Lalit Modi catches the action at Eden Gardens
© Getty Images

The Banished

Exile on Sloane St

Once cricket's flashiest administrator, Lalit Modi is now its flashiest muckraker. And still relevant

Osman Samiuddin  |  

There is no denying the geographical reality - and tyranny - of exile, even if, to Lalit Modi, its geography does not matter. Lalit Modi is proof that exile is a state of mind, and in his mind he is not in exile. Living in a seven-floor residence (not quite palatial but not quite anything else either) on London's Sloane Street has a way of smoothing the rough of real exile; in fact, for now let's call this the peculiar exile of the Pakistani politician.


But Modi doesn't think he has been banished from cricket. In his mind, he is still the central force of the game, once spurring it to upward mobility, now stirring it into a fight. "I'm back in the game. I was never out of the game," he spat when we met in June, just as I had begun to explain to him the idea for this series, reporting on cricket's many banished figures.

He was right in a literal sense, because he had recently returned as president of the Rajasthan Cricket Association. But he wanted me and my co-interviewer, Nagraj Gollapudi, to know he was right in a spiritual sense too. "Of course I'm in the thick of the action. Who else can stir up the action like I can stir up the action on a 24/7 basis?" The action, it need only be recapped, is his battle with N Srinivasan, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, and the Big Three at large. Modi speaks arrhythmically, like a long Test innings that is multi-paced, as if played by different batsmen. At points he falls into contemplation, as Rahul Dravid might; at others he rat-a-tats like Virender Sehwag. Often, in the middle of a sentence, he becomes uninterested before one word suddenly roils something inside him again.

Modi is not, strictly speaking, stirring unrest as much as he is trying to tweet it. He drops important ICC documents on his feed, and dangles, every now and again, newsworthy snippets (with one such he had, of course, tweeted his way to his own demise). Most of the time, though, he is a news aggregator, linking to stories where he has been quoted badmouthing his targets or where his targets look bad. It is high-profile needling.

Twitter is perfect because it muddies the very idea of exile. Ostensibly it has no geography, even if, counter-intuitively, it often acts to embolden jingoism. It offers exiles the mirage of an escape: here Modi is still interacting with his former peers in the world he once ruled. Ultimately, though, hemmed in by the boundaries of the virtual world, it serves only to reinforce that very reality: Twitter offers vicarious pleasures, running parallel to real ones and, indeed, to the real world itself.

Nevertheless, Modi spends a lot of time and energy on it, his own relentlessness feeding perfectly into Twitter's. Neither ever stops. "I love Twitter. It's the most important tool as far as I am concerned. It allows me to disseminate the information at the same time. What happens is that if I turn out a press release, it's already late. By the time it is typed, somebody's already got the story."

One day Modi claimed to have done 17 press conferences. He flew to every IPL game, which, even with a personal jet, is a little unhinged

The driving motivation for meeting Modi was to find out what he does every day. It was actually a kind of fascination, because during his time as the Indian Premier League commissioner Modi defeated the solar calendar that decreed days to be 24 hours long. The legend of Modi was that his days did not end, and so neither did they really begin. One day he claimed to have done 17 press conferences. He flew to every IPL game, which, even with a personal jet, is a little unhinged. He was there at every late-night IPL party, glad-handing, flesh-pressing, schmoozing, networking. His one true mistress, his Blackberry, was always in his ear or at his fingertips, a way out, a new future its promise. He was a little like Gatsby, especially in that he represented a coming age - just that he had no mystery about him. (Modi eventually ended our afternoon by summoning another American entrepreneur. "Now my whole vision, I gotta do a Steve Jobs. Simple as that. I need to do a Steve Jobs, that's what I need to do. He went out of Apple, came back to make it bigger and that is what it is. So you gotta be a game-changer.")

He was like no subcontinental cricket administrator I ever encountered, or could even conjure in my head, and not just because he was never in a safari suit. Those men were all, essentially, studies in stillness, a bit like hot, inactive and sweaty afternoons in Karachi or Mumbai. Modi was an afternoon storm, sudden and active, alive, causing and effecting, unpredictably bringing relief and destruction. He rarely ever sat, and certainly not on a chair with a towel on its back, a covered glass of water and files on the desk before him.

The storm had passed. What did he do now that his days were only 24 hours long, and caged by a sun at one end and moon at the other? A while back I was discussing an idea for a comic strip with an Indian journalist. He suggested one based on Modi: SuperModi, megalomaniacally whirling around London organising birthday parties for kids.

It was an outlandish enough idea to become a comic strip. As it happens, not outlandish enough. One highlight of our afternoon was Modi's attempt to send a politician's daughter an invite to his niece's wedding (the invitation going not from Modi but from his father). He did it in a circuitous manner, through a series of phone calls that went nowhere, with the fervour and impatience of arranging, for example, a last-minute switch of the IPL to South Africa.

"You see, what happened is that I had zero time for my family and they were all complaining. The first few months [after coming to London] we were just settling down and moving in. We had all our businesses. Everyone else, my father, was upset I was giving no time to the businesses in the first place and I wasn't really concerned. It didn't drive me. I started to look at the businesses but again my focus was always more... it became an issue of clearing the name. That became the mission."

Paparazzi magnet by association: with politician Shashi Tharoor and actor Shilpa Shetty

Paparazzi magnet by association: with politician Shashi Tharoor and actor Shilpa Shetty © Getty Images

And then, suddenly, he latched on to another conversational thread and was off riffing - entertainingly - about how he is not in hiding. ("If I'm in hiding," - he recreated an interview with the cage-rattling Indian news anchor Arnab Goswami - "I wouldn't be sitting in front of you right now.") It was as if he didn't even have the patience and attention span for what he was saying.

He had to be pulled back to talking family, but he didn't dwell too long. He has spent "a lot of time" with them but had still managed to miss all their important get-togethers: "My parents' 50th anniversary in Bangkok, my daughter's graduation, my son's graduation, my children going to college, I have not been able to visit them, my wife's multiple medical issues." He eventually missed his niece's wedding.

At one point in a particularly long, wandering bit of self-celebration disguised as an anecdote, Nagraj interrupted, asking him what he missed about India. So thrown off was Modi that he asked him to repeat the question. He became incredulous, before giving the kind of identikit reply that can only come from having speed-read too many bad novels about subcontinental immigrants and exile. "I miss everything about India. India is my soul and life, the flavour and the smell and everything you miss. It's different."

What he really misses, though, is this: "I used to be on six flights a week and that is not only from my cricket days but from my business days before. Five to six flights a week, and now to zero flights?" He remembers the date and time of his last flight (coming in to London from Israel) before notices were issued against him in India, his last flight out of India, and his last flight full stop (incoming from Dubai). Flying is the penis envy of the corporate class. No high-level executive worth his salt spends hours ground-borne. This must grate.

"In the beginning I missed it a lot. Now I just don't think about tomorrow, you know? I don't make a plan anymore, because if I do I'll disappoint myself. So I've conditioned myself that tomorrow is another day and if tomorrow comes, it's another day. And you do that only after you've gone through the experience I have in my life."

Otherwise, his full-time job is to retain relevance, to ensure that he has a plentiful supply of the oxygen that a high-profile exile needs: PR. I was, I am sure, his umpteenth media engagement of the day. He still finds himself on magazine covers. On slow days he is easy TV time. He had just guested on ESPNcricinfo's popular #politeenquiries and was about to spend a day with the Cricketer, watching an IPL game. A book is due out soon and it will be explosive, of course. He is still embedded in cricket administration; IPL franchise owners are in touch, as are, clearly, several board officials (that is how he manages to leak documents nobody in the ICC wants leaked).

"I gotta do a Steve Jobs. Simple as that. He went out of Apple, came back to make it bigger, and that is what it is"

On Twitter he posts pictures from major sports events he is at, like the much-hyped boxing bout between Carl Froch and George Groves in May. ("What a knockout it was! Eighth round, you see it? What a punch! What a punch, that punch... that punch.") He turned a particularly interesting portion of the discussion, about the leadership styles that have influenced him, into a bout of casual first-name dropping of Bernie and Peter (Ecclestone and Ueberroth, the head of Formula One and a former commissioner of Major League Baseball respectively). All this is to say, Modi still matters.

Nagraj asked him as politely as he could an impolite question: why is any of this profile-maintenance important to anyone? Briefly the scene became awkward. "Why is it important for you?" Modi snapped back, and his response was not a response but Don King hype. "Because I'm probably gonna break some story about it the next day. I do it for a particular reason because I'll probably break some story about it sooner or later. It is as a teaser, everything is a teaser. Or I'm just enjoying the game and that's it."

Is Modi relevant still? Well, for whatever it is worth he is still the only figure of any significance fighting Srinivasan and the Big Three. If you think a countering force to those powers is necessary, then you believe in his relevance. Does it matter that it says more about the depths to which cricket administration has sunk that it can be occasionally outmanoeuvred by a man in London on Twitter? And that it has turned Modi, of all people, into an anti-establishment, whistle-blowing renegade?

This is why it is a Pakistani kind of exile. London has long been the preferred haunt for the country's exiled politicians. They have all luxuriated there, before returning to find themselves still relevant in Pakistan. It feels right and only mildly surprising to discover that Shaukat Aziz, a former Pakistan prime minister, has a house across the road (you can see it from Modi's window). Aziz is not exactly in exile right now, but let's just say he's not likely to be garlanded and welcomed back by any Pakistani government anytime soon. Modi attended the India-Pakistan Champions Trophy match last year with him. They are, he boasted, best friends.

Osman Samiuddin is a sportswriter at the National

 

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