What I read in 2023 - Part 2 of 2
Concluding this series with some of the better titles I read in the past year
This is the second part of my annual reading review for 2023. You can read the first part here.
As the year 2023 moved into its terminal half, like with other things in my life at that moment, the quality of books landing by my bedside also took a turn for the better. Here is my review of three books that I read last year. One, was a work of historical fiction, which despite picking a worthy character as its protagonist, ended up telling me more about how some of us see our past from the lenses of contemporary politics and cultural discourse, than provide a wholesome view of its central subject. The other two were an absolute delight! It is not often that you end up falling in love with something you ostensibly think you have known since childhood.
Here we go:
Kumaragupta I (414-455 CE): His dad’s (Chandragupta II Vikramaditya) legacy cast a long shadow, but one doesn’t repeatedly keep Huns at bay for decades without being extraordinarily capable.. Source: Creative Commons, Wikipedia
Life and Death of Sambhaji: Medha Deshmukh Bhaskaran
Before I go into a bit more detail, this is an excerpt from my earlier social media post about biographical writing in India, that needs to be highlighted here as well:
“The problem with Indian books on business or history is that they are either directly or indirectly commissioned by the subjects of those books. Hence they end up like Hagiographies - like court biographies of ancient and medieval rulers. Such titles are good to read before you are 20 and want inspiration to take over the world. But once you grow older, you realize that the general population, and perhaps more mature readers are better served by a more impartial version of biographies.”
This book is a work of historical fiction. Hence, it doesn’t deserve as severe a criticism as it would as a biography of Sambhaji - the second Chhatrapati (Emperor) of the Maratha state. That said, it is perhaps the result of an extraordinary dose of historical reading I have had in my intellectual life that makes this book look incomplete at places. And at others , a wholly black and white account, with a clearly defined hero and obvious villains.
The life of Chhatrapati Sambhaji, all the ephemeral 32 years of it, deserves a more researched biography. That is because of the very unique nature of his legacy.
He stands alongside Kumaragupta I and Achyuta Raya in a subset of capable rulers in Indian history, whose own brilliance was unfortunately eclipsed by being born as heirs to illustrious predecessors. Shivaji, Chandragupta II Vikramaditya and Krishnadeva Raya respectively. And while all three of them were born at the active edge of long-simmering conflicts - Kumaragupta with Huns, Achyuta Raya with the five Deccan Sultanates and Sambhaji with the Mughal Empire, the task before Sambhaji was the toughest of the three.
Kumaragupta had inherited from his father an empire and its vassal states which at the time made up the richest economy in the world. Achyuta Raya from his older brother, a thriving state-of-the-art Portuguese military contingent and the rule of one of the largest cities in the world at the time. Sambhaji, meanwhile, had control merely of a strongly defended but economically much deprived region, despite the exceptional skill of his father and because of the latter’s untimely death in his early 50s.
The good part about this book is that it is a great starter for someone looking to understand Maratha history since after Shivaji to the rise of Peshwas. Especially through portrait sketches of the key figures during this phase (1680-1720). Where it falls short is that such portraitures are incomplete, or have cognitive gaps. This might have been because the author wants to pitch this as a hero story, or a good-vs-evil conflict. Any shades of a character that do not fit with this narrative have been expunged.
For instance, Maharaja Jaswant Singh of Marwar is shown to be very sympathetic to the cause of Shivaji. He is a fierce protector of Shambhaji during his house arrest in Agra. What remains untold are the political calculations that prevent him from rising up against Emperor Aurangzeb, despite the sack of Mathura.
Then there are some quasi-deified and hence untouchable figures in the novel.
Historical accounts state that Shivaji, in his lifetime, was torn between choosing his successors from among his two sons - Sambhaji and Rajaram. Both of them ended up being very capable leaders in their own times, and proved him right by doing so . What is glossed over is his thought process and how it impacted his sons. He is simply presented as an Abrahamic God-like figure testing his sons’ ability to rule. The author is equally vague about the reasoning behind Sambhaji Raje defecting to the Mughals in his early 20s and then coming back to his father’s fold. We are not told what led his father to forgive and rehabilitate him.
Structurally, the book loses its steam after Chhatrapati Sambhaji ascends the throne after his father’s death. We get to know little of his career as an administrator. The campaign against corrupt land revenue collectors, which he led from his office is missed out. It was equally consequential to the resilience and support that the Maratha state received in its resistance against the Mughals. The focus predictably shifts to his capture and torture at the hands of Emperor Aurangzeb in the Deccan. One of the most important purposes of this book is to narrate, in rigorous detail, the atrocities Aurangzeb committed on Marathas during his Deccan campaigns in the 1680s - so as to animate a “national/regional consciousness”.
Even so, Aurangzeb and all the Mughals come out of the story as one-dimensional brutes like Emperor Palpatine and his crew in the Star Wars universe. I consider Aurangzeb as the ideological progenitor of a fundamentalist and non-inclusive Islamist state whose legacy and concepts have continued to plague this subcontinent for the last three centuries. But to not give him credit for his military excellence by attributing his early success over Marathas to underhanded stratagems, to dismiss his ability to manage, through carrot or stick, a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire for almost 50 years, is to sell his capability, evil as it may be, short.
By not illustrating the complex personality of Sambhaji, so as to not let history get in the way of a narrative, this book left me quite unsatisfied.
Sourav Ganguly and Gautam Gambhir: Two of the greatest all format left handed batsmen, in happier times. Why doesn’t India produce enough top -order southpaws? Source: Reuters
Hitting Against the Spin: How cricket really works: Nathan Leamon and Ben Jones
This for me was the standout book that I read this year. There are very few books that you read in your lifetime that make you look at things around you differently, and fall in love with a gradually fading childhood passion once again.
“How cricket really works” is a very presumptuous title to market a book on cricket, especially to Indians. In these matters, we are cocky enough to assume that we know everything that there is to know, having watched cricket matches and participated in discussions around it since early tween-age. But watching is not the same as observing. Experience is hollow without its own analysis.
Management jargon and “life lessons” for social media aside, there is plenty in this book that made me take a note-pad and pencil and tinker with its schematic diagrams and illustrations on cricket. It made me realize how much of cricket I thought I knew was simply received wisdom. Of how many statements that me and my friends have made as “experts” are internally inconsistent. Chances are that a number of you reading this review are Indians and have a good handle on numbers. This is your book. Nathan Leamon is a statistician who is credited to have played a major role in the English team’s revival after the 2015 ODI World Cup and heralding its best ever phase in white ball cricket which saw them hold the double title of 2019 ODI and 2022 T20I World Cup champions. Ben Jones works with Cric Viz, a sports performance analytics start-up that has an enviable record of crunching over 40000 first class games going back to the 1800s. They have also captured, since the early 2000s, almost 30 key data points for batting, bowling and fielding for every delivery bowled in a first class game across countries.
What is rare here is that despite talking about how data analytics changed the English team’s approach to the game and its success rate, the authors are no data absolutists. This book is not a marketing material for data analytics. The authors desist from a Marc Andreesen kind of statement like “Software is eating the world” equivalent when it comes to their field’s relationship with cricket. Data here predicts odds of success, but there is no guarantee that simply crunching numbers will ensure success. I liked how the authors caution relying too much on models and match-ups and not considering a player’s innate skill level and captain’s intuition in making selection decisions. A good example is that of Shane Warne and Anil Kumble. Given that leg spin is such a physically demanding task to accomplish, the level of control average leg-spin bowlers have is fairly low compared to other types of bowlers. Therefore, if you were a data analyst picking up a Test team, you would have avoided picking a leg spinner. This was the case with Test cricket through the 1960s-90s. 1990s is when these two gentlemen burst on the scene and shocked the world with the control they exercised while bowling. There is no data analysis that can predict outliers like Warne or Kumble, and their phenomenal success at the top of wicket taking lists.
Unlike “Barons of Banking” a book I read this year that talks about history and economics, and fails at both- the authors of this book are able, to paraphrase them, “articulate the world of data with the words of language”. It also speaks a lot about the well rounded nature of the education system in the UK where it is considered alright to do a doctorate in mathematics and choose a career in journalism and sports.
That is why, even if you (hi Non-Indians) have a passing acquaintance with cricket as such, this book is still a worthy read. For someone like me whose daily job involves quite a bit of heavy data crunching, this book is a reminder to keep all the models relatable. It is a good lesson in keeping the conclusions of one’s data analysis crisp, while at the same time appreciating the caveats about things that data won’t answer.
Another great contribution of this book to cricketing literature is that it is the first major attempt to understand T20 cricket. I cannot count the number of times we have seen a polarized debate around T20 versus the longer versions of the game among the fans of the game. To its fans, T20 is a “consequentialist”, “results-oriented” version, to its critics, it is a “bastardized” “ titillating” form of the gentleman’s sport, shorn of its elegance.
The authors, through a very data driven analysis - suggest that it might be another game in itself. It has different priorities - putting a price on each ball rather than each wicket. It rewards different kinds of skills - a single momentous ball over a consistent, miserly line and length. That might be the real missing angle of the debate around T20 too. Its supporters and opponents might simply be seeing one game from the lens of another.
As I finished this book, the Cricket World Cup 2023 was already at the doorstep. This time, thanks to all the conceptual frameworks, all the tinkering that I had done on a pad and paper while reading this book, made me appreciate the game better. I was able to sit through the entire 50 over games. I was able to sense the pressure building with each passing moment. I was enjoying the game as an avid student of cricket, and not a partisan India fan. And just for that last part, I would recommend this book to all people in my country and the subcontinent.
Cricket is not everything. It is just a sport. But if a book about cricket can help you fill your hours watching the game with meaning, it can make you understand and predict its under currents, then it is a book worth your time.
Warne’s dismissal of Mike Gatting during Ashes 1993. With a single delivery, he resurrected leg spin as a bowling option for the next three decades. Source: YouTube
“On Warne” is Haigh’s second book on cricket that I have read, having purchased it after reading his “The Green and Golden Age”. The latter is his collection of writings on Australian cricket, between 1995-2007, where it was a team that had few equals across the ages in all formats of cricket. Now in Haigh’s world, there are just two teams in cricket worth writing about - Australian and the English. Everyone else, and especially the subcontinent, is treated as a tag team of upstarts- deserving only of backhanded compliments. This pet peeve and bias aside, On Warne is a portrait of an singularly talented, endlessly competitive and a vividly colorful hero of cricket - Shane Warne.
It is poignant that I picked this book in my hometown (Bokaro) on November 20th, just the day after India went down once again against a gutsy and cohesive team performance by Australia in the 2023 World Cup final.
“I go to sleep at night remembering the things I am grateful for. I wake up in the morning and recall the things I hate. I remind myself of the need to struggle against something. That friction, that concocted angst, takes me through my day” - I remember hearing this from a very successful alum from my college. I wonder if cricketing legends do the same. If I think of Tendulkar, he would have woken up with plenty of things to struggle against - a bipolar audience which would deify or disembowel you depending upon the result of a match and a team, a nation that transplanted its expectations of excellence from politics, economics and daily life onto cricket, in a desperate hope of gaining international fame.
But not for Warne. The Australia he played in had the fortune of players born once in a century - McGrath, Waughs, Lee, Gilchrist- all coincidentally being in the same team. He had the cushion of a more measured and mature criticism from Australian media and punditry when his team lost. So, he created things to struggle against. In a revealing passage in the book, his teammates wonder why he creates so much chaos in his life - multiple infidelities, doping, dalliances with bookies. The answer to that perhaps would be - he thrived in chaos (remember the World Cup 1999 semi final against South Africa?) and went out and sought it.
Coming back to Haigh, it is perhaps a travesty that one of the finest cricket-writers around, who has sufficient nuance to portray Warne - warts and all, that he writes a regular tour summary just for the Ashes. This is not a biography of Warne. It is a collection of snapshots from different dimensions of his life - his beginnings, his art, his struggles, his teammates and his wilful invocation of chaos. You feel as if you don’t know everything about Warne, but what you do, you are fed in a measured and informative manner.
To quote Haigh, and this is something that all biographers should aspire to - "I have some expertise about Warne the cricketer, of whom I have seen much, but not much about Warne the person, with whom my relationship is comprehensively superficial. And, to be frank, that suits me fine. I only wished to watch him play cricket; I didn’t want to marry him."
In writing about Warne the cricketer, even on-field, Haigh is in no way lenient on him. It is perhaps the most honest and objective account that I have read of Warne’s associations with bookmakers during Australia’s tour of Pakistan in 1994-95. It also brings out the contribution of Australian Cricket Board (ACB)’s role in creating incentives that egged on Warne in becoming the problem child of that Green and Golden team. A board that had turned activist and fined Warne and Merv Hughes for sledging in South Africa in 1994 preferred a mutually beneficial silence when reports came out of Warne informally providing pitch and weather reports to bookmakers in India and Pakistan. It showed a lack of courage. In punishing relatively smaller errors severely when in public view and papering over the issue of match fixing because the details in the open were not very few, they created a wrong precedent. That approach to turning a blind eye of what happened in the dressing room backfired quickly, when Warne was caught taking steroids in the build-up to the 2003 World Cup.
The book also provides a window into Warne’s differences with Steve Waugh and how the latter managed to create a working relationship with him. The narration of the Australian team’s journey through its golden age via the diametrically opposite perspectives of these two greats is a high point for me in the book. A passage through the times and team of Warne wouldn’t be complete without talking about Stuart MacGill, a man whose career would make you believe the importance of luck in life.
Once again, Warne’s unstructured, street-smart and non-conformist approach to cricket rubs against the method-driven, “star” agnostic team that Ricky Ponting was recruiting - to create the second phase of Australia’s dominance of world cricket. Towards the end of his career, after his return from the doping scandal of 2003, Warne cuts a lonely figure. A wizard with the ball who still played a key role in 2006 avenging Australia’s mauling by England in the Ashes 2005, he found no friends except for a young Michael Clarke, who was more in his awe than a friend.
A shunning of Warne by his long standing team members in the late 2000s, fed up with his off-field antics and comments, is an enduring image of understanding that there is a life beyond cricket that asks for its own propriety and accountability. Which Warne habitually failed to respond to.
If you like cricket, this is a great addition to your book list. Gideon Haigh is a writer whose each book you should look up. My only wish here is that he writes something as magical about the Border Gavaskar Trophy in 2024, as he does every second year for the Ashes.
This is it for 2023. I am already on my way, about to finish my first book for the year. Hopefully, in another 12 months time, I will be back with this series, telling you how I feel about what I read in 2024. Meanwhile, if you find this newsletter relevant, please be kind enough to share and subscribe it with your friends/ family/ acquaintances.
Apart from reading reviews, the plan is to take writing more seriously this year and to come up with originally researched pieces on economy and finance for those of you who have encouraged and supported me on this journey.