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The star-studded Indian side, captained by Rahul Dravid, a bonafide great of the game even then, had just faced a humiliating 69-run defeat against Sri Lanka. Earlier, they had lost by five wickets against Bangladesh for the first time in their ODI World Cup history.
As an 8-year-old kid in a third-tier Indian city, I have three distinct memories of the meltdown that followed India’s first-stage World Cup exit.
I saw a cartoon in a Hindi daily advising Sachin Tendulkar to sell dried fish in Mumbai after a poor tournament. Another showed MS Dhoni’s house being pelted with stones. Third, which affected me the most, was an image of a burned Dravid poster.
Even at that age I had some semblance of reverence for Tendulkar, and Dhoni was the cricketer who hooked me to cricket. However, it was the Dravid poster being burnt that really incensed me. I remember tearing the newspaper where that image had appeared and chucking it away.
The reason is clear when I look back now. Even then, I could see the dignity and composure Dravid exuded. I had heard my uncle say that if there’s one batter he would want to bat for his life, it would be Dravid. I also remember how he felt so likeable whenever he smiled.
And now, 17 years after that phase, I can now add probably a few more things that would make me want to respect him more as a cricketer. I can tell how he was the highest run scorer of the 1999 World Cup. I can prove how he was the spine of India’s middle order in the 2003 World Cup. 
Even at 8, sitting in a far-flung corner of India, I knew the world wasn’t fair to a good man.
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Rahul Dravid is in the air. Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma are on either side of him, ready to throw their coach in the air once again along with their other teammates as gravity brings him down. Both Rohit and Kohli became the next-generation faces of Indian cricket within a year of Dhoni’s house being pelted and Dravid’s poster being burned.
By the time Dravid left international cricket, both were already christened as the future of Indian cricket.
And here they were, now the future past of Indian cricket, hoisting its past above their heads.
It was only because the past refused to stay in the past and strived to improve the present. Rahul bhai, as the team called him, didn’t stop giving back to Indian cricket even after he stopped playing for it.
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How many international cricketers do you know who started coaching in franchise cricket, then went to the academy level, coached age group boys, and then made their way up to coaching senior national sides?
Dravid did that. According to various reports, he was offered a coaching position in the senior side much before, but he denied it. He's not someone who likes being given something he hasn't worked for. By the end of his playing career, he had joined the Rajasthan Royals' backroom staff as a mentor. Later, he would become the coach of the India Under-19 and A teams.
There, his virtues as a cricketer helped him refine young talents as a coach. Dravid’s batting was all about discipline — straight elbow, meeting the ball beneath the eye, foot pointed towards the covers while defending, etc. — a facet of the game that batters at the age group level sometimes compromise on to amp up their power hitting.
Pick any interview of any U-19 cricketer from the batches of 2016 and 2018, and he will tell you how the Bengaluru royalty instilled groundedness in them as cricketers both on and off the field. Not to mention that during these stints, he included the likes of Paras Mhambrey, Sairaj Bahutule, and many other former cricketers who were already established coaches in the setup.
By the time he moved to coaching the senior side, the likes of Prithvi Shaw, Shubman Gill, Abhishek Sharma, Arshdeep Singh, Rahul Chahar, and Shivam Mavi had taken their first steps in cricket under him. The system of shadow tours and a dedicated support staff for the India A side also started functioning regularly and efficiently under him. It’s well documented how the depth in Indian cricket is a significant function of that.
It’s one thing to be a great cricketer. However, it takes a different skill to identify the structural issues in your country’s cricket administration and then diligently sort them out under your supervision. Who better than Rahul Dravid to do that in Indian cricket?
That’s why when he got results with his process, he continued that principle of having a defined vision for progress and functioning when he joined the senior Men’s side, taking over from Ravi Shashtri in November 2021.
India needed a mentality change in their batting at that point. They needed to open up and attack a lot more. Dravid, as the head coach, had three World Cups hurling towards him.
That’s when Rohit was able to buy in this new change finally after the group stage exit from the 2021 T20 World Cup. Along with him, the rest of the team did so as well. Although it didn’t palpably materialise in front of our eyes in the 2022 T20 World Cup, the change was bubbling beneath the surface, and it came to the fore during India’s 2023 ODI World Cup campaign at home.
That newfound intent characterised India’s batting in the tournament, and Rohit led his team to the final undefeated. That one result in Ahmedabad on November 19, 2023, made the entire nation sideline the greatness of that campaign from the cricket narrative in the country. The never-ending pain and trophy drought made sure of that.
However, when the next opportunity came in the 2024 T20 World Cup final, a tournament in which they had played with the same aggressive intent as 2023, they didn’t falter this time. The team that couldn’t catch a cold if it came disguised as silverware was T20 World Champions after a 17-year wait.
Seventeen years ago, Dravid was there with his face in his hands as the losing captain of the Indian cricket team. 17 years later, he is being lifted as the head coach of a World Cup-winning team.
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When Kohli finally put the trophy in Dravid’s hands, he nervously smiled momentarily as if he was almost apologetic about being away from his pen and notebook, where he’s continuously jotting down pointers at every crucial moment of the game.
But as soon as the cold metal of the T20 World Cup trophy hit his skin, something electric bolted through his body that made him lift the trophy and shriek like a madman. All composure, dignity, and Jammy boy perceptions broke, and a man who had just touched justice emerged.
Justice for all those burnt effigies, posters and the abuses. Justice for life’s unfairness on November 19. Justice for his cricket career where he was amongst the best in the world for a long time at what he did, but still wasn’t called a World Champion.
If someone had played “Maula mere lele meri jaan”, probably Dravid would have just teared up like Shahrukh Khan from Chak De India. Even if he didn’t, I did, and so did millions of others who watched their Mohammad Rafi-listening retro star turn into a metalhead for a few seconds.
As Rahul Dravid fades out of the limelight of Indian cricket and returns to the green shadows of his hometown Bengaluru, there are high chances that you might find him standing in a line during elections. You might even find him on local grounds, watching his son play age-group cricket.
I wish I could time-travel to 2007 and show my younger self that Dravid also does the mundane things you expect a 51-year-old Indian man to do! I wish my younger self could see Dravid being hoisted in the air by the biggest cricketing stars in the world after winning the World Cup in his last game as a head coach.
I wish I could tell myself that good men do win one day, and life isn’t always unfair. After all, as Rahul Dravid’s life in cricket has taught us, that sliver of hope is all that matters in the end.
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