Human relationships are complex, dynamic and never static. This applies even to sportsmen involved in a team game like cricket. Even while they are striving for excellence and trying their best to help the team to win, they may be not in best relationships with some of their teammates. My book delves into many of these conflicts spanning many eras, right from Tiger Pataudi, Ajit Wadekar, Bishen Sing Bedi, Kapil Dev, Sunil Gavaskar, Azharuddin, Tendulkar, Dravid and Sourav Ganguly.

I have written about India's greatest cricket players in a narrative that is anecdotal and has personal and even intimate details of how these conflicts unfolded.

My relationship with Kapil Dev, with whom I had played an inter-college cricket match during my university days in Chandigarh helped me get a peek into a cricketing world that was mostly unknown to the public.

I have tried to keep the readers interested with revelations which they should find both entertaining and engrossing, As I mentioned before, everything is based on facts, as they are my own eyewitness accounts. All these conversations and incidents I was privy to are not well known outside the Indian dressing room.

The book also touches upon one of the darkest chapters of Indian Cricket, when Greg Chappell tried to foster the seeds of division within the team. Chappell disparaged Sourav Ganguly, one of the most successful Indian captain's ever. Since I was intending to write Ganguly's biography and had access to him as well as to other players of that era, my narrative is as authentic as it can be possible.

(As told to Sanya Tyagi)

To be continued….

To get the book:

(NOT JUST CRICKET: A Reporter's Journey through Modern India https://amzn.eu/d/3yp6NXc)