Covid 19 took a personal toll today. Cricket Samrat, first of the two ‘CS’s I want to talk about in this thread, has shuttered. The magazine was more than a childhood obsession. It played a role in what I became: a sports writer. And, years later, a total cynic. 1/n https://twitter.com/the_kk/status/1275399326097969152

For those who are unaware of the phenomenon that was CS, the magazine’s importance to cricket fans in the Hindi heartland of the 90s can’t be overstated. In the pre-cable TV, pre-Internet age, it was like Cricinfo and Star Sports rolled into one. 2/n

CS would have great write-ups, stats and scorecards like Cricinfo, and it would cater to us Hindi medium types long before Star Sports saw the market. 3/n

I can even argue that it acted as a force multiplier for Indian cricket itself, really taking the sport to the blind spots in mofussil North India. In the emergence of UP cricket, it’s my conviction CS played not an insignificant part. 4/n

I would even say, at a crucial juncture in its history, Indian hockey lacked a ‘Hockey Samrat’ and fell behind in the region. CS kept fans abreast of non-India cricket in distant lands, but its real worth was bringing domestic cricket to people when it still mattered. 5/n

There was no player worth following if he wasn’t profiled in the magazine. I remember reading about Atul Bedade’s sustained big-hitting prowess in domestic cricket in CS, and before long, he was in the Indian team... 6/n

Now I am sure many others wrote about Bedade as well, around the same time or even before, but in my imagination it would always be the flowery prose of CS’s star writer, Charanpal Sobti (the second 'CS') that broke the selectors’ defenses. 7/n

Suffice to say, his storytelling was a guilty pleasure — funny, creative and informative — looking back it was kind of single malt to the prevalent hooch of Hindi newspaper/magazine writing. His was in fact the first byline I noticed. 8/n

Soon, I would wait for his columns — the next edition couldn’t come soon enough. Along the way, it contaminated the mind and for me sports writing became more important than sport itself. 9/n

In the years to come, I outgrew Cricket Samrat, became a sports journalist, met many of those stars I would read about in the magazine, grew weary of it all, but Charanpal Sobti remained a constant fascination — what imaginative, ahead-of-its-time writing! 10/n

Remember Fake IPL Player, the gossip blog that became an Internet rage in 2009? Well a stylistically similar Sobti column predated it by 15 years! Often, though, I would wonder if he was really that good, or my memories were projecting a larger than life image of him. 11/n

As years went by, I started to get this itch to meet Sobti. I would often look him up on google, hoping to find a write-up that would vindicate me. (CS didn’t have a web presence.) The search results would throw up some random book suggestions, but nothing substantial. 12/n

I once even suggested at an editorial meeting that I wanted to meet this guy and see where it would go — if there was a story there. They were kind enough not to tell me directly that it was a national newspaper and not my personal blog. 13/n

The obsession subsided with the passage of time. Then one day a colleague texted me a pdf file of Cricket Samrat, saying something to the effect, ‘You were talking about Charanpal Sobti, here read his article’. 14/n

I opened the file, and the penny dropped. It was indeed very well written — but it was a word by word Hindi translation of a story by my Express colleague. No credits! 15/n

A few days later, another fine Express feature was translated and reproduced in CS under his byline, no attributions this time either. My boyhood hero was a serial plagiarist! 16/n

This thread was a closure I think I owed myself. Though to be honest I feel ambivalent about the whole affair now. Plagiarism is of course condemnable, but at least he was lifting — and passing on to us who otherwise had little access — some good shit. END