“Somewhat like Ajit Agarkar”, that’s how we would describe him. Not that he looked
anything like the cricketer in question. He was plumpish and unathletic. He had probably
entered a sports field only in his dreams, though he actively followed sport from his couch. But like Agarkar, he was talented and multifaceted. And like Agarkar, he was always threatening to be great – without ever getting there. We’d often berate him for not putting his talent to better use and ‘doing something in life’. But he would laugh it off with some mock philosophy like, ‘For mankind to have a Winner, there has to be a willing ‘Loser’ or ‘If everyone was ‘doing’, what would the poor armchairs do?’, and so on.

Not that he didn’t like the spotlight. He just didn’t like carrying the burden of it for too
long. So, he chose to be the ‘Star’ among spectators. He specialised in the unexpected
question, the pointed critique, the left-of-field observation, and the disapproving shake of the
head. He was a respected and sometimes feared participant at meetings. When called
on stage, he’d keep it short and provocative – make a mark and exit as quickly as
possible. He specialised in the one-slide presentation at work, where one hundred was the norm. Most often, it was all that needed to be said. Inspired by Groucho Marx, he sometimes joked, “I couldn’t bear to be in my presentations’. But his biggest weapon in a gathering was humour. He was funny. “More punny than funny, so if you laugh at my jokes, you know how low-brow you are”, he would warn us. And he could pun. He would do it impunsively. He’s even been beaten up for it once or twice. Once when he heard a guy ordering a 3-egg omelette in our college canteen, he sagely observed, “No wonder you are so dim-witted”. And he’d use all five languages he knew. You’d suddenly see a fleeting twitch of a smile in the middle of a serious meeting. You‘d try to ignore it and then pause and ask, “ok, what?!”. He’d shake his head and say, “You’d need to know Tamil and Bengali for that”. He was a sambar-guzzling Tamilian, and the quintessential Calcutta Jholawala rolled into one. “He has the worst traits of both species”, his Bengali wife would complain.

But in small groups, he didn’t mind holding court. He was a raconteur, a fierce debater,
an inquiring listener, and you could talk to him on any subject – as long as it had nothing
to do with a P&L or Balance Sheet. ‘I’m an MBA, but not an MBA type’ was another
favourite of his. He loved music and literature and cinema and sport – especially cricket.
He was our Statsguru at school (‘I know nothing after 1980, he would tell us after we
grew up’), and we trusted his opinion. He would sometimes say, “The worst
thing about knowing what good music sounds like, or what good writing is, or what a
good cover drive looks like – is that you either be that good or just be a spectator.”
Maybe it rankled a bit sometimes. Maybe not. But when we meet again on the other
side, I half expect him to greet me and say, “Can you name a player who was the fastest
Indian to 50 wickets in an ODI, who had the fastest 50 by an Indian in ODIs, has a Test
hundred at Lord’s, turned a test match at Adelaide in one afternoon just like Chandra at
the Oval in 71, and then captained his team to a Ranji trophy?

Hint: it’s not Virat Kohli!”