The Dhoni Touch

by Bharat Sundaresan

  ‘He’s able to savour every moment and relish it more than others, whether it is good or bad, because woh saas leta rehta hai (he keeps breathing). You notice him, he’ll always take deep breaths despite being the fittest cricketer in the country as if he wants to make the most of everything, rather than rushing through life like most of us do,’ says another friend.

  Coach Banerjee recounts that when Dhoni was playing for the CCL, he would be paid Rs 1500 as stipend. He would somehow manage his entire month’s expenditure with that money. He never worried about the struggle. He never once seemed to think even a step beyond the one he was taking at that moment, but still managed to be a few steps ahead of the rest—like he can often do on the field even now.

  ‘It was his thing from a young age. He never believed or thought that one thing will lead to another. He knew there was a path to take, a process to follow. If he was batting in a match, he was only concerned about the ball coming at him. Even if the selectors were there watching, he didn’t think about if I score here, I’ll catch their attention,’ the coach says.

  ‘Forget about the 1500 during his CCL days. He used to come back to Ranchi from his railways job with Rs 100 and still spend that on us, his close friends. He never bothered about whether he’ll have anything left. Today, he’s probably smarter than any other Indian cricketer when it comes to investing money. And his shauk (love) is bikes and cars, and he indulges. He has every right to. He’s enjoying this moment now,’ Chittu adds.

  Another friend, slightly older than the rest, but whose home he visits rather often whenever he’s in his town, reveals how Dhoni can take the whole ‘living in the present’ bit to extreme levels.

  ‘Whenever he comes home for food, he doesn’t bring his phone along. He leaves it at the hotel. Two and a half hours he’ll sit at my place. Such an important and busy man without his phone, and we’ll all be amazed. He will sense our astonishment and simply dismiss it, saying, “Nothing can be so urgent that I need my phone at all times. Everything can wait,”’ the friend says. I’ve heard Dhoni himself talk about his pet peeve—people peering into their phones when they’re being spoken to or when they’re amidst a group of people. It apparently annoys him far more than most other modern-day distractions. This exemplifies his friends’ belief that despite being a gadget freak, he ensures he never becomes a slave to them.

  Dhoni isn’t known to be staunchly religious but visits the Deori temple—or ‘Dhoni-wala temple’, as Tripadvisor.in lists it—almost every time he’s in the city before or after a tour. Chittu is generally in tow, and in his various visits to one of Ranchi’s most iconic spots, he’s observed another facet of Dhoni that is again linked with his carpe-diem approach to life.

  ‘Haath kisiko nahi dikhata. (He has never shown his palm to a fortune teller.) He never even extends it towards an astrologer. He’ll have the same dialogue always. “Achcha naseeb hai, chalne do. (My luck is good, let it keep going.)”’

  Kiran More, former India wicketkeeper, has known Dhoni for a long time. He’d first come across him in 2004 when Dhoni was taking apart a quality North Zone attack in Chandigarh. More was there as the chairman of the senior selection committee. It was love at first sight. A bond was formed and it continues to this day. So much so that Dhoni would ask for More to train actor Sushant Singh Rajput to not just bat and keep like Dhoni, but be Dhoni for the movie.

  It was More who gave Dhoni a break into the Indian team as the chairman of selectors fourteen years ago. He was also at the selection committee meeting six months later when the then India coach Greg Chappell proclaimed to his shocked audience that ‘Dhoni was a future India captain’. It took less than two years for Chappell’s words to come true—when Dhoni became India’s first-ever captain at the World T20 tourney before becoming India’s captain across all formats just over a year later.

  Dhoni’s style of captaincy has won him many complimentary sobriquets, but More uses one that I’d never heard in this context, of him having led the team like a corporate chief. It took me a while to fathom exactly why he sounded so convinced about it.

  ‘He is a corporate guy who understands the workmen, the production guys, the marketing guys and the finance team. That’s why Dhoni is a complete package,’ he says. Earthy and ingenious are likelier or commoner descriptions of India’s most successful captain of all time. It came to the fore, More says, when Dhoni was thrust into the role of the captain of the T20 squad. That was when all the senior players had backed out—perhaps because they didn’t necessarily fathom the scope of T20 cricket back then—and the young captain was left with a motley crew of mostly untested, raw talent. Most of Ranchi still believes strongly that it was a set-up for him to fail. Kiran More, though, recalls it having left Dhoni in a position wherein he had nothing to lose but absolutely everything to gain. The radical decision was taken by More’s successor, Dilip Vengsarkar. More not only considers it to be a masterstroke but also believes that it helped Indian cricket turn the corner.

  ‘The factory’s sick unit was given to him, and the sick unit was converted into a profit-making company. That’s what Dhoni did at that World T20,’ More says.

  It makes sense too. When you look at his captaincy reign overall, Dhoni has been the best CEO a company could ask for, not just bringing the best out of his resources by assigning them well-suited roles but also being able to be always on top of things.

  ‘But his journey was different once he took over as Test and ODI captain. Before that, he was a general manager with around seven to eight CEOs in the team, all former India captains or superstars in their own right—Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, Sehwag, Laxman, Bhajji (Harbhajan Singh), Zaheer Khan, Nehra, to name a few. And overnight he gets promoted to being the MD and suddenly he has to look after all those CEOs,’ More says. Dhoni took over as ODI captain for the seven-match series against Australia in September 2007. He provided a telling indicator to the era of surprises that Indian cricket was embarking on by pulling out left-arm spinner Murali Kartik, who’d been in the Neo Sports studio as an expert, and picking him as a replacement for Ramesh Powar after the first three ODIs. For the record, Kartik notched up figures of 6/27, the best figures for a left-arm spinner in ODIs, in the last match at Mumbai.

  One of Dhoni’s prime captaincy traits is to define not just his own responsibilities but also the roles of those playing under him. And it’s not just on the field. Dhoni has a defined role for everyone around him. Like with most of his other attributes, this one too he practises in his daily life with the same earnestness.

  ‘Everyone, including his wife, his parents, his friends, his agents and his employers, has a fixed role in his life and each has a line that he or she knows they cannot cross. Sakshi cannot go overboard by saying anything about his parents or me. The same goes for his parents (they cannot say anything against Sakshi). At the same time, I cannot say a word out of line about Sakshi or his cricket. He would also stand up for me in front of anyone,’ Chittu had said when I met him in Ranchi.

  He’d also recalled an incident when a JSCA official once insulted Chittu at the Ranchi stadium. When it reached Dhoni’s ears, he wasn’t pleased. When he visited the stadium next—which apparently, Dhoni does every day when he’s in Ranchi—he confronted the association official. Chittu recalled with pride how Dhoni sorted the man with just one line: ‘Chai se garam toh kettle hi hota hai, sir. (Sir, the kettle is always hotter than the tea.)’ The official apparently never looked into Chittu’s eyes again. He had learnt his lesson. ‘Mahi knows I have a temper but if Mahi’s clear that I’m not in the wrong, then whoever says anything to me will definitely get a piece of his mind,’ he had added. Chittu and Co. have also realized a long time ago that despite often bursting with ideas and suggestions regarding their friend’s cricketing career, it’s best not to bring them up when Dhoni’s around. For, the response generally is nothing more than ‘rehne do’ (let it be). Having spent some time with Chittu, I’m rather impressed that he actually manages to
show restraint and not voice the strong opinions he has about those making life difficult for his friend.

  In October 2017, Ziva, just two and a half years’ old, turned YouTube sensation after a video of her singing a famous Malayalam song, ‘Ambalapuzha Unnikannanodu Nee’ went viral, and the little girl even got an invite from the Ambalapuzha temple to pay a visit. It was later revealed that she had learnt it from her Malayali nanny, Sheila Aunty. The song—it received nearly 400,000 views within the first week of it surfacing—apart, Ziva is also known to speak quite a bit of Malayalam. And most others around Ziva are known to talk to her in English. Dhoni realized last year that this meant that his parents didn’t quite know how to communicate with their granddaughter. So, a decision was taken that both Sakshi and Ziva—who, otherwise, tend to accompany him on most tours, at least for certain periods anyway—would stay back in Ranchi during the one and a half months of the IPL in 2017.

  Those close to Dhoni reveal that he wanted Ziva to get used to being around her grandparents more. They also laud Sakshi’s decision to stay back. She’s a celebrity wife and would have her own aspirations, but she was prepared to put them on the back-burner. Dhoni has also taken on the role of teaching Ziva the ropes of Indian culture, including touching the feet of any elderly person she meets. For the record, Sakshi did make an appearance during last year’s IPL. She went on Instagram in defence of her husband after Harsh Goenka, whose brother owned Rising Pune Supergiant, the team that Dhoni played for in 2016 and 2017, expressed a few highly critical views on the former India captain after he was replaced as the franchise captain by Steve Smith. Sakshi first posted a picture wearing a Chennai Super Kings helmet with a hashtag of ‘#throwback’ on Instagram and then followed it up with a quotation about karma.

  ‘When a bird is alive, it eats ants. When the bird is dead, ants eat the bird. Time and circumstances can change at any time. Don’t devalue or hurt anyone in life. You may be powerful today, but remember, time is more powerful than you. One tree makes a million matchsticks but only one match is needed to burn a million trees. So be good and do good.’ One would think that it was directed at Goenka, but was done with the kind of subtlety that perhaps even Dhoni would envy. I couldn’t quite find out the exact origins of the quote but at least the first couple of lines could easily have been—as any journalist who’s attended a Dhoni press conference would concur—out of the Dhoni book of ‘how to raise eyebrows at a media gathering’. Birds, ants and the irony of who eats whom. Yes, they sound very Dhoni-esque. Sakshi and Ziva, by the way, have been as omnipresent on and off the field as Dhoni himself during his 2018 IPL campaign where he’s returned as CSK’s captain.

  Dhoni loves to post videos of his dogs, the other love of his life. He once famously stated that they are his most non-judgemental and dispassionate supporters. ‘I have three dogs at home. Even after losing a series or winning a series, they treat me the same way,’ he has said. These roles are not defined in a dictatorial fashion wherein those around Dhoni are in any way meant to be subservient to him. There is no hierarchy in place here just because he’s the famous one. His close ones respect his candour in these interpersonal relationships because he remains impartial and objective, and doesn’t define these roles as if he’d learnt them in some business management school. The human touch is all too evident in every Dhoni relationship. Stories abound of how the door of his room is always left open so that any player can seek him out for a chat, or a PlayStation challenge. He’s proven over and over again to be a captain who wants to know about his players’ backgrounds, and hear their stories. The most significant reason he gets so much love from the people who know him is that he plays his role in their lives to perfection.

  The only other sportsperson of his generation who has managed his personal and professional lives so that they coexist seamlessly and sans fuss is Roger Federer. There are some glaring similarities in the way these two great sportsmen view life.

  In an interview to Sports Illustrated in 2014, Federer spoke about not enjoying being alone and how he loved having an ‘open house at his hotel so that people can gather’. He said that he gave his coach and physio the key to his room so that they could drop in whenever. There’s also the part where the tennis legend described his fling with social media and called it the ‘biggest change’ in his off-field persona. Federer, like Dhoni for most parts of his career, led his personal life behind the proverbial fourth wall. They were performers of the highest quality but liked to keep a cap on how much the world really knew about them beyond their prodigious performances. They were cerebral and clinical in victory and defeat, even if Federer could, at times, be temperamental on court, regardless of whether he was winning or losing. In later years of course, he would debunk the theory that ‘boys don’t cry’ and become the poster boy for letting one’s emotions flow down one’s cheeks, after almost every Grand Slam victory. They are champions who ooze coolness but somehow make their life beyond the stadia seem rather normcore.

  Social media allowed both Dhoni and Federer to create windows, or slight indentations at least, in that fourth wall and provide the odd glimpse into the real lives they led behind the curtain of immeasurable success. ‘If I do it, it needs to be me. My idea was to give people extra insight nobody else has,’ is what Federer told Sports Illustrated about being on social media. He might as well have been speaking on Dhoni’s behalf. For, Dhoni generally only uses social media to provide rare ‘insights’ and glimpses into his real life and his real passions—bikes, dogs, family, military. Federer, of course, gets to showcase the wonderful amalgamation between his personal and professional life a lot more, being the foremost champion at an individual sport, which means for two weeks at a stretch, during most Grand Slams, he’s constantly dabbling in both for the camera.

  Dhoni, of course, opened up his life to the world when he became the first active cricketer to have a movie made about his life. Untold or not, those were stories that you wouldn’t have expected someone as private as Dhoni to put forth to the world. You could call it his marketing acumen or his foresight. Like most of his gambles on the field, the decision to air his life story on the big screen seemed to be a calculated one. It was the equivalent of finishing off a bowler’s spell when he’s in great rhythm and taking wickets in every other over rather than holding back a portion of his quota for the death. The idea would have been to make the movie at a time when people could watch it and relate it with the real Dhoni actively doing what he does best. Why wait and have people recall your feats retrospectively? It was a master stroke.

  ‘He might not have studied much. But his IQ, baap re baap, is of another level. He taps into market trends like nobody’s business and is always five steps ahead. See how he uses social media so smartly by letting his fans get a piece of him that would never be possible through the mainstream media. At the same time, he’ll be aware of everything that’s happening in the country. Suddenly, he will ask about the BMC election in Mumbai,’ says More.

  ‘If he wants to, he can be a master at keeping a low profile. I remember two years ago he attended a wedding in Baroda and nobody found out. Only the CISF (Central Industrial Security Force) guy at the airport was informed. He landed and they whisked him away. He went for the wedding, spent half hour there chatting with everyone, stayed overnight, and the next morning, he was off. Just like that,’ he adds.

  Understanding your role and your place in Dhoni’s life is something that those who are allowed to enter his very tiny inner circle get used to rather quickly. Col Shankar knows that there are times when Dhoni wants him around and times when he doesn’t. And he makes it rather obvious.

  ‘He just doesn’t answer his house phone in his hotel room, ever. And he knows I know that. Somehow, I don’t know how, but when he wants me in his room, he somehow always picks up the house phone when the reception folk call to check with him. He’ll say later, “See, I knew you would be calling,”’ says Col Shankar.

  The same formula works in th
eir phone conversations too. The colonel, the irrepressible cricket fan, is never shy about sending a slew of messages ranging from ‘well done’, ‘what a great stumping’ and ‘other silly stuff’, as he puts it, to Dhoni, messages which never ever evoke a response of any sort, smiley or otherwise. But here’s where Col Shankar gets to see the other side of Dhoni’s penchant to have roles for everyone, which is an uncanny knack for knowing who needs to be given importance when.

  ‘When I became a colonel, after having been a lieutenant colonel just like him, I said, “MS, you have to salute me now.” I picked up the rank in the morning at around nine, and that evening I got a message. Same-day reply is very rare. He must be having 1000 friends in the army, and 10,000 others send him WhatsApp messages. For him to realize it’s an important day for me, and despite so many WhatsApp messages, to send me a congratulatory message is just extraordinary,’ says Shankar.

  It happened again this year, in which time Shankar had, of course, sent another hundred cricket-related messages which had no response. It was the day the colonel had decided to hang up his boots.

  ‘I said today is my last day, and he immediately said, “Welcome to the retired gang.” That time he was in Kashmir, in the midst of everything, very busy. Every moment is busy. He understood that those two days were important for me,’ he adds. There has been one time, though, the first and only so far, when Dhoni himself initiated a conversation over WhatsApp with the colonel. It happened the day the Indian army carried out cross-border attacks into Pakistan.

  ‘He messaged asking for the numbers of those guys. I said, “They won’t have telephones now but I’ll get them for you.” He got through to some people and said, “Well done, we are proud of you.” Look at the motivation the chief officer would have had after M.S. Dhoni’s call. He understands what is important in life, which is a rare quality.’