For cricket followers of this vintage, it might be hard to comprehend that there was an era when Indian cricket wasn’t accorded the same respect and reverence it enjoys today. India then wasn’t the financial hub of the sport, even though cricket always received excellent patronage. There wasn’t such a massive clamour for the Indian team to come calling, the Indian diaspora overseas was laid-back and self-involved, almost to the extent of being timid, and chants of ‘India Indiaaaa’ at Lord’s or the MCG or Basin Reserve or Newlands were few and far between.

Today, of course, all this is de rigueur. India is unquestionably the cricket capital of the world, the land that props up the sport globally. Close to eighty percent of the cricketing revenue is generated from there, through sponsorships and through media rights. India’s cricketers are the cynosure of all eyes, their presence imperative for TV ratings to shoot up and for sponsors’ purse strings to be loosened when they showcase their wares in Australia and Zimbabwe, New Zealand and Nisshin. Over the last three and a half decades, India have thrown up an assembly line of superstars — mainly batting, of course — with the poster boys at different ends of that time-frame spectrum answering to the names of Sachin Tendulkar and Virat Kohli respectively.