There is something profoundly distressing about an international cricketer trying to forget his days in the game. Laxman Sivaramakrishnan, 60, became a national hero in his brief career, and a victim of colourism in a country that looks down upon the dark-skinned.
His is not an isolated case. Abhinav Mukund has spoken about skin colour bias, as have movie stars, and others affected.
As a prodigiously talented leg-spinner, Siva was good enough to play for India at 17 alongside his state skipper S. Venkatraghavan, who had made his Test debut before Siva was born! At 19, he won a Test for India, claiming 12 wickets against England in Mumbai.
Laxman Sivaramakrishnan later developed into a good analyst. File. SourceX/@LaxmanSivarama1
A couple of days after that Test, Siva arrived for dinner and cricket talk at the residence of my then boss in Chennai. We were a motley crowd — there was the great P.K. Srinivasan, wonderful writer and an early hero of mine in the profession, and another senior journalist.
Articulate
The 19-year-old held his own, talking about the Test, especially his strategy against Mike Gatting, a fine player of spin whom he dismissed twice in that match. He listened as the topic moved on from cricket to politics (Indira Gandhi had been killed a few weeks earlier), to literature and returned to cricket. I was just a few years older but was impressed by his confidence, his keenness to learn, and his sense of humour.
I got to know him better over the years. So when he says, as he did in Indian Express, that he always wanted to “forget, forget, forget,” I feel a pang of guilt. How did I not see all this in his playing days and write about it before all the insults, the frustrations got out of hand? Siva always spoke intelligently about cricket, and with his friend W.V. Raman was one of the most articulate youngsters in the Tamil Nadu team then.
It all seems such a waste. Indian cricket didn’t have a system of mentoring players; if you were good enough to play for the country, the authorities probably argued, then you were good enough to sort out your own issues. A bunch of talented youngsters who arrived with Sivaramakrishnan, like Maninder Singh and Sadanand Viswanath, were thus left to their own devices and suffered in different ways.
The seniors were too busy fighting their own battles to take younger players under their wing. The Sunil Gavaskar-Kapil Dev feud meant that others had to take sides in the team. It says something about Siva’s temperament that he was accepted by both camps.
Technical issues
Mentoring apart, there was too a technical detail that bowlers, especially spinners with early success, had to deal with. When they grew taller, they struggled to land the ball on the good length spot. Another teenage talent who levelled off after he grew taller was Karnataka’s left arm spinner Prakash Rathod who bowled with a natural loop that was compared to Bishan Bedi’s.
It seems to be less of a problem today, with more professional coaching, but India has probably lost talented bowlers to the growth spurt. Siva, who later developed into a good analyst, didn’t fully understand this in his teens and lacked a coach who would help him make the adjustment.
For those on the outside, it was easy to blame everything on an assortment of bad habits. People who should know better often take a perverse pleasure in running down young talent, especially after initial success. In recent years, promising youngsters Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma had to deal with this too, accused as they were, in the early days of IPL of being party animals and lacking in discipline. But someone cared, within or outside their teams, and that made the difference.
If Siva had to face colourism in the dressing room (this is terrible, among teammates!) as well as in the stadiums, today’s youngster has to deal with social media trolls too. Do talented teenagers around the country, many of them India probables, receive lessons on handling this additional pressure?
Siva’s is a cautionary tale, saying as much about him as about us. Sadly, there is no guarantee in our system that no one else will suffer in the manner he did.
Published – April 01, 2026 12:30 am IST
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