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This blog was written on the 22nd of June. A variety of reasons, most notably my wedding, prevented this from being done earlier. yet i am convinced it retains a timeless quality, undiminished by the fading memory of that glorious day at Lord's, and the subsequent semi-final defeat.
Can you name any movie that James Dean was in? Probably not. Yet most people could recognize this picture of the short-lived superstar.
There are people who come to define not only a profession, but an era. Their essence seems to capture the world around them, the glories and vagaries of their time, the sense of how life was meant to be lived within their context. the word "zeitgeist" was invented for them.
One such person was Wasim Akram.The Left Arm of God was a man who was plucked from obscurity at 17 and went on to redefine what it meant to be a bowler. Like one of his contemporaries, Shane Warne, his mastery of his art was so great that he left his greatest victims (the English, the Indians) with massive Stockholm syndrome. And yet he was also a playboy, a poster child for diabetics patients, a prodigal son for bookmakers, a partygoer and a scapegoat.
But for my generation, he was, is and always will be – Wasim bhai.For the longest time, I had not questioned why we called him wasim bhai, Then I saw this again, and immediately i recognized the awe that fills up in the future Ufone salesman you see below.
In fact, this public service message may well have been my first real encounter with Wasim bhai the person, and as the ad makes evidently clear, Wasim Bhai was already a legend.
Remember, this is before the 400 test wickets and the 500 odi wickets, before the tri-series in Australia, before the repeated brutalization of India in Sharjah – heck, it’s even before the bloody reverse swing sodomization of England, both in the test tour and the world cup.
Our cricketing consciousness woke up to an age where Wasim bhai was already divine.
And so while I, and people my age, got to see Wasim Bhai’s greatest years, as well as his latter days, we never saw the awkward young boy who was just learning to make his mark, learning where to bowl the inswinger, when to use the bouncer, how to disguise the slower one.
In a sense, we never really grew up with Wasim Bhai.
Yes he was always there, the ever-protective guardian of our dreams and hopes. Time and again, when the Pakistani team’s collective brain farts would leave our spirits flagging, wasim bhai would resuscitate them faster than Pamela Anderson on Baywatch. Bowl after bowl he would beat the bat, flirt with the edges, and when the slips inevitably dropped the resulting catch, he would glare, call their mothers whores, and return to bowl the batsman out. In a previous era, fast bowlers bowled short, broke bones rather than stumps, and had long, long run ups. Wasim bhai almost ambled in, and bowled them full, but man, did he bowl them well.
But still, he was after all, wasim bhai.
For us, our generation’s hero, our era’s James Dean, came to be in 1996, in a forgotten ground in Nairobi.
It began perhaps the most insane and counter-intuitive love story since Rumi gave up his scholarly trappings after one gaze in Shams’s eyes. Other countries venerated men like Tendulkar, who gave them century after century, or Waugh, who gave them illusions of immortality, or even Hick, because really, they had no one else to support. So what was it about this man then that turned all Pakistanis delirious?
It was not like we were blinded either. Every inevitable failure, every ugly swipe resulting in tame dismissals, every golden duck, every moment of indecipherable stupidity was roundly criticized, chastised, moralized and analyzed to death. Fathers and uncles would make exasperated grunts and evoke memories of Zaheer and Mushtaq, young girls would find their cricket fever suddenly cured, foreign commentators would sound bemused and smug. There would be snide remarks about the stereotypical idiocy of the pathans, and vows that he would never be supported again. Logic, common sense, pragmatism, his lowly average, his sheer uselessness all screamed for him to be banished to the wilderness.
And perhaps that was why we loved him – because he encapsulated best the spirit of what it meant to be Pakistani in our times. He was something no one else could quite understand, he used an approach that no one would dare mimic.Consider this – the only thing that matches the volume of opinions regarding the failure of Pakistan as a viable entity is the plethora of expert conclusions that his career was finished. And yet, both of them are still around. Because just like Pakistan, he is forever resilient, forever capable of reinvention. When even he could see that the batting was just not happening anymore, he did not slip away into the darkness. He came back as the baddest mothfucker leggy since a fat boy from Victoria.
Once, while I was somewhere up north, a friend and I saw young children jumping across a yawning ravine with death defying leaps. At first we wondered how they could do something so stupidly dangerous. Then it occurred to me that the reason they could pull off such insanity was because the possibility of failure never came to their heads. They had pure faith in their madness.
Mohsin Hamid had written of 1998 that no one believed in consequences anymore.Every day, as we break red lights and jostle with vehicular madness, as we consume tainted water and questionable food, as we bribe and barter, we live in existence where the possibility of the consequences of our actions can not hope to be considered, because perhaps we know of no other way.
It would be foolish then to expect our Lala to be any different.
We will never be what this game, or this world is supposed to be about. We may never fully democratize, or industrialize, or de-feudalize. He will never learn a method, or perfect a formula, or become predictable.But when it all seems over, when there is no hope left, when everyone will write us off, we will have our moment of undying glory.
We are “The Boom Boom” generation.