Virat Kohli - Poetry in motion

The simplest form of art is anything that flows unimpeded. There is something inexplicably delightful in the vigour of unobtrusive motion, pure and enchanting, that leaves a mark on the mind even after it has moved on.

Think of a dream sequence in Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror where Margarita Terekhova washes her hair. The texture is vivacious, the rhythm dream-like and the movement haunting. Somehow it weighs heavy on the mind, on the surface of silence, like a paragraph from Marcel Proust. But the music of Bach, Pergolesi and Purcell ensures that even while the scene hangs heavy, it flows.

The inimitable Neville Cardus had once compared the batting of Victor Trumper to "the gorgeous bannered beauty" of Wagner's Die Meistersinger. Such musical analogies are by no means far-fetched; Ranjitsinhji in his Jubilee Book of Cricket had said that the legendary WG Grace used to manage his cricket bat like a "many-chorded lyre".

The obvious photograph of Trumper that still evokes in us the comparison to the Wagnerian opera is the picture of the drive, in his signature skull cap, by George Beldam which the Australian cricket writer Gideon Haigh discusses in his biography of Trumper titled Stroke of a Genius: Victor Trumper and the shot that changed cricket.

Haigh's prose is, as always, elegant and it flows like a dream when he talks of the photograph of Trumper's drive. Except that is not the only elegant thing he has written about drives in the recent past.

When Haigh wrote about Kohli's match-winning innings against Australia in the quarter-final of the World T20 earlier this year, he might have been referring to Kohli's majestic drives when he wrote: "Not a stroke, by the way, would have looked out of place in a Test match. Much as the marketers would like to take the cricket out of T20, Kohli keeps putting it back."

The truism of that statement is palpable as Kohli carries on in his merry way in the ongoing series against England. The Indian skipper has been nothing short of majestic -- not even the sacrilegious comparison to Tendulkar would be lèse-majesté anymore as Haigh had pointed out.

What he is meting out to Cook and company at the moment can be deemed to be the retribution for the lèse-majesté - revenge for a pernicious English summer when Anderson and Broad repeatedly wooed the outside edge of Kohli's bat, reducing his technique and temperament to questionable propositions.

A couple of years later, he is driving the ball with an aptitude and flair that makes us curious to know what adjectives would Cardus have graced him with. Whether he had been driving Faulkner and Zampa back then or Anderson and Rashid now, Kohli has had a phenomenal year in which he has made incredulity the new norm.

Just watch Kohli walk into bat on a winter morning and you can snugly settle in with a cup of coffee till he scores his century. A moment of recklessness at times, God forbid, and Kohli is gone. You know that's the odd occasion but you shake your head in disbelief. That's how high the bar has been set now.

TV sets will be switched off, producers and advertisers will curse under their breath. Kohli gives you TRP. Over-demanding mothers feeding petulant children with repeated rebukes to finish off their last morsel while watching Kohli will fall silent. The food will go untouched now.

And unsuspecting septuagenarians who had paused their daily tirade about the state of the world will go back to remembering how Gavaskar's days were infinitely better. Not until Sachin Tendulkar has a single cricketer united the nation in this fashion.

In Mumbai the cold breeze that wafts in from the Arabian sea has made the weather just about pleasant for the England team. At 307 for 6, with a few quick wickets in the post-lunch session, they have the home team on the mat. But standing tall is Kohli who had walked in to bat in the first over of the day.

In T20s, a shot that he has perfected by now in the lofted cover drive that usually sails for six. In the longest format of the game it is a different story. Kohli drives but the ball does not leave the ground; it caresses the wet blades of the Wankhede grass on a winter day.

Everyone stands to attention as the ball flows, drifts and glides to the boundary repeatedly. Steady head, long stride, quick hands and the sweet orgasmic explosion off Kohli's blade. To watch him is to experience lack of control just like your gondola drifting away into the dream-swept Venetian channels.

If it's outside the off-stump, it goes square or through cover. Anything coming into his pads is flicked away. The rest are driven straight, some with a touch of impetuous disdain when they are over-pitched by a tiring Rashid who has been overcooked in an endless spell by a clueless England captain.

Like a Tarkovsky film, everything flows when Kohli bats. Yet the magic lies in how the banal is turned surreal. Never had the act of a woman washing her hair looked more magical, never had the ball racing off the bat through cover looked more poetic.

There is something ineffably beautiful about the movement as Kohli gets into position, the freeze-frame sound of the ball on the bat and the delight of watching the ball speed away. It is the texture of a dream suspended on the other side of silence.

One of the most beautiful things about sports is that it can draw you closer to philosophy. There are moments when you wonder if there is a better way to observe the intricate details of life – those microseconds when sports takes on meaning so powerfully that it closely resembles poetry.

It is the disappearing truth only observable in the flickering ephemerality of motion when a Roger Federer plays a booming backhand down the line or a Lionel Messi dribbles past the last defender and chips the goal-keeper. Or a Virat Kohli caresses Anderson through cover.

Haigh had rightly pointed out that Kohli puts the cricket back into T20. But cricket is too banal a name for the ethereal desire and suspension of disbelief that Kohli evokes in us. More than anything else, Kohli puts the poetry back into cricket.