There was a type of melancholic and underachieving Indian in the late 1980s and 90s who watched cricket with an empathy for the struggling career of a technique-obsessed Indian batsman. He wanted Sanjay Manjrekar to succeed but there was something strange that the Mumbai batsman’s invisible admirers wouldn’t like to admit.
Sanjay’s appeal was derived more from a languishing presence amid the emerging star cast of Indian cricket and felt in the brooding lament of unrealised potential. In a way, he was the cricketing face for a generation of unfulfilled lives – for one’s failures in coming anywhere close to an orderly and perfect trajectory of one’s craft, recognition (fame, if you are a public performer) and life, of course.
