The Dhoni Touch

by Bharat Sundaresan

  The helicopter shot is synonymous with M.S, Dhoni, despite the fact that it wasn’t originally his creation or the fact that he seems out of touch with it these days. But he’s never quite lost touch with his expertise on helicopters—at one glance, he can identify its make. He uses this shrewdly to create a shock-effect, especially when he’s around someone from the military. Col Shankar recalls the time he was taken to South Africa for a tour and how Dhoni just saw a copter take off from the airfield next to the one where they were waiting to board a flight, and immediately identified exactly which one it was. Just like that, and not for the first or the last, he’d left the colonel shaking his head in disbelief.

  It’s a unique skill that he’s developed mainly through his natural powers of observation and also due to his insatiable inquisitiveness. He puts it to full use and ends up being a de-facto intelligence gatherer whenever he’s on an away tour. The security officials assigned to the Indian team generally happen to be former military guys. Dhoni’s modus operandi is to start a conversation about their weapon and make an observation or two about it. ‘The guy will look at him with raised eyebrows and say, “How come you know about it?” He’ll then tell him about his love for weapons. Then they’ll bond over how both of them are a part of their country’s special forces, and the conversation will drift towards comparing the kind of weapons each country possesses in its arsenal,’ says Col Shankar. Whatever information is gathered is then duly passed on to the colonel, but always with a rider, ‘Sir, if South Africa can have this and this weapon, why don’t we have it?’ That leaves the colonel speechless, with only a sheepish grin to show.

  Dhoni the cricketer has never been known to obsess or even get hooked to the finer details of batting or wicketkeeping techniques. He’s got a very Frank Sinatra ‘I do it my way’ approach to both. In later years, he has done work with video analysts to fine-tune certain aspects of his batting, but it’s been more need-based and more to do with alignment without getting too pedantic over the nitty-gritties. I remember him telling a video analyst who was working with his technique during the tenth edition of the IPL: ‘Sir, I’ve just woken up and had some chai; give me a few balls and the bat will come down the way you want it to.’

  However, he’s known to get very technical while handling a weapon, and according to Col Shankar, will keep shifting the gun around in his hand to find out the best way to hold it so that it fires at its optimum.

  For, as Col Shankar puts it, he’s always looking to tinker around even with day-to-day objects and see if they can be put to any unconventional use. It could range from using a mobile phone as a projectile to using a phone charger to make toast—the more extreme the better. Even with weapons, he spends a good deal of time talking about how they could be modified.

  No wonder then that he keeps putting up Instagram videos of opening up his bikes and putting them back together like they are Lego pieces. It’s got a lot to do with his very fauji principle of never calling room service for any aid and ‘using the resources available to fix any problem’. It could be a pen that’s stuck or even a sole that’s come loose. Dhoni will not let anyone call for help, and take ten minutes to figure something out, whether it’s using a shoe lace or a safety pin or anything. It’s again something that’s achieved by practising daily. This is an ingenuity that comes through in every facet of his cricket too, which the world has gotten used to by now. And you believe it’s some form of raw urge that he needs to constantly get his hands to produce something out of nothing. This is often seen in his batting, where Dhoni, who, apart from being a hands-on captain, also tends to be very ‘hands-on’ in his batting, as his hands often do more work than his feet—especially the way he drives the ball through the covers where the wrists take over completely at the point of contact and would find gaps through packed off-side fields.

  Meetings between Dhoni and the colonel are, of course, mainly centred around him going: ‘Sir, aur batao na. Uss mission mein kya hua? (Sir, tell me more, no. What happened on that mission)?’ or ‘China ne aisa kar diya, sir, South China Sea mein. Bhutan mein kya ho raha hai, sir? (China did that in the South China Sea. What’s happening in Bhutan?)’

  Over time, Col Shankar has realized that Dhoni has a penchant for the unconventional. This is reflected in the faujis he calls friends—‘guys who are different’, as the colonel puts it—or when it comes to civilians, even journalists. It’s the same when it comes to army missions. ‘War is too organized for his liking. Even army operations, where things are clear, with planned attacks, don’t really get him going. Conventional things don’t attract him. What he really gets fascinated by are cross-border attacks where information is scarce and soldiers often have to go against the norm to succeed,’ says Col Shankar. But, of course—to steal a Dhoni catchphrase—there are questions that need to be answered too. ‘“Suppose the information that has come our way is wrong, what do we do? What are the contingency plans?” These are tactical and strategic questions that all young officers ask when they are coming up the ranks. So does MS,’ the colonel adds.

  Nothing, though, quite excites him as much as finding himself in a scenario where he needs to make contingency plans. There was the Delhi hotel fire, of course, but Col Shankar recalls another instance a few years ago. Dhoni had been invited for an event where many people were expected to gather. He was concerned about a potential melee upon his arrival. So, he came up with a strategy. With just 2 km to go for the venue, Dhoni told Col Shankar and his driver that they’d all have to switch places in the car. ‘Ek kaam karte hai. (Let’s do one thing.) I will drive from here. You sit next to me and we’ll ask the driver to sit in the back,’ were Dhoni’s orders to the colonel. Dhoni’s view was that as soon as those awaiting his arrival see a car, they would naturally look for Dhoni in the back seat, not find him and think he’s not here yet.

  ‘He said, “You wear a cap. People will look at you and say no, no, he’s too dark.” Nobody will look at the driver’s seat,”’ recalls Col Shankar. The plan worked to perfection, not surprisingly.

  6

  The Mahi Way

  ‘Dhoni sir, I want to be India’s next astronaut. They’re planning to choose one now. I’ve been a test pilot and have completed many hours of flying. I’m the right guy. Please, please have a word with Sunita Williams. She’s also a naval officer just like me. If you speak to her, they’ll select me.’ All along this plea, Dhoni simply kept nodding as if he was agreeing with every word the officer was saying to him.

  Back in the car on their way out, Dhoni would ask Col Shankar, ‘Sir, yeh Sunita Williams kaun hai? (Who is this Sunita Williams?)’ The colonel recalls being shocked and he spent the next couple of minutes raving about who Williams was, citing all her achievements in space and also, more crucially, how she was of Gujarati origin and a Padma Bhushan winner. As calmly as before, Dhoni’s response to that was: ‘Mera kya lena–dena usse, sir? (What do I have to do with her, sir?)’ Col Shankar had no option but to give up.

  ‘Sunita Williams kaun hai?’ Col Shankar says to me, laughs loudly and then continues, ‘That poor chap came thinking that Dhoni will know everyone in the world and one word from him will send him to space.’

  It wasn’t the first time that Dhoni was shocking his friend with his complete ignorance about someone the colonel considered a famous personality. Often, the colonel would brag about having scored the autograph of a renowned sportsperson whom he had tracked down after plenty of effort, and all he would get in response was a ‘Yeh kaun hai, sir? (Who is this, sir?)’ This happened most recently on the eve of the ODI team’s departure to South Africa. The colonel met Dhoni in his hotel room in Mumbai. India had just commenced the third and what would turn out to be an infamous Test against the Proteas at the Wanderers in Johannesburg. As young pace sensation Lungi Ngidi ran in to bowl and took a wicket, Col Shankar would tell him about how his celebrations were very reminiscent of former West Indies pacer Patrick Patterson. The colonel then narrated Patterson’s
tragic tale, about how he had been a recluse for twenty-five years. And after listening and nodding throughout, Dhoni had the same response for him: ‘Kaun tha, sir, woh? (Who was that, sir?) Never heard of him.’

  It’s not, however, a case of Dhoni being a snob about what and who came before him or being disrespectful towards celebrities from other fields. It’s just a case of him ‘not bothering about anything that doesn’t affect him’, as Col Shankar puts it.

  ‘His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.’ No, this is not Col Shankar raving about his friend again. That’s Dr John Watson summing up his good friend Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, the first of their adventures. In the novel, the good doctor, like the good colonel here, is astonished at how Holmes is not only ignorant of famous philosophers and theories; he also claims to not know that the earth travels around the sun or what constitutes the solar system. It is then that the foremost detective in the world—made so real by Arthur Conan Doyle—dishes out his famous theory about the mind being an ‘empty attic’ with no ‘elastic walls’: ‘A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or best is jumbled up with a lot of other things . . . for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.’

  Now, I’m not saying that Dhoni isn’t aware of the solar system or the earth’s axis. If anything, I’m rather confident he is well aware of it, though I doubt he’s been quizzed on it much. But what Holmes and Dhoni seem to have in common is this belief that they’re better off not bothering with that which doesn’t affect them.

  Cricketers, the Indian ones in particular, often live in bubbles wherein they know little about what lies beyond their worlds. That’s the reason why many of them often struggle with life after retirement. A rather renowned former Indian cricketer, for example, is said to still get flustered while checking himself in at airports because he spent nearly half his life being checked in by someone else. Some other Indian cricketers only find out what a supermarket actually looks like on the rare chance that they get to play county cricket or an international tour. I once encountered a modern-day Indian star in a supermarket in Antigua as he walked around clueless, looking for a deodorant. I eventually had to direct him towards the aisle which had a board that said ‘Deodorants and Antiperspirants’. He looked back at me like I’d just reinvented the wheel.

  Dhoni, however, seems to be an exception. You can’t imagine him being lost after he’s done with playing cricket. He’s kind of ensured he’s stayed on the periphery all through his career. Some close to him believe that he’ll just disappear and perhaps become the character Phansukh Wangdu of 3 Idiots once he retires from the game for good.

  They also talk about his pointed and poignant views on Indian politics. He’s someone who’s known to be always aware of elections in various states and once even surprised a friend of his in Mumbai with his knowledge of the upcoming municipality elections in the city. He is known to have vehemently dismissed the theory, posed to him once by another friend, that if a superstar celebrity, of whom there is no dearth in India, decides to become a politician, he or she would win hands down regardless of which constituency he contests from—for example, a player from Mumbai choosing to contest from Bengaluru. Dhoni’s response, I’m told, was that the celebrity in question would lose by a massive margin if he were to do so. The best way out instead, he believes, is to pick a place where people can connect to the person they’re voting for in all aspects—language, caste, everything. That it’s often the surname and not the name that matters in these cases.

  He’s also built up to be rather perspicacious about people—which we’ve established already through the several anecdotes from Chittu and Chhotu. But Col Shankar insists it’s the same when it comes to analysing trends amongst people, regardless of how old or young they are.

  ‘He psychoanalyses people a lot, like he has this theory about his really young fans. He believes that small girls tend to be more open and uninhibited while asking him questions as compared to little boys. “Outside the room the boy would have said, I’ll ask him this and that, but as soon as he enters the room, dekho, sir, he’ll just stand there and not ask a single question,” MS used to tell me. And I saw it happen too, just like he said it did. These little girls just walk in and start asking him the most personal of questions,’ says Col Shankar. Dhoni is known to appreciate people who are upfront and direct. A journalist who has grown close to him over the years reveals, ‘When he’d come to my house in Pune for lunch once, my daughters innocently asked Mahi about how he met Sakshi. And he sat and told them the whole love story.’

  The Dhoni family—including the dogs and the various vehicles—have now moved and fully settled into their new farmhouse on Ranchi’s Ring Road. But when I was in Ranchi visiting Chittu and coach Banerjee, Sakshi and Chittu had been still overseeing the final touches to the farmhouse. Chittu would constantly be pulled away from our meetings to attend to his responsibilities at the farmhouse. I asked him once how often he and Dhoni talk while he is away on his long foreign tours.

  Chittu didn’t need to think too hard. He explained that phone calls from his oldest friend are few and far between. ‘Farmhouse ka kaam kaisa chal raha hai poochne phone karega. (He’ll call to know about the work on the farmhouse.) But the calls are very short and to the point.’ And without me asking, Chittu had a theory why that’s the case, one that he declared with great conviction, as always.

  ‘If he’s in England, Mumbai bhool gaya. Mumbai gaya toh Ranchi bhool gaya. Woh jahaan hai, woh waheen hai. (When he’s in England, he forgets about Mumbai. When he’s in Mumbai, Ranchi is forgotten. He’s present wherever he is.) At that point, nothing else matters to him. That’s why everyone says he lives in the present.’ If true, then it kind of adds some gravitas to his peculiar, even infamous, comment on the New Zealand tour of 2009 about getting ready for a Test in Napier only eighteen hours after arriving in the city.

  ‘When it comes to the mind, it depends on what you’re feeding into the mind. You come and say, “This is Napier” and it believes it’s Napier. If you see, it’s an abstract. When people say, “He’s in form,” nobody has seen form. It’s a state of mind,’ Dhoni had said to a stunned media audience.

  This was perhaps a window into Dhoni’s real state of mind even if at that time it may have seemed like he was deflecting a question. It is in tune with his trademark efforts at disassociating the answer to a question during press conferences to such an extent that nobody, including the person who asked it, would remember the original question.

  Another time Dhoni would kind of snap at a reporter (this was in 2014 at Brisbane) when he was asked about why he, as captain, had persisted with the short-ball ploy against the Aussie lower-order despite India being in a strong position. ‘First of all,’ Dhoni replied, ‘you don’t really know what was going on in my mind and so don’t speculate as to what was going on in my mind, just leave that to me.’

  That ability to stay in the present perennially manages to amaze people. It is a state of mind that perhaps even Sherlock Holmes is not known to have possessed, at least not without help from his pipe. For, to be truly in the present, like everyone around him claims he always has been, you require an extreme form of surrealism, almost to separate your subjective from the objective and somehow find an in-between place where you are totally one with the present. In Dhoni’s case, according to Col Shankar, it’s derived from that other MS Principle, which is about ‘controlling the controllables’.

  In the army, for instance, soldiers realize the implication of staying in the present mainly when they don’t know what’s coming next. How much ever they are taught about it in training, to follow the diktat of not losing sight of the aim and believing that the casualty will be taken care of—even if one of your comrades has been shot dead right next to you—requires
that kind of detachment.

  ‘If you fret about that guy, you might get hit and there’ll be more casualties. The operation will get affected. So you have to keep moving on. That’s why in the air force what they do is, if there’s a crash, immediately, all the aircraft take off to say that, we just have to carry on,’ explains Col Shankar. Dhoni though, the colonel insists, already had this trait much before his tryst with the uniform. ‘It’s like some sadhu thing to say but difficult to practise. But he does it.’

  Those close to him in Ranchi recall numerous incidents when they had seen their beloved friend put this into practice. And they all agree that the reason he’s able to do that is rather straightforward. ‘Because the future is planned in his head, he can afford to live in the present. We’re not surprised by any decision he takes, like the rest of the world. Uske pet mein rehta hai. (It remains with him.) Nobody else knows. It’s only after he takes a decision that you’ll be like, wow, how long did he have that in his head,’ says Chittu.

  There was, however, one occasion when even Chittu was left stupefied by Dhoni. It happened in 2010 when one day, he was asked to fly immediately to Delhi with no reason given. When he reached Delhi, he was asked to get himself to Dehradun. A confused Chittu followed the orders and only when he reached Dehradun did he realize that his schoolmate was getting married the next day. ‘The only thing he told me was, tu chal (you come). He’d kept it such a low-key affair to avoid the media frenzy that even I was not privy to the information,’ he says.