When Sunil Gavaskar advised Sachin Tendulkar to not let Wasim Akram put his arm around him

It was an evening in which the ‘Little Master’ Sunil Gavaskar and ‘Master Blaster’ Sachin Tendulkar regaled the select audience with cricketing anecdotes. It was also a reunion of sorts for some of the Indian cricketing greats, largely former captains from Mumbai and also former Test players.

There were several generation India cricketers, captain Nari Contractor, his predecessor in the Indian team in the 1950s, Madhav Apte, his juniors and captain Ajit Wadekar among others. The most notable being Tendulkar under the same roof as his childhood friend and team-mate Vinod Kambli, burying their differences of the past, and the 200-Test veteran sharing some jokes with his captain Mohammad Azharuddin and even sharing the stage with the scorer of three Test centuries in his first three matches from Hyderabad.

The occasion was the launch of journalist Rajdeep Sardesai’s book ‘Democracy’s XI – The Great Indian Cricket Story’ on Monday evening. Cricket stories of the past, some heard of in various other platforms and some unheard of before, were greatly consumed by the audience with the author himself narrating stories of his famous cricketing father Dilip Sardesai and his team-mates including Salim Durani.

The chat on cricket and its glorious stories that went for …read more