Omar Kureishi | White Star
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?