The Dhoni Touch

by Bharat Sundaresan

  But Dhoni didn’t have any soldier friends while growing up. Even Chittu is bemused at just when or how his longest-standing friend developed this love and obeisance for the armed forces. He doesn’t even remember him talking much about the military or the army, which is not surprising considering he doesn’t usually say much. In his meetings with Dhoni though, Col Shankar came to know that Dhoni had an innate desire to join the army, a childhood obsession even. Though circumstances didn’t quite allow him to pursue his dream, the drive remained as strong as ever.

  As his cricket career advanced, Dhoni was lucky enough to experience a few brushes with the military and even a few of their establishments like the National Defence Academy (NDA) and the Indian Military Academy (IMA)—places he could only dream of visiting as a young man. The NDA visit was with the Indian team in the mid-2000s and he’d visited the IMA with a friend. Then came his first encounter with the Parachute Regiment in 2006, when the then Indian coach Greg Chappell decided to take the Rahul Dravid-led team to its training centre in Bangalore. It wasn’t simply a feel-good exercise though, as the Indian players were put through the grind, and had to undertake activities ranging from shooting, rock climbing, grenade throwing and many obstacle courses. By all accounts, Dhoni topped all the obstacle courses and proved to be even better than some of the jawans. The video-game buff also got a taste of simulation exercises like infiltrating enemy territory and rescuing hostages. Dhoni also learnt a trait during that five-hour visit, which would in years to come make him the most popular non-army visitor at every military camp across the country. He has learnt to talk in the jawan tongue.

  ‘Being a Hindi-speaking guy, he could easily relate to the jawans more than anyone else. Typically, he would always find a fellow Ranchi guy and he would say, “Aap mere gaon ke ho. (You are from my village.)’’ Things like that. People would also come to him and say the same,’ says Col Shankar.

  According to the colonel though, the tipping point in Dhoni’s enduring love affair with the military came when he paid the National Security Guard (NSG) commandos a visit in Manesar on Republic Day 2009. It was part of an NDTV programme, and Dhoni could be seen in commando gear, overcoming his fear of heights by successfully completing a rock-climbing drill. But not before a quip to his trainer about needing an external boost to calm his nerve.

  Later in the show, he delivered an emotional ode to the NSG for their efforts in the terror siege of 2008 in Mumbai: ‘When the attack started and I watched it on TV, my first thought was, “Where is the NSG?” I knew that once you guys step in, the victory would be ours. What you did was remarkable and I thank you for it.’ There, he also showcases his dry humour while narrating a Rajinikanth joke to the commandos as well as while clamping down on their queries about the then bachelor’s marital plans. On the latter, he said, ‘Udte huye panchi key par kyon kaatna chahtey ho? (Why are you trying to clip the wings of an air-borne bird?)’

  Dhoni also got to meet a lot of other army officers in addition to the NSG commandos during his full-day visit and became great friends with a few of them—some still remain a part of his fauji circle.

  Dhoni, Col Shankar says, then wanted a taste of the actual stuff by getting a feel of where the jawans lived and the sacrifices they make at the border. ‘What we get to see in Colaba (Navy Nagar and a few other military colonies), for example, is the peacetime army. He wanted to know the army from the bottom-up and not by looking at it from a general’s view,’ he says.

  One of his friends from the NDTV-NSG visit to Manesar took Dhoni around Manesar and even got him to experience one of the most challenging and testing posts in the army. And Dhoni perhaps became the first Indian cricketer to take his position at a sentry post, even if it was for a brief while. ‘He wanted to see how a sentry feels at night. In the night, everything seems to be moving. Even static objects seem to be moving. That’s how the night is. He actually wanted to know how people react at that sentry post. Because, a sentry is guarding so many people. Even if you’re a sepoy with just two years of service, you can’t be waiting for any general’s orders to fire,’ Col Shankar explains.

  And standing at sentry posts is also what young trainee officers are made to undergo.

  ‘Just how he knew it was the right thing to do without any formal training like us boggles my mind,’ he says. I hear a lot of declarations of astonishment from Colonel Shankar during our chat. Dhoni came out of the NSG visit more determined than ever to form some sort of association with his real passion.

  ‘He mentions that visit many, many times. He’ll keep referring back to running into some of the soldiers he had met there. He’s met thousands of faujis in the years after that, but he keeps mentioning those guys in particular, and has stayed in touch with them after nearly a decade. The boot camp in 2006 gave him the feeling that “if I were in the army, I would have done well’’. But it was with the NSG that he was properly exposed to training and weapons, and made fauji friends,’ Col Shankar says.

  To be one of his fauji friends comes with certain concessions and even greater privileges. It means you’re often on a higher pedestal than anyone else, including Amitabh Bachchan.

  His phone might remain unreachable regardless of who you are, but he’s the most active member of the WhatsApp group that he shares with his fauji friends. He might fail to pick up Bachchan’s phone call on his birthday but he never fails to call Manoj-bhaiya—a former military man turned security head at the Jharkhand State Cricket Association (JSCA) stadium in Ranchi and whose special chai Dhoni considers his true poison—and wish his family every new year. Dhoni’s almost strange apathy towards his phone is legendary, so is the list of people who have been on the receiving end of the Dhoni no-show on the phone.

  And try as he might, Col Shankar struggles to mask the envy in his voice when he talks about the activity on MS’s fauji WhatsApp group which he shares with his closest army friends. On that group, Dhoni, who’s the last person to use his phone as a social-media tool, shares pictures of himself and discusses the goings-on in his life, which even the colonel isn’t always privy to.

  Dhoni doesn’t like alcohol. He’s rather vocal about his aversion to it. Some close to him say it’s the smell that bothers him—especially that of champagne and beer. To the extent that he is known to change his room even if there’s a whiff of it around. You won’t find him in the dressing room if the team is celebrating a win by spraying champagne around, like after the Johannesburg Test win in 2006 when the Indian players went a little berserk. It was, after all, their first-ever Test win in South Africa. And it was only the fourteenth Test of Dhoni’s career, but he preferred to wait outside on the grassy bank right outside the dressing room at the Bullring and held his ground even as some of his teammates exuberantly ran around him carrying the bubbly and drenching each other with beer and orange juice. The wild celebration even prompted the then coach Greg Chappell to hold forth on ‘drinking rather than pouring’ beer.

  Dhoni himself has often said it’s the ‘bitter taste’ of liquor that puts him off from drinking it. But he also has never had an issue with others around him indulging in it. Those in Ranchi recall how in his younger days he would make it a point to ensure that his closest friends always had a nice time while celebrating one of his cricketing achievements, and he would sit in the middle with a glass of drink which he rarely sipped out of even as others guzzled away.

  But this pales in comparison when he plays the overindulgent host whenever his fauji friends visit him. According to someone very close to him, that’s the only time even Dhoni has a drink. Not according to Col Shankar, though. It’s again more a case of him being a gracious host and ensuring that the guests have the best time possible and that they are at complete ease.

  Dhoni doesn’t appreciate cigarettes either. But in his younger days, he would often buy cigarettes from duty-free shops while on foreign tours for one of his closest friends. However, he wouldn’t hand them over without a taunt: ‘Mere paise se tu kudhki z
indagi jala raha hai. (You are sending your life up in smoke on my dime.)’

  Such concessions also extend to that prickly affair that annoys not just cricketers but also cricket journalists—the demand for match tickets. I can’t tell you how many relatives and friends I have fallen out with just because I’ve not been able to provide what they assume I owe them. ‘What’s the point of you being a cricket reporter if you can’t get your cousin sister a couple of IPL tickets?’ How I’ve tired of listening to this rant year after year even as my honest pleas of ‘Wait, I just get an accreditation to cover the bloody thing. Why would anyone give me tickets?’ would fall on deaf, stubborn ears. At least, Dhoni has the excuse of never answering his phone, not to mention that he’s slightly less accessible than I am.

  On IPL match days, the fauji group goes into overdrive, with demands that far outstrip the reasonable. ‘Players generally get four tickets, and as captain, MS would get an extra couple. It’s easier for home matches but it’s for the away matches that you have to oblige the teammates from the host city. His phone would be flooded with messages saying “minimum I need 4 tickets” or “jyaada nahi (not a lot), 7 tickets needed”,’ says Col Shankar, while revealing that he has seen Dhoni going out of his way and even managing twelve to fifteen tickets if one of his army buddies asked for them. In one instance, one of his fauji friends got shocked by just how far his cricketer friend could go. ‘One of them had messaged him for seven tickets, and a few days later, MS told me, “Arrey, he never came to collect them.” When I informed the fauji concerned, he just couldn’t believe Dhoni had actually taken the effort to make it happen.’

  Dhoni doesn’t usually give tickets to anyone else who contacts him directly. His rationale is that if the person is big enough to reach him, then he certainly must have access to a politician or a high-ranking government official to get the tickets. ‘They must have already done jugaad. MS is just a backup and also they can flaunt that Dhoni gave them a ticket. MS knows this all too well,’ Col Shankar explains.

  On most other occasions, it’s the housekeeping staff or the waiters in the restaurants who end up as the beneficiaries. It’s rather common for the last guy who cleans Dhoni’s room to be asked whether anyone at home would want to watch that night’s match, or for a waiter on the morning shift to receive a call from the restaurant with a simple message: ‘I’ve kept two tickets for you at the front desk.’

  What Dhoni appreciates the most about his military friends is the way they treat him. They take liberties with him; Col Shankar says they ‘treat him like a commando buddy, with mock disdain, like he’s just one of the boys’. They tell him that he’s just some lowly cricketer and is no match for their real heroes. Dhoni loves such banter since at some deep level, he likes being treated like a regular guy. It’s a break from the hero worship that is doled out everywhere else. They criticize him too, mostly to get under his skin, and generally about the nitty-gritties of his beloved uniform, the one he received while being commissioned as an honorary lieutenant colonel.

  ‘They’ll say he’s wearing it wrong or that his dress is crumpled,’ says Col Shankar. But, for someone who’s dealt with criticism and public scrutiny for years, these tongue-in-cheek barbs really rattle Dhoni. So much so that he would come to the colonel, and like an adolescent who’s been picked on at school, say, ‘Usne aisa bata diya, sir. Aapne bataya nahi ki aise lagana hai isse. (He made fun of me, sir. But you never told me that this was how it should be worn.)’

  When MS Dhoni was conferred with the rank of honorary lieutenant colonel in the Territorial Army of India on 1 November 2011, he didn’t take off his uniform the whole day. The ceremony took place at around 9 a.m. in Delhi, there was a press conference at 4.30 p.m., and it was only at around 11 p.m. that the then Indian captain could bear to temporarily part with his treasured ‘olive greens’.

  ‘Everything else you can buy. But you can’t buy a uniform. That’s something you earn. He was very happy about it. That gave him a lot of confidence,’ says Col Shankar.

  The ceremony was attended only by Sakshi and the major from the NSG—incognito—whom Dhoni by then had grown very close to. Col Shankar would meet him later that evening and find his friend beaming like he’d never seen him beam before. They had met for the first time at a dinner organized by Col Shankar’s friend in the midst of India’s Test against South Africa in Kolkata in February 2010.

  The colonel is an autograph collector and is obsessed with his sporting idols, ‘especially those who captured our imaginations in that period between 1983 and 1991’, ranging from Patrick Patterson to Sergey Bubka. Once, the colonel was in Mumbai to get an autograph from Bubka on a couple of caricatures. The pole vault legend was there as the chief ambassador of the Mumbai Marathon, and Col Shankar had travelled all the way just to catch Bubka for a couple of minutes. For such a fanboy, it came as unbelievable news—some eight years ago—to know that Dhoni would be having dinner with him.

  ‘There were some four–five of us, and I couldn’t believe that the Indian captain would come for dinner in the middle of a Test. No cricket was spoken about. I took a few autographs. It was his knowledge about the air force and army weapons which intrigued me. For someone rumoured to never read newspapers or watch TV, he had in-depth information about what items the army was procuring and what was in the arsenal of some other countries. He was inquisitive too. What also stood out for me was how he looked at the army. No jingoism on the lines of “our soldiers are sacrificing their lives”, but very, very practical,’ Col Shankar recounts his first meeting with Dhoni.

  Shankar would soon take Dhoni along to various military establishments around the country but there would be a lot of protocol to be followed. Around a year later, they began discussing how to get the new World Cup–winning captain officially associated with the army so that, among other things, he could visit even more military establishments. Col Shankar and a few of his colleagues approached the then army chief General V.K. Singh with a proposal. Kapil Dev, the last man to have lifted the World Cup trophy, and the legendary Malayalam actor Mohan Lal had already been made honorary lieutenant colonels. But it wasn’t smooth sailing, for the air force too wanted Dhoni on their ranks. Wing Commander M. Baladitya, who’d been team India’s manager for a number of years, was the keenest proponent. He’d already roped in Sachin Tendulkar as a group captain. In fact, just three days after Dhoni hit Nuwan Kulasekara for that famous six in the direction of the hockey stadium adjacent to Wankhede, Wg Cdr Baladitya was at the then air force chief P.V. Naik’s residence, and plans were being made for Dhoni to fly in an Su-30MKI.

  Dhoni, though, was to remain loyal to his childhood fixation with the army. He had only one request: to be allowed to join the Parachute Regiment. His decision did take Col Shankar slightly by surprise. ‘He had called Ranchi home for most of his life and could have joined the Bihar Regiment. He then had this special adopted home link with Chennai and could have joined the Madras Regiment,’ he says. But Dhoni, like always, had a valid explanation for his choice.

  ‘He wanted to join the Parachute Regiment. Number one, because it’s a volunteer force. Number two is that it’s pan-India. So, they are not people from one particular state or region. That intrigued him,’ explains Col Shankar.

  There were other perks as well. Being a paratrooper is considered elite. So, Dhoni knew that they would have more exciting missions than the regular army. Moreover, most of his friends from the NSG were paratroopers. Col Shankar recalls that the army was slightly apprehensive as it didn’t want Dhoni to be a figurehead like other celebrity inductees who would just come for an odd event here or there, and maybe even charge money for coming. Finally, they decided to dovetail Dhoni’s conferment ceremony with Olympic medal–winner Abhinav Bindra’s who too became an honorary lieutenant colonel that day.

  For all his excitement regarding the rank, Dhoni was most excited to be in the olive green uniform. This was his childhood dream coming alive. And so obsessed is he with i
t that he carries a set everywhere he goes, much to Col Shankar’s bewilderment. ‘I’ll say, “No chance you’ll get to wear it, especially during an IPL match. You’ll come this afternoon, practise and go for the match. Next morning, you have to leave.” “Nahi, sir, kaheen mil gaya toh chance (No, sir, what if I get a chance), and I end up going there in a T-shirt and jeans.” I’ve realized that more than anything, it’s that uniform that fascinates him the most,’ says Shankar, who isn’t at all surprised to have seen Dhoni proudly donning his uniform and marching towards the podium to receive his Padma Bhushan award in April 2018.

  Now an official member of the army, Dhoni has started visiting even more army establishments, including a visit to the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) factory where he got introduced to even newer weapons.

  With his Test retirement in late 2014 freeing him up, Dhoni decided it was time to earn a badge and add more glory to his already glorious uniform, which at that point simply carried a Territorial Army logo, the paratroopers sign and his rank on the shoulder with the name tag above the right breast pocket. The uniform, as he would tell Col Shankar, was looking ‘sukha, sukha’ (dry).

  The honorary lieutenant colonel now wanted a ‘para wing’ added to it, and a badge with blue wings and an umbrella, for which he would have to complete five parachute jumps at the end of a rigorous fourteen–fifteen-day training schedule. After getting permission from the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and clearance from the defence ministry, Dhoni reported at the 50th Parachute Brigade in Agra. There he would stay in the barracks, wake up at 4 a.m. like everyone else and go through the rigours for the whole day at the Para Training Centre. But while the rest of the jawans would get to rest and recuperate after the physically draining day, the celebrity trainee had to contend with various social commitments, from drinking chai with the superiors to inaugurating an event. In fourteen days, he visited thirty different places, including one government school—he later said that none of the kids knew who he was.