TRIBUTE
Follow UsRoyal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) have just won their sixth game on the trot after winning just one in the first eight games - a truly miraculous feat in every sense of the word.
Dinesh Karthik is standing in front of a packed dressing room in a sleeveless RCB jersey, wearing his cap backward. He then starts speaking in that characteristic measured but emphatic fashion.
He calls Faf du Plessis’s coin-tossing skills ‘sh*t’. He taunts his wicketkeeping and says it was outstanding (he had dropped a catch). He adds cheekily how MS Dhoni’s gargantuan maximum that went out of the ground was the turning point of the game because the wet ball was replaced by a dry one. And then, when he gets everyone’s attention through his jokes, like a great speaker, he comes to the main part of his address.
“Jokes apart, we all should be really proud of this journey. People will always remember certain journeys. The way we have come back — after eight games, we needed to win six — people will remember this team for a very special time."
He continues, “Every year in this tournament, when you reach the seven-game mark, there are a few teams that have won only one or two. I think they’ll look to us and say RCB did something special. We are going to try and repeat what RCB did.
“When we get on that flight to Ahmedabad, I think we will have a job at our hands. We have it in our grasp to do something that people will remember us for decades.”
Karthik retired from the Indian Premier League (IPL) after getting knocked out from the Eliminator. If you look at that video now in hindsight, suddenly, that makes that entire speech personal. It’s no more about the team, per se. It’s about the speaker himself. It’s his desire that he is transposing on his team.
Let's keep aside the fact that they couldn’t complete the job in Ahmedabad and focus on the key theme here.
Remembrance. Legacy.
So, will you remember Karthik, the cricketer, now that he has retired? Or will you remember the man whose captivating speech skills (like the one he displayed in the instance above) made for an entertaining and insightful listen during live commentary and otherwise? If not that, will you remember him through the prism of his start-stop international cricket career?
Or maybe chuck all that. Will you remember him as a man whose career was spent in the shadow of MS Dhoni’s greatness? So much so that people forgot that the game was built up as probably Dhoni’s last IPL game would also have been Karthik’s last!
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Karthik made his India debut on September 05, 2004. He was 19 then. Rahul Dravid was India’s wicketkeeper. Karthik’s inclusion in the squad ensured that Dravid kept for India the last time on November 13 that year.
In about a month and ten days from that day, Dhoni made his ODI debut and within a few matches, he sent Pakistani bowlers into submission with his hitting in Vishakhapatnam.
Karthik didn’t play an ODI for India until 2006 after that.
If you have seen his pictures back then, you’ll find it hard to believe it’s the same Karthik. His face is clean-shaven, his body lean and thin. In fact, he looked even younger than 19 as he walked out on the field alongside the Tendulkars, the Gangulys, and the Dravids.
If there was any noise in his head about being given a raw deal by the Indian team, Karthik probably kept it muted. He knew, he wasn’t a finished product, either.
“I think I need to be honest with myself. I think I wasn’t as good then." - That’s what he told ESPNcricinfo in an old interview and anyone else who compared him with Dhoni.
He was honest. And he kept trying because even in the initial doldrums of his career, he was doing stuff on the cricket field that was catching eyeballs.
And just like it was a few years back, T20 cricket was right at the centre of it.
You might have seen his picture of stumping Michael Vaughan on his debut, where he collected the ball from Harbhajan Singh way down the leg side and then put on a full-length dive to stump the English skipper before he could return behind the safety line.
Karthik was the Player of the Match in India’s first-ever T20 game in 2006. He then led his home state, Tamil Nadu, to win the inaugural edition of the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy. When the young squad for the 2007 T20 World Cup was announced, Karthik was right there.
In fact, he made one of the most spectacular yet aesthetic catches in the tournament's history, catching Graeme Smith’s edge airborne in the slip cordon in a must-win game for India.
So what if he didn’t have the gloves on? Karthik’s fielding has always been top-notch. And he probably worked at it harder, too, considering that he would have had to play as a pure batter in the side.
That same zeal to keep improving, to keep reinventing himself so that he’s ready for the Indian team if and when the call comes, kept him in the fray for the national side across all three formats.
His inconsistent batting might have spilled the milk, but very soon, Karthik was the ‘replacement man’ of Indian cricket, turning up from Colombo to Cape Town as soon as transport could take him.
All this time, and later, he kept competing with the country's Parthiv Patels and Naman Ojhas to eke himself a space. As it turned out, he then had to compete with the next generation of wicketkeepers—Wriddhiman Saha, Rishabh Pant, and Sanju Samson.
It was only after an upheaval in his personal life that the direction of his career and his batting changed. That incident was big enough to tank anyone’s life. Forget a flailing career in international cricket.
But the reverse happened. His life took a turn (for the good) when he met Dipika Pallikal, a squash superstar in the country, and later married her.
Karthik started batting with the intent of being India’s middle-order batter. It took him a few years and a lot of batting changes to make it to the Indian squad again, but Dhoni’s waning finishing power after 2015 and India’s perennial number four crisis meant that there was space for a reliable but enterprising batter.
So, in a few years after that incident, he had won the Champions Trophy in 2013, the Vijay Hazare (where he captained Tamil Nadu) in 2017, and reconfigured his batting with friend and mentor Abhishek Nayar in the middle of it all.
Now, to improve his power hitting, Karthik was holding his shape a lot longer. He had changed his back lift and was also leaning back a lot more in his shots which enhanced his bat swing and imparted more power despite not having a typically muscular frame.
If you want to see how that change materialised, just check that shot he played in the Nidahas Trophy final that changed his life (still the most-watched video on YouTube). It was full and wide, and then to hit over extra cover for a flat six when six was needed off that one delivery in the final of the Asia Cup—that was the arrival of Karthik’s fullest potential.
This new finisher pro max ‘DK’ version suited the growing demand of the game. With age against him, he became a lower-order finisher specializing in giving maximum impact in minimal opportunities. His abbreviated name suited his shortened but enhanced role in the sides he played for.
DK was able to hit the ball in areas that young Karthik never used to, as he was more of an orthodox cricketer. But now, because he has started practising how to use the crease, where to stand to get a feel of what the bowler will be doing, and what is the right position for him to be in the crease to make maximum use of the ball.
As a result, the deliveries he would have hit earlier to extra cover were now reverse-scooped over the third man for a six.
In the end, he became so good at it that the omniscient replacement man of Indian cricket became its 'comeback man', forcing his way back into the Indian squad for the 2022 T20 World Cup after being one of the best T20 finishers in the world of recent years.
And now, two years later, despite still batting extremely well for his side at 38, this is where his story closes in the IPL and probably in international cricket as well.
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Now, just compare what you felt about Karthik, the cricketer while reading his career trajectory to what you felt when he gave that speech in Bengaluru.
There’s a clear dissonance between the two portraits of a man.
One is of a confident man addressing a team that includes Virat Kohli, Andy Flower, Glenn Maxwell, and Faf du Plessis. The other is of an unfulfilled career in which he batted 169 times for India across all formats in roughly two decades.
So why does he command that respect?
It’s because Dinesh Karthik has kept trying for the last two decades. He kept trying to be a better batter. He became a better partner. He became a finisher when no one thought he could be one. He led Tamil Nadu to glory multiple times in SMAT. He became the spine of KKR and RCB in the IPL.
Karthik failed throughout his career. He always wanted to play for CSK. He would have loved to end it all at Chepauk. But his IPL career ended one game short of that becoming a possibility. His journey never had a fairy tale ending, just like he mentioned in the video after the Eliminator.
However, this one moment of loss can’t define his entire journey because DK is not about one moment or an end. That moment hasn’t given him supreme respect in star-studded dressing rooms like RCB or KKR.
It’s because DK is all about the journey, where he has kept reinventing himself, where he keeps coming back in avatars (what about his printed shirts, huh?) no one expects him to.
That’s why the same hands that don’t stop fidgeting while holding a bat are extremely stable while holding the mic - an entirely new profession that he started as he approached the beginning of the end of his career. The head that keeps bobbing as he’s getting ready in his stance looks straight into the eyes of the person he’s interviewing. His voice is measured. Thoughtful. Each word was pronounced clearly, with enough stress on his speech's emphatic parts.
After all, isn’t this journey of change what defines a person? The zeal to keep getting better? The sheer determination to keep trying? To become a better version of oneself so that we can give ourselves the maximum opportunity to show the world what we are all about? Isn’t it more profound and more lasting than just winning?
Maybe that’s why DK is more relatable, you know?
Most of us are not like Mahendra Singh Dhoni. We are not born with that raw talent. We don’t always have luck or fortune of that sort. We are not at the right place at the right time. We don’t get popular moments that define our lives.
Most of us are like DK—trying to figure out what works best for us in this ever-changing world while controlling the controllables. DK is relatable because he’s all about the journey and not just the end.
As Kunwar Narayan, the famous Hindi poet, said in the poem 'Antim Unchai' (The Final Height).
"There’s no difference between winning everything and not losing until the very end."
