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Shadows Across The Playing Field

Shashi Tharoor and Shaharyar Khan

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Description

Shadows Across the Playing Field tells the story of the turbulent cricketing relations between India and Pakistan through the eyes of Shashi Tharoor and Shaharyar Khan, who bring to the task not only great love of the game but also deep knowledge of subcontinental politics and diplomacy. Shashi Tharoor, a former UN Under-Secretary-General and ma...n of letters, is a passionate outsider, whose comprehensive, entertaining and hard-hitting analysis of seventy-five years of cricketing history displays a Nehruvian commitment to secular values, which rejects sectarianism in sport in either country. Shaharyar Khan, a former Pakistan Foreign Secretary, is very much the insider, who writes compellingly of his pivotal role as team manager and then Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board at a time when cricket was in the forefront of d?tente between the two countries. In their essays, the two authors trace the growing popularization of cricket from the days of the Bombay Pentangular to the Indian Premier League. They show how politics and cricket became intertwined and assess the impact it has had on the game. But above all the book is a celebration of the talent of the many great cricketers who have captivated audiences on both sides of the border. If politics and terrorism can at times stop play, cricket is also a force for peace and healthy competition.

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Authors

  • Shashi Tharoor worked for the United Nations in various humanitarian, peace-keeping and management roles for nearly thirty years and was Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information during the tenure of Kofi Annan. Currently a Lok Sabha MP representing the Thiruvananthapuram constituency, he is an acclaimed novelist, author and newspaper columnist. His non-fiction titles include An Era of Darkness (2016), The Paradoxical Prime Minister (2018) and The Battle of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism, and what it means to be Indian (2020). He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Indian cricket, which he has followed avidly from afar, and has played in such cricketing hotbeds as Singapore and Geneva.

  • Shaharyar Khan had a long and distinguished career as a diplomat, retiring as Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary in 1994. He had earlier served as Ambassador to Jordan and France as well as High Commissioner to London. On retirement, he was appointed the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Rwanda. He was born in Bhopal and educated at Cambridge University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston. He has had a lifelong interest in cricket and over the past ten years has played a pivotal role in cricketing relations between India and Pakistan. He was manager of the Pakistan cricket team that toured India in 1999 and served as Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board from December 2003 to October 2006. He is the author of The Begums of Bhopal (1999), The Shallow Graves of Rwanda (2000), Cricket: A Bridge of Peace (2001) and Bhopal Connections (2017).

ISBN
9788194969198
Binding
Paperback
Page Extent
224
Weight (kg)
0.3
Height (in)
9.84
Width (in)
8.27
Subject
Sports
Published Date
25/06/22
Publisher
Roli Books

Authors

  • Shashi Tharoor worked for the United Nations in various humanitarian, peace-keeping and management roles for nearly thirty years and was Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information during the tenure of Kofi Annan. Currently a Lok Sabha MP representing the Thiruvananthapuram constituency, he is an acclaimed novelist, author and newspaper columnist. His non-fiction titles include An Era of Darkness (2016), The Paradoxical Prime Minister (2018) and The Battle of Belonging: On Nationalism, Patriotism, and what it means to be Indian (2020). He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Indian cricket, which he has followed avidly from afar, and has played in such cricketing hotbeds as Singapore and Geneva.

  • Shaharyar Khan had a long and distinguished career as a diplomat, retiring as Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary in 1994. He had earlier served as Ambassador to Jordan and France as well as High Commissioner to London. On retirement, he was appointed the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Rwanda. He was born in Bhopal and educated at Cambridge University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston. He has had a lifelong interest in cricket and over the past ten years has played a pivotal role in cricketing relations between India and Pakistan. He was manager of the Pakistan cricket team that toured India in 1999 and served as Chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board from December 2003 to October 2006. He is the author of The Begums of Bhopal (1999), The Shallow Graves of Rwanda (2000), Cricket: A Bridge of Peace (2001) and Bhopal Connections (2017).

ISBN
9788194969198
Binding
Paperback
Page Extent
224
Weight (kg)
0.3
Height (in)
9.84
Width (in)
8.27
Subject
Sports
Published Date
25/06/22
Publisher
Roli Books

Reviews

Shaharyar Khan

Published Date:- June 25, 2022

A new generation of people living in the global village and with high expectations of a better life are no longer the willing slaves of government handouts, censored national media or the edicts of the politicians and agencies. They have developed a mind of their own. The basic issue is that the people crave peace and not hostility… In 2004, I sensed this public mood in the air like the onset of the monsoon. A stirring, sporting series would provide a perfect fillip to the desire for peace and the eventual resolution of issues. Carefully handled, cricket could act as a bridge of peace.

Dr. Shashi Tharoor

Published Date:- June 25, 2022

India versus Pakistan is a contest between two countries, not two communities within India. It is not the Pentangular revived; India has never fielded an all-Hindu team, and even Islamic Pakistan these days cannot do without a Hindu leg-spinner. Coverage of these matches in communal terms is as reprehensible as covering them through military metaphors, a sin of which Indian and Pakistani journalists alike have been guilty. The tendency to see these matches as warfare by proxy is equally unfortunate. Cricket is a sport; a cricket team represents a country, it does not symbolize it. To ask cricket to bear a larger burden than any other national endeavour is palpably unfair

Suresh Menon, ESPN Cricinfo

Published Date:- June 25, 2022

… two diplomats and cricket lovers look at… India-Pakistan cricket andthe attendant politics and tell it like they see it

Dawn

Published Date:- July 2, 2011

Mr Tharoor writes, for many Indians, Pakistanis are merely estranged siblings “basically like us”, in appearance, ethnicity, cuisine, and music largely indistinguishable from northern Indian. For other Indians then Pakistan can never of the taint of the original sin of its creation. While India has its share of Hindu bigots, hostile to Muslim in general and Pakistanis in particular, Indian liberals weaned on a diet of preaching about pluralism and religious co-existence.

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ESPN Cric Info

Published Date:- December 12, 2009

The title is from a line in Ramachandra Guha's A Corner of a Foreign Field; both writers have acknowledged a debt to that excellent history of the game in the subcontinent. The authors have taken off their diplomatic hats in an attempt to say it like it is, and that is the strength of the book. Their respective backgrounds as UN under-secretary general (Tharoor) and Pakistan's foreign secretary and chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board (Khan) allow them to place what Guha has called sibling rivalry in the context of the political and cultural changes.

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