to be finished which I suddenly remember. Several unfinished documentaries suddenly beckon me.
I have to do everything except sit down and write my first sentence. An act of writing to find one’s form is like delivering a child. It’s excruciatingly painful, but a process one can never forget.
Nothing in life, other than going out to bat on a sticky wicket, causes similar nervousness. One always looks to survive the first couple of overs. And then happens “aamad”.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Waiting for Divine Intervention")
(Views expressed are personal)
Amit Bamzai is a Kashmiri entrepreneur and an avid cricket buff who has played the game at club level in India and England.
