MS Dhoni: The unassuming changemaker from Ranchi

It was the Dhoni wave that forced cricket officialdom in India to acknowledge the talent that lay beyond Mumbai, Bengaluru, New Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata

In a storied and well-chronicled career, there is little Mahendra Singh Dhoni has not achieved. Were he to make a short list of his accomplishments, one suspects the pivotal role he played in integrating the one-time hinterland with the mainstream ecosystem of Indian cricket will figure prominently.

It’s not as if, before Dhoni, players from relative cricketing outposts hadn’t donned national colours. Kapil Dev’s stirring exploits lent a new dimension to the sport in Haryana, from where alone a fair few emerged in the wake of the ace all-rounder’s debut in the late 1970s. The sheer impact of Dhoni’s meteoric rise, however, is unparalleled.

Ranchi isn’t an insignificant stop in Indian topography, the bustling industrial city already a major force in mineral-based activities by the 2000s. Dhoni made Ranchi a household name in the cricketing world through sheer weight of his presence; equally significantly, he triggered a revolution not just in his home town but also in other non-traditional cricketing centres, widening the base from which India could mount its challenge to conquer the world.

That he did so without feeling, or yielding to, the pressure of conforming to expected norms is telling. Dhoni’s breakthrough came in the era of the Tendulkars, Dravids, Gangulys and Kumbles, suave and polished and clean-cut. Dhoni breezed in, not irreverentially but with a strong streak of individualism, and retained his individuality as his career evolved and blossomed while polishing the rough edges with experience and experiences.

Not until he perceived the need to do so did he lop off the flowing mane which captivated his legion of fans. He didn’t try to change himself to fit into a team of established superstars, singularly unaffected by the fame, the spotlight and the clamour for attention that less deserving and less strong have found impossible to cope with. He didn’t attempt to banish his past and reinvent himself as a ‘city boy’. And even when he moved out of Ranchi and set up home elsewhere, he made sure Ranchi did not move out of him.

Shaking the centre

Without intending to, Dhoni’s resounding message to aspirants of his ilk from what are conveniently called ‘smaller centres’ was that if you were true to yourself and didn’t compromise on character and integrity, all you needed to travel the distance was skill and hard work. That where you came from was secondary to who you were and what you were capable of. That you didn’t need to speak the Queen’s English to succeed at the highest level. That your background didn’t define you, your actions did.

To those who might have harboured a sense of insecurity and a feeling of inferiority because of the cricketing pedigree, or lack of it, of their respective hometowns, his glorious journey proved an invaluable life-lesson. The surge of cricketers from beyond the celebrated bastions of Mumbai, Bengaluru, New Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata in the last decade and a bit is every bit a by-product of the sweeping Dhoni wave that forced officialdom to acknowledge that the time had come to burst the unspoken but widely perceived elitist bubble of the country’s most popular sport.

There has been a steady stream of players from Ranchi-like centres who have taken the Dhoni route to international caps. From Jharkhand alone, Varun Aaron and Shahbaz Nadeem have earned Test caps. So have Pankaj Singh from Rajasthan and Naman Ojha from Madhya Pradesh, and a slew from Uttar Pradesh for whom the first salvo had been fired by Under-19 World Cup-winning skipper Mohammad Kaif at the start of the millennium.

The list is far too exhaustive to bear reproduction in its entirety; suffice to say that Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh can both also boast international cricketers today. It would have to be a remarkably weird coincidence for none of them to have been inspired by Dhoni’s scything run and his larger-than-life yet head-firmly-on-the-shoulders persona.

Dhoni opened the eyes of administrators nationally, of course, but he also shook local officials out of their stupor. That manifested itself in upgradation of infrastructure and ramping up of training facilities across the country. Those hitherto required to travel to state capitals for access to top-class facilities and quality coaching found that those essential requirements had now been delivered to their doorsteps. It will be simplistic, admittedly, to credit Dhoni alone for these improvements. But without Dhoni, this organic development would have taken many more years to fructify, of that there is little doubt.

Dhoni the cricketer and captain is peerless, among the most sparkling gems in a star-studded Indian crown. Dhoni the trend-setter, the ticket-checker who effortlessly made it to the big-ticket league, hardly pales in comparison. If anything, the former assumed greater lustre because of the latter, which can’t be said of too many others.

(R Kaushik is a Bangalore-based cricket writer with nearly three decades of experience)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.