Every time someone tried to impose the English into it, the Wisden Indian Cricketer of the Century Awards managed to wriggle free and reassert itself as an Indian event. Initially the venue left everyone puzzled: what were the awards doing in the Wembley Conference Arena in London? The answer was taking advantage of strong Indian presence --- both in England's cricketing summer and in the suburb of Wembley.

It’s a section of the grand old football ground, venue of England's lone World Cup football win in 1966, now the scene of much confusion over refurbishment plans.

For the luminaries and the audience gathering at the Wembley Arena, it didn't matter. Their corner of that particular foreign field was packed with the best and brightest of Indian cricket. It was an evening dominated by in true desi-style, a mixture of the sentimental and the unpunctual. And typically at the end, no-one minded either. Except perhaps the current Indian cricket team which arrived on the dot at the time mentioned in the invitation but left well past their dinner times.

The evening was—mercifully—not about them, but a generation that had gone before and in the deafening din of the television age, threatened to get forgotten.

The stage was shaped like an orchestra pit but the music accompanying the awards programme was an ersatz mix of old rock and roll—featuring a range of bands from the Byrds whose classic 1960s tune Turn Turn Turn to Oasis, self-professedly bigger than the Beatles and God, whose new album is just out here in England. And yet somehow with 1,200 Indians or those of Indian origin watching, whistling and cheering, it didn’t matter what the music was: the audience provided its own soundtrack to the evening.

The roof came down when Kapil Dev was declared the winner; all the studious formal hands
awardee banished as he slapped palms and hugged Viv Richards and produced his rambling emotional speech. The event managers tried to herd him into an organised press conference which then turned into pandemonium, as gate crashers burst through in the interview room, shot questions and then tailed him with pieces of paper and cameras. It could have been an evening straight from his playing days when he won matches and walked off the field with toothy grin in place and his collar turned up. His wife Romi in all her finery and five-year-old daughter Ameya dressed in frilly pink were both happy and harassed. The evening was over for the l'il one … MCC rules meant she couldn't go into the exclusive dinner at the Long Room at Lord's—which was perhaps just as well. Running exactly two hours late, meant that by the time they finished eating their six-course meal (creamy spiced harigot beans with garlic and ginger/ a compendium of poona pancake aubergine pate and spinach bhajiyas/ lemon chicken with spiced beans fresh pasta, goan mushrooms and tamarind sauce or onion tart tartin for vegetarians followed by mango rice pudding with saffron poached pear, organic coffee and chocolates), it was another day.

A day when the tumultuous career of Kapil Dev turned another corner.