The Beatles want to hold your hand. The Stones want to burn your house down. The word was out, Bangalore and Mumbai would have to guard the...
The Beatles want to hold your hand. The Stones want to burn your house down. The word was out, Bangalore and Mumbai would have to guard their homes, lest Tom Wolfe’s pithy observation came true. So when Venkat Vardhan of DNA Networks confided in me early in 2003 that the Rolling Stones were indeed coming to India, I couldn’t believe it.
But they did come. They did play, Bangalore on April 4 and Mumbai on April 7. And when that happened, it represented the coming together of three things that I hold dear to my heart: Calcutta, cricket and the Beatles.
Venkat, the promoter, is from Bangalore. But the man who hooked him up with Messrs Mick Jagger & Co. was Dilip Doshi, the left arm orthodox spinner who used to play in Calcutta even though he is from Gujarat. We rejoiced at his belated inclusion in the Indian Test squad – why not, he was a “Kolkata-r chheley” after all – in 1979 against Australia in Madras (Chennai) where he ended up scalping 8/167 in the match. Yet unknown to us then, his other passion was the Rolling Stones.
Writing about it in The Telegraph (London) in August 2006, Doshi recounts how...
