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Follow UsWhen the chips are down, and you are staring at the abyss, what would you need the most?
Hope.
Hope is the best of things and no good thing ever dies.
At approximately 10.15 PM IST, a section of the crowd at the Chinnaswamy Stadium wanted to one up on the traffic. Then another section wanted to run the clock down because they didn't want to go to the office the next day. And then the main section who still believed.
They needed 166 runs from 60 balls. It was a day never seen before in the history of the Indian Premier League. Ideally, such an equation shouldn’t lead to hope, and if it does, then either the crowd are in delusion, or one person is driving the delusion.
In this case, it was the latter. A 38-year-old Dinesh Karthik was driving the delusion, riding the wave of the highest order.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Karthik was sure that the Royal Challengers Bengaluru had the best crowd support there. He isn’t wrong, if fans can still stay back and hope that 166 can be scored off 60 balls, there is nothing to be wrong either.
But RCB fans are like a double-edged sword. You can either be a hero or they can come out calling you in terms of the most pathetic, to an extent ‘club cricketer’ might seem like a compliment.
For Karthik, this season was all about finding himself at the IPL level. It was his last season in the highly sought-after league. He was some kind of a traveller, seeking to find the best version of himself, which made him move multiple times but to no avail.
Remember, this was a man who played for every franchise you could name without playing for his home team. So, finding a home after all was quite necessary. At Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru, he wanted to create a nice little home before he could march on his paths to commentary glory.
Despite not many batters down the order, you could visibly see that the crowd were still putting their hopes in Karthik, like a man desperate for money would put on trying his last luck at a casino.
But in both cases, they are living in delusion, a delusion that good things will happen, not realising that they have themselves to blame for this pitfall.
Karthik, though, did not disappoint them for having that hope. He found boundaries at will, sometimes with his hard hands and on other occasions holding the bat ever so softly like butter sitting on a butter knife just waiting to be applied all over the bread. Karthik’s application was on point, and every second ball flew across to a different part of the boundary.
You could see that there was no pressure on Karthik, whatsoever because the equation was such that a victory was never going to be in sight. But you could see that Karthik took his swansong seriously, and danced like Shiv's Tandav (Shiv's Dance of Fury).
Sometimes moving his leg over-ly to the off-side to access the leg-side region, sometimes just gracefully moving it enough to pierce the gap in the third-man region. And sometimes when the bowlers were right on point, Karthik ensured they walked back to the mark thinking, what the hell is wrong?
He played some shots that would have made one certain Abraham Benjamin de Villiers proud. Maybe he would have, just like ABD, made a good hockey player. Karthik took the crowd as his hostage and perfectly hypnotised them with his magic willow (wand), charming the crowd into thinking it was still possible.
The ball even travelled across the ground, like he had cast a spell on it. It came to a point where the crowd believed that it was DK on strike, irrespective of whether it was a left-hander or a right-hander because of the varying degrees of switch hits he had hit during the clash. The result might have already been a bygone but Karthik ensured that his Tandav would be remembered.
That his nifty feet would finally know a place they could firmly place themselves, calling it home. When he walked back, scoring a 35-ball 83, in 52 minutes of mayhem, he already had the crowd standing on their feet and applauding.
Normally Karthik isn’t one of emotion, he doesn’t exhibit them, even as a captain. But when he walked back, you could see that a 38-year-old was ready to put his sweat, tears and blood on this franchise, and the crowd obliged.
Over the last 52 minutes, they were only dancing to his tunes, and singing his praise. Finally, after years of wilderness searching for a home at the IPL level, Karthik found one, 350 km away from a place he calls home.
This one is a bit more magical because he crafted this with his hands and feet. Make no mistake, the fans were still highly delusional but at least they were driven into this delusional overdose by Karthik’s Tandav, a last dance for him in the league.
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