Caught behind
Quiet Anil Kumble stands revealed as a keen amateur photographer. A new book collects his photos, on the field and off, but we are not bowled over
The package took some prising and cutting open, through thick cardboard and bubble wrap. Inside, the hardbound 184-pager is carefully packed inside a biscuit-brown gilt-edged box. Produced and marketed by Tenvic (a division of Anil Kumble Sports Promotion Pvt Ltd) and titled Wide Angle: Candid Moments from My Playing Days, the book is sure to catch any cricket lover’s eye.
A simple foreword from Sachin Tendulkar, alongside a great photograph of him dressed as Gabbar Singh, is a striking opening, as is another full page of a nattily dressed Kumble. “Anil has always been an avid photographer, and when I see the results in this book, they take me back… Watching him bowl in a match, it was impossible to say whether he has just sent down ten overs for three wickets or 25 overs without a wicket. The intensity was the same. Anil brought the same intensity to his interests outside cricket.”
There is no doubting the honesty of this effort, and the book has been culled together from thousands of pictures, painstakingly put together by Dinesh Kumble. These have been divided among 10 chapters under various heads. Most of them have been taken by Anil Kumble himself, though there are obviously some in which he features (which are unacknowledged). His brother Dinesh gave him a camera just before he was to travel to Srinagar for an under-17 camp, and “that’s how it began”. Since then he has never been far from his camera, and this has enabled him to document all manner of moments, from the informal camaraderie of the players’ dressing room, to tableaux on the pitch, family holidays, encounters and interludes — moments that are transitory, but when captured and viewed in the clear light of another day and time, taking on a different life, imbued with a different meaning.
That voyeuristic pleasure is the merit of this book, offering glimpses into a life that for so many in our cricket-crazy country is one “devoutly to be wished (for)”. Kumble’s text accompanying the photographs is like the man himself, quiet and shorn of affectation. On the whole, viewed as a personal album that its author wishes to share, the book is worth a second look. But examine closer, more critically, and it falters. The photographs are all valuable as personal keepsakes, and a few are competent in terms of technical merit, with the wildlife ones classically framed. But it’s clear we set different standards for our celebrities, as there’s nothing that makes you catch your breath, nothing that makes you see something you hadn’t realised before. The design and layout are functional but unimaginative. And finally, it’s the price that leaves one breathless — Rs 5,900.