_d.png "Independence Day 2025")
A chat with television host Gaurav Kapur who has launched a cracking new podcast that is a treasure trove of untold cricketing stories
The show offers an account of Kapil Dev's heroics
That's why the one with Memon also has the following nugget. Back in the late '70s, when he'd just started his career, the writer went to Sandip Patil's Shivaji Park home to conduct his first interview, since the cricketer had just been included in the national team. There, he found that Patil had an actual small aircraft kept on his terrace. Not a model, but a real plane lying defunct on a roof. And when a naturally curious Memon asked Patil what it was doing there, the latter replied that he uses the plane as a bar when he throws parties. Imagine that.
Kapur adds that the difference between hosting a podcast and a TV show is that in the former, the conversation can take any direction you want and is thus more no-holds-barred and fluid. "We try to tell stories on TV too, but those are more contextual and based in the present," he says, pointing out that an added advantage a podcast has is that it affects only one sense — that of hearing. "So, it lets you absorb a lot more and allows for a calmer state of mind. I think that that's also one of the reasons why audio is coming back in a big way. People have had enough of gazing at the screen," Kapur explains.
The takeaways he thus hopes that listeners will have from his show is to fall in love a little more with cricket. It's quite fascinating really to hear Memon recount exactly what transpired on that fateful day in Turnbridge Wells (when he'd walked into the ground, the scoreboard read 9/4 but the first thing that Gundappa Vishvanath, who was sitting in a porch outside the pavilion, prophesised to him was, "Nothing to worry about"). It provides a sepia-tinted picture of a simpler era when there were less frills attached to the sport. And it's incidents like the one about Dev's heroics that offer the sort of nostalgia that Kapur wants to stir up with his show.
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