Just like his departed friend Tom Alter, actor Naseeruddin Shah has a deep love and understanding of sport. Shah’s sporting passion came shining through in a dark, evening setting of a Khar lounge last Saturday. Shah was one of the speakers at the first anniversary of journalist Sohini Chattopadhyay’s brilliant book, The Day I Became a Runner, which features in the main, the trials and tribulations of eight women athletes. To his right was the author, who was also flanked by Suhasini Mulay, who has acted in Assamese, Bollywood and Marathi films. Shah playing coach Mohit Mishra in the 2005 film Iqbal and hosting Mid Wicket Tales, a show aired on Epic Channel, explains his cricket connection. But his sporting love goes beyond the 22-yard strip as it were.

He indicated to his audience that he was more interested in the vanquished than the favourite. One is not sure whether he was aware that Jammu & Kashmir had outgunned a formidable Mumbai team in the Ranji Trophy earlier in the day, but Shah’s utterances about unexpected winners were made on the same day. “The margin between glory and humiliation is very fine in sport,” he said, referring to the film Rocky, where one witnesses the “underdog triumphing.” Cricket didn’t take long to get into the mix: “And we have seen that happening at least in our cricket in India. People from less privileged backgrounds are emerging as forces to reckon with… people from small towns, people whose parents ride a rickshaw or are gardeners—that is fantastic. It does say something of the emergence and awareness of trying to reach for things. I don’t think that happens in any other sport, where you spend your entire life trying to reach a point and you fall just agonisingly short of it or you triumph when no one expects you to. I think the sense of competition and the sense of being the victor is very precious. We all identify with a person who may be a loser, but who has won our admiration in some way or the other. We all look up to such people.”