Ravichandran Ashwin and the winter of ’24 in the summer of ’69 

It’s the morning of 19 December. I am just staring out of my sixteenth-floor hotel room on the Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai. It’s a clear day. There is a chill in the air. And the cars are flying by with not a care in the world.  

On 18 December, a day earlier, my favourite cricketer of the current era, Ravichandran Ashwin, unexpectedly announced his retirement from international cricket. Ashwin is 38, so, that retirement decision would have come sooner rather than later. Nonetheless some surprises do hurt.  

It reminds me of a lovely Hindi poem written by Ashok Vajpayee, which I tend to remember on such occasions.  

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In a few hours I will be leaving for Abu Dhabi to see Bryan Adams perform. Adams is 65 and unlike Ashwin he doesn’t need to be chosen by a coach and a captain to show his abilities and perform. But what they have in common is that in their respective highly competitive fields they have managed to remain relevant as long as they have. And that’s something.

Adams’ first album released in 1980. And 44 years later he is still around performing concerts all over the world. Of course, like most other rockstars his popularity has waned. But that hasn’t stopped him from producing newer material and singing new songs.

Of course, these songs are not as popular as his hits in the 1980s and the 1990s, but they are more contemplative and experiential and show us that the songs that Adams wrote and sang in his 50s and is writing and singing in his 60s, are different from what he wrote and sung from his 20s to his 40s.  

These songs show that his growth as a singer-songwriter hasn’t stopped with his waning popularity. Indeed, like many other famous acts of the past he is not just a cover version of himself. He has newer stuff to offer. (Try listening to his 2019 song Shine a Light, a song he wrote with Ed Sheeran. Or the 2022 song So Happy It Hurts, a post pandemic song.)

In a way the same is true about Ashwin. He has never stopped trying newer stuff in an era where almost everyone had written off off-spin bowling as a dying art. 

As Sidharth Monga wrote on espncricinfo.com after Ashwin’s retirement: “He pushed the art to its limits… Different run-ups, different load-ups, different seam orientations, different balls altogether, while always landing the ball where he wanted it to.”  

Or as Sharda Urga wrote in The Hindustan Times: “He remains a cricket nerd, whose game is always a work in progress, looking for more. It is routine to study opponents, but it’s a special kind of student who watches every ball of an entire series being played by the next team to play India.” 

The larger point here is that we live in an era where continuing to remain relevant in our professional lives remains our biggest challenge. My life has been no different.

When I think about the 21 years that I have spent in the media, this is how it looks like. I started off writing primarily for the digital medium. Over the years, I have written for websites, newspapers and magazines. I have written pieces in lengths ranging from 300 words to 8,000 words, and done everything from some news reporting to longform writing and from edit page columns to filling up the personal finance pages of newspapers. I have done podcasts. Appeared as an expert for just about everything on TV news.

I have ghost-written some stuff for fund managers who can’t write in simple English. I have done long Twitter threads. I have edited stuff for corporations. I have rehashed a lot of my earlier writing for stock brokerages. I have spoken extensively at business schools. I have written five books.  

When it comes to writing, I have primarily written about economics, finance and investing. But I have also done political commentary (quite badly at times). Written a lot about cricket and music. And even reviewed films and music a few times. Basically, whatever it took at any point of time to keep the money flowing in. I have been a true hack in the strictest sense of term, who can fill up space when it needs to be filled up. 

On days when I question what I have been doing with my life, I feel like a restaurant in Goa that serves Punjabi, Chinese, Mughlai, and even Udupi fare. Now, as the needs of the consumers of content—pity we don’t call them readers or viewers anymore—change, I need to serve Korean, Japanese, and Italian as well. And given that I come from erstwhile Bihar, even Champaran mutton for that matter.  

The content business has moved on to digital video and audio, from reels lasting a few seconds or a few minutes, to podcasts that are slightly longer. Now, I have done a lot of video in the past and am not unfamiliar with the medium, but I have a problem putting out simplistic stuff that the audience wants to lap up. They are basically waiting to be lied to and that’s the biggest market currently going around.  

Let me explain this through an example. In the recent past, finfluencers and those in the business of managing other people’s money (OPM) have been asking their followers not to be worried about the stock market, which could do nothing wrong for the past few years but hasn’t gone anywhere in the past few months. And that’s because foreign institutional investors (FIIs) have been selling out of Indian stocks.  

Now, the narrative being pushed by the finfluencers and OPM wallahs has been that the US Federal Reserve will lower interest rates. And when that happens the FIIs will invest more money in Indian stocks given that fixed returns in the US will fall and that will send foreign investors looking for higher returns. This will mean that stock prices will go up.  

This is a clear, crisp and a confident explanation. People like certainty while dealing with the future. And such analysis offers them that certainty, but it’s very simplistic.  

On 18 December, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 25 basis points. One basis point is one hundredth of a percentage. But stock prices fell even after that. Weren’t they supposed to go up as per all the analysis offered by the finfluencers and the OPM wallahs?

But they didn’t. Why? Because the Fed now plans to cut interest rates at a much slower pace in 2025 than it had projected earlier, and stock prices were adjusting for that.

All this is too much nuance for finfluencers and OPM wallahs used to making glib bytes. Plus, any nuance brings down the chance of going viral.  

Indeed, in order to continue to be relevant one has to get into this business of lying, and if not that, at least into the business of perpetually selling hope—something I am unable to do given that I have lived through different stock market cycles. And hope cannot be an investing strategy however glib it may sound.

It's around 3pm and I am in a taxi going to Abu Dhabi for the Bryan Adams concert. This is the third concert I will be attending this year in distant foreign lands. Now, I could have seen Adams perform in Mumbai. But I didn’t. Why? That’s a different topic or a different day. 

Before Adams I saw Bruce Springsteen perform at the Wembley Stadium in London in July and Bob Dylan perform at the Royal Albert Hall in London in November. I had wanted to see Paul McCartney perform at the O2 arena in London in December, but the dates were clashing with Adams’ concert and London is prohibitively expensive to be going there thrice in one year.  

Basically, earning in Indian rupees and spending money in British pounds or even United Arab Emirates dirhams is a difficult proposition. Everything from air tickets, accommodation, local travel, food, international roaming on the mobile phone, visa fee, etc., tends to cost a lot in terms of rupees.  

Plus, on top of that, I have a tendency to buy books everywhere I go. And books in India are significantly cheaper. Of course, one can come back and order those books on Amazon in India, but somehow that doesn’t work for me at all. All shopping therapy is about feeling good about spending money in that moment. (My most recent discovery on this front being that books in Dubai are even more expensive than the same books in London.

It makes me think about Warren Buffett and the concept of the Ovarian lottery. As he said in a speech to business school students in October 1998: “You are going to participate in the Ovarian lottery. And that is going to be the most important thing in your life, because that is going to control whether you are born here [in the United States] or in Afghanistan.”

The point being where you are born ends up influencing a lot of things in life. In the context of what I am talking about here, Indians wanting to enjoy holidays in countries with stronger currencies need to make a lot of money in rupee terms to be able to enjoy holidays abroad without feeling poor or feeling guilty or ending up with very little savings.  

Also, the Ovarian lottery works at multiple levels. It’s not just about the country one is born in, it’s also about the family. I was born into a family where both my parents are postgraduates and fluent English speakers. So, I did win the Ovarian lottery in that sense and can earn enough to be able to attend concerts abroad.  

It’s around 10pm at the Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi. Anastacia’s opening act has ended and we are waiting for Adams’ concert to start. There seems to be some delay. I am sitting and staring at the stage and wondering about the year gone by.  

I have five favourite rock songs. Bruce Springsteen’s No Surrender. Bryan Adams’ Summer of ’69. Bon Jovi’s In these Arms, which I think is the best rock song ever written in Hindi. Mark Knopfler’s Romeo and Juliet, and, of course, Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower. By the time 2024 ends I would have ended up seeing three out of these five songs being performed live.  

Now that leaves Bon Jovi and Mark Knopfler. Knopfler retired from touring in 2019. So, unless he decides to tour again, there is no chance of watching him live. And no Bon Jovi live show seems to be currently planned. 

The irony, of course, is that I have never seen Ashwin play in a cricket stadium. I did watch some live cricket at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai in the noughties but the time and effort it took to get into and out of the stadium put me off watching live cricket in a stadium forever.  

But maybe I will now watch Ashwin play for the Dindigul Dragons in the Tamil Nadu Premier League at the NPR College Ground.  

It’s 10.55pm. Adams and his band still haven’t appeared on stage. The crowd is getting restless.

At 11pm Adams and his band appear on stage. The balloons lying on stage are kicked into the crowd and they start singing Kick Ass.  It’s followed by Can’t Stop This Thing We Started. Soon, the crowd is singing 18 Till I Die with Adams.

While the crowd seems to be enjoying itself, the energy in the arena is missing. I guess that’s probably because people are busy recording Adams play live than being in the moment and enjoying his performance. This goes on for a while. 

Before starting to play the eleventh song of the evening, You Belong to Me, Adams tells the audience that what he and the band are about to play is a dance song and the audience should dance along. He starts the song and stops seconds later, probably realising that the energy in the room is still missing. People are still busy recording rather than dancing.  

He starts again and people are now dancing. The concert finally has the energy that it deserved.

Talking about deserving, Ashwin, the great cricketer that he was, deserved one final match. This wasn’t the way to retire in the middle of a series after a match that he did not play. But we all know why that happened.  

Back to the concert. Adams continues to blast his hits. The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me is You. (Everything I Do) I Do It for You. So Happy It Hurts. Run to You. 

And then comes the moment that the whole crowd has been waiting for: Bryan Adams singing the Summer of ’69 in the winter of ’24 (or something like winter). The concert peaks here. And if you know you know that the Summer of ’69 isn’t really a song about the summer of 1969. At least not totally. If you don’t believe me, listen to the last few lines of the original recording of the song carefully (very carefully.)  

The concert ends with Adams doing a solo rendition of Straight From the Heart and All for Love. At his age he can still wake up the neighbours. And that’s really something.  

It’s around 1am by the time we get out of the arena and are being driven back to Dubai.  

I am thinking about the fact that Adams’ concerts in India were packed to the hilt. And the fact that he performed in Shillong, probably India’s most rock mad city. But the Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi wasn’t completely sold out. I would say it was 85-90% full.

The point being that there is a time and space where most of us continue to be relevant until we become irrelevant. Hierarchy or otherwise, we all rise to our position of incompetence. The energy and the mental ability might still be there, but the demand for the skill one has to offer might go missing. The availability of supply doesn’t always create demand.  

But Ashwin won’t have this problem playing at the Chepauk stadium in Chennai, where the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) play their home games in the Indian Premier League (IPL). MS Dhoni will be playing the IPL in 2025 and he on his own can probably fill up the Chepauk five times over. Add Ashwin to the mix and you probably get two times more.

Finally, some heroes don’t stop being heroes for people who grew up along with them. As Adams wrote along with Jim Vallance, those were the best days of my life. And in the heads of their fans those best days just continue forever and forever.  

Someone probably in his 70s said on Twitter that while Anil Kumble and Ashwin might have taken more wickets, India’s spin quartet (Bishan Singh Bedi, Bhagwat Chandrashekhar, Erapalli Prasanna, and S. Venkataraghavan) were better bowlers. Now, given the number of variables involved in cricket, comparing cricketers across different eras is a very difficult proposition, and I will not get into that. So, you keep your heroes, and I will keep mine. And both will be fine. 

PS: This was the last issue of this newsletter. Thank you for reading.

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Written by Vivek Kaul. Edited by Feroze Jamal. Produced by Vertika Kanaujia. Send in your feedback to newsletters@livemint.com.