With the Pakistan Super League (PSL) final due later in the day, it is only obvious that all eyes would be fixated on the contest as they only should be, but since 2005 for thousands of cricket followers — the lucky ones who heard him describe the game as only he could — the month of March is a time to remember what a man Omar Kureishi was. What a man! Really.

The modulation, the intonation of his voice as the game moved along on the field was awesome. Yes, the word has all but lost its meaning with excessive usage (abusage?) in this day and age, but Kureishi was, indeed, nothing but awesome. The timber and texture of his voice was tailor-made for broadcasting, and words came to him more naturally than, say, a cover drive to Zaheer Abbas.

It was on March 14 that he bid his ultimate and inevitable adieu. Characteristic of the man, he died in his fatigues; his last column appearing posthumously. It is interesting to guess what he would have thought of the PSL, or, for that matter, the whole fandango that the T20 format is. Remember that the first ever T20 international match was played on February 17, 2005, and Kureishi died just days later. It is naturally unfair to implicate the format directly in the death, but it may well have played a part for Kureishi was the most purist of all purists when it came to cricket.

This month 13 years ago, Omar Kureishi crossed over to eternity. For those lucky enough to have heard him describe a game of cricket, his voice remains immortal

In a 1990 interview with the Herald — available on Dawn.Com — he was unambiguous about it. “I am very old fashioned in my views on cricket. I resist change. The one field, really, where you can call me a reactionary, if you like, I don’t mind. I am certainly very orthodox, very conservative and, put in political terms, an extreme right-winger as far as cricket is concerned. Cricket to me was, and is, a way of life.”

He was even against the element of neutral umpires. “The whole idea of neutral umpires is negative in my opinion, if you are talking about the values of cricket. The moment you accept the fact that you need a neutral umpire, or an umpire from a third country, you are destroying the mystique of cricket,” he insisted.

But he had come to terms with ‘pyjama cricket’ — a derogatory term coined for the One-Day format in its early days — and who knows how he would have rationalised the even shorter format. He was, after all, a rational man who made practical choices all his life. In essence, he was just as pragmatist as he was an idealist. It is contradictory, but our contradictions define our lives, don’t they?

Kureishi plied his trade in an era when cricket commentary had more to do with radio than television. The ability to create a mind movie for the listeners was essential. It was the era of the likes of John Arlott, Brian Johnston and Alan Gibson on air and Neville Cardus in print. Kureishi excelled in both.

The element common to almost all these big names was their penchant for things other than mere cricket and that made their commentary much more than the one-dimensional babble that is churned out cricketers-turned-commentators of today.

Let’s turn to Ebb And Flow, the fourth volume of Kureishi’s unfinished memoirs, published in book form after his death, for a taste of what it was like. Talking of Arlott, he writes, “He was the world’s best, on a different level to all the others. I had met [him] when he had come to Karachi enroute to Australia and I had been his host … We had not discussed cricket at all. We had talked about Dylan Thomas, and Arlott, who was a poet himself, had told me about him as they had both worked at the BBC.”

About Gibson, he is even more articulate. “He may or may not have been a poet, but he looked like one … a studied untidiness and a vacuous sadness originating is some divine despair. But appearances were deceptive for he was articulate and very much of this world … Like John Arlott, he was not single-dimensional and was more than capable of talking about subjects other than cricket.”

The first time Kureishi shared the microphone with Arlott was during the 1962 tour of Pakistan to England to which the former was invited as the guest commentator. He “betrayed no nerves”, but was “tense” about “coming second-best” to Arlott. “But I had my own distinct style and I was damned that I would change it. I would do it my way … I waited for my turn with some trepidation but once he had handed over to me, all doubts vanished. I was at an age when I believed in myself. At the close of play, John said to me … ‘you are a natural’. This was high praise from the maestro.” Indeed, Kureishi was as natural as he was a learned soul.

It is interesting to hear what Kureishi has to say about Richie Benaud, the modern-day Voice of Cricket. At a reception in Karachi, he overheard Benaud talking about ‘some chukers in the Pakistan team. “Something in me snapped” and they were on the verge of getting physical when people pulled them apart. “Since then Benaud and I have kept our distance, a sort of healthy dislike of each other though I respect him as a cricket commentator.”

The greatest thing about Kureishi was his ability to transcend the linguistic barrier while describing a cricket game. He remains only the second man in our national history to have done it on a mass scale and on a consistent basis with unqualified success. The first was a man named Mohammad Ali Jinnah. They both spoke fluent, high-flying English to audiences that for the most part didn’t understand the language at all. But they all understood precisely what was being said. One spoke politics. The other, cricket. The result for both these gentleman was the same: success in putting the message across.

They don’t produce men like these anymore. To use an expression that Kureishi used often during his commentary stints to describe quality stuff, My Word! What a man he was!

humair.ishtiaq@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 25th, 2018