THE GRAB

If it does happen, cows should be allowed as fielders on the ground. Dilip Sardesai, on whether Laloo Prasad Yadav should be made BCCI president

Jagmohan Dalmiya wears the jaguar smile. As a sports administrator who was once bracketed with Don King, Dalmiya's past is well-recorded. In 2000, hemmed in by television rights scandals, the match fixing drama, he gave up his job as International Cricket Council president in less than pleasant circumstances. With even the Government against him, his innings seemed well and truly over. On June 29, 2001, Dalmiya executed Operation Comeback. In what one newspaper described as a "bloodless coup", he outsmarted incumbent A.C. Muthiah and once more became president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. Muthiah was beaten on home turf. Chennai, where the election was held, is his native city. I.S. Bindra, the Punjab cricket honcho and so often Caesar to Dalmiya's Asterix, was flummoxed.

Like all adept batsmen, Dalmiya is a master of timing. He used the public outrage against Mike Denness' punishment of Sachin Tendulkar for ball tampering to drape himself in the national flag. His cause became India's. He took on the old fogeys at Lord's, practically split world cricket into two, threatened to walk out of a promised fourth Test in England next summer. The Anglo-Australian cricket club seethed. Back home nobody objected, not even a government that found itself stumped by Dalmiya's finesse.

MIKE DENNESS
Man of the Match

Add this to the nine ways in which a batsman can get out in cricket match: damned by a match referee. Ask who framed this new rule and you don't need Virender Sehwag to point to a balding, hook-nosed Englishman called Mike Denness. In one day of reckless adjudication at Port Elizabeth, the 61-year-old former England captain created more excitement than he had in a career spanning 28 Tests. By suspending Sehwag from one match, punishing Sachin Tendulkar for ball-tampering and four other Indians for appealing in ungentlemanly fashion, Denness played a singular hand in taking world cricket to the brink. BCCI President Jagmohan Dalmiya, as intolerant of tranquillity as his construction company's cement mixers, tilted at the ICC. The threat of India withdrawing from South Africa, England from India loomed large, that of the cricketing fraternity splitting even larger. Sense prevailed, but Denness had shown that you didn't have to be on the field to be the man of the match.

SANTOSH YADAV
Top Gun

Talk about having a close encounter with terror and you won't find Santosh Kumar tongue-tied. December 13 turned out to be a red letter day for this 21-year-old CRPF constable. Positioned near Gate 8 of Parliament, Yadav let his self-loading rifle do all the talking. Spotting three of the five militants running around Parliament, he knelt and fired 27 rounds from behind a tree. Yadav did not let the country down with his aim. Had he missed the terrorists may have struck in a big way. They were a few feet away from getting inside the building but died in a hail of bullets. The young man himself knew the danger. The terrorists fired a few rounds at him with their assault weapons but missed. Considering that one militant-a human bomb-blew himself up and the fifth one was shot by the Special Duty Group near Gate 5, the credit for the successful counter-attack must largely go to Yadav. His father, a head constable who died serving the CRPF in 2000, would have been proud.

P.K. MAHANTA
Partner in Crime?

The wife, it is rumoured, is always the last to know but in this case it would appear that she is the first, perhaps even the only one, provided, of course, that she is the wife. The beauteous Sanghamitra Bharali, a junior employee of the Assam Legislative Assembly in Guwahati, claimed to have married former chief minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta-a father of three-in a secret ceremony in a Mumbai temple on March 11. The classical singer, married to a veterinarian with a 12-year-old son, added that her alleged paramour's security officers, including the inspector-general of police, and minister for rural development were also present on the occasion. The allegations rocked the Asom Gana Parishad and almost cost Mahanta his job as the party's president. Everyone denied it though, including the temple priest, the man under scrutiny and his wife. "I know he is innocent," she said. Who knows, maybe the wife is the last to know. Meanwhile, the man who was anointed chief minister for the first time in 1985 received a severe drubbing in the assembly elections in May. The year spelt the final crush of a dream that went horribly wrong.

LATA MANGESHKAR, BISMILLAH KHAN
High Note

Lata Mangeshkar on Ustad Bismillah Khan: "I am so glad Khan sahab has got it, I've known and admired him for years." The shehnai maestro on the "Nightingale of India": "She should have got it earlier."

A mutual admiration society? Well, include the teeming populace of the country as well. When the Bharat Ratna-the nation's highest civilian award-was conferred on Khan, 86, and Mangeshkar, 71, the unanimous reaction was "at long last". The octogenarian earned the distinction of becoming the only Indian musician to have received all four top national civilian honours. As for the indefatigable Mangeshkar, who has sung more than 30,000 songs, she is grateful the ultimate recognition did not come sooner than it did, for "nothing should come to a human being easily".

Simplicity and humility-they have an old-world charm about them. It's another matter that they are old-world attributes to begin with.

THE GRAB

The average length of a word in my writing is four letters. I like to use small words-they compel you, force you, to clarify, to be precise. V.S. Naipaul

V.S. NAIPAUL
Civilisational Man

At long last the Swedish Academy had to give the Prize to Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul. The reason: he has "united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories". Despite the unNaipaulian heaviness of the compliment, you could not have missed the resonance of those two operative words: suppressed histories.

Yes, yes, Sir Vidia has been travelling through the suppressed histories of "half-made societies", translating his discoveries into genre-defying literature, a part of which an unsentimental memorial service to his ancestral home-India. But for some neoliterates, especially those Guardian variety liberals, Naipaul's civilisational Brahminism was the thing that earned him the Nobel.

Silly, they could not have ever understood his criticism of Islam. It was not born out of hate, it was a rejoinder to "suppressed histories".

BHARAT SHAH
Diamond Daddy

THE GRAB

It is simply unbelievable that a man of his wealth would voluntarily join hands with the underworld for money. He can only do it because of fear. Shailesh Mehta, diamond merchant, on Bharat Shah

It was not entirely unexpected. When Nazim Rizvi, producer of Chori Chori Chupke Chupke, was held for links with the underworld, there were enough indications that all was not hunky-dory with the film's finances. The portent turned out to be true when its financier, Bharat Shah, was arrested by the Crime Branch on January 8 for aiding and abetting don Chhota Shakeel's murky underworld activities. The 56-year-old diamond merchant was booked under MCOCA (Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act) on the basis of a couple of tape recordings of telephonic conversations with Shakeel. The first, recorded on November 20 last year, had Rizvi talking to Shakeel about his meeting with a financier called "BS" and the various business proceedings with him. In the second conversation, recorded on November 24, Rizvi talked again to Shakeel about money, BS and satellite rights. The tape also had Shah and Shakeel conversing directly and discussing business. Shah vehemently swore innocence. He claimed to have paid Rs 12.7 crore for the film by cheques but evidence showed that Shakeel had invested Rs 75 lakh of extortion money in the industry through the merchant. The film world grieved for the man-after all, he was a virtual one-man industry. Even Dalal Street took the news badly and the Bombay Stock Exchange dropped sharply. Next in the sequence of events came an all-India bandh called by diamond merchants on January 10. What was ironical was that Shah had been given police protection in 1997 after complaining about extortion calls.

Diamonds are forever? Not always, as Shah must now be realising. Too late.