O Captain! My Captain!

India beat Pakistan in a World Cup bowl-out. Zimbabwe beat Australia. Bangladesh knocked the West Indies out of a World Cup. S Badrinath and Akash Chopra clocked in double hundreds against a strong South Africa A.

Kapil Dev encouraged and inspired aspiring fashion designers in Delhi...click on this link to check out Paaji having a nice evening. Yet, through all that silliness and noise and hype, the one piece of news that felt like it mattered was Rahul Dravid's resignation.

The pundits seem to think Rahul made a good choice. Rohit Brijnath and Ian Chappel both think so.

It's easy to imagine the debate inside Rahul's head. In the Blue corner, pragmatic self-preservation. In the Red corner, service to a team that really has no alternative captain. Pragmatic self-preservation won. Rahul follows in the footsteps of Sunil Gavaskar, who abandoned a promising Indian team who desperately needed him after winning the Benson and Hedges World Championship in 1985.

But I can't help feeling disappointed. Is there any point to cricket if all it's about is pragmatic self-preservation?

Zooming out a bit, is there a sub-text here about social class? Both Rahul Dravid and Gavaskar are quintessentially middle class Indians. Educated-upper-middle-class if you want to make fine distinctions, as both their families doubtless would.

This is the class which has dominated Indian cricket since independence. Other Indian captains from similar middle class worlds include Ajit Wadekar, Dilip Vengsarkar, Polly Umrigar, Vinoo Mankad, Pankaj Roy, Ravi Shastri, Krishnamachari Srikkanth, Srinivas Venkataraghavan, Gundappa Vishwanath and Sachin Tendulkar. Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath, Venkatesh Prasad and Bhagwat Chandrasekhar are other Bangalore cricketers from this world. This is a pleasant and comfortable world, a world of tightly knit families, kind words, regular home cooked meals and music tuitions. I can write about this India with some conviction, this is my India.

My India also carries a visceral understanding that this comfortable life is not to be taken for granted. The yawning chasm and the Other India are all too visible. And so we work for our comfortable lives with an ethic that is more Protestant than that of any Protestant nation. And we create outstanding tech companies like Infosys and technically sound but risk averse batsmen like Dravid and Gavaskar.

Interestingly, no middle class Indian captain has ever really given his team pride, self-belief and conviction. Looking around for the most influential captains, my top three sub-continentals are Imran Khan, Arjuna Ranatunga and Saurav Ganguly. All three are from the elite, more privileged than middle class.

All three have more than a whiff of the amateur playing for pride, rather than the professional just getting the job done. All three have been willing to walk away from the job. All three have backed their men to the hilt. I love Ranatunga for getting in the face of the Aussies and backing Murali through the chucker controversy. I love Imran for coming out of retirement to lead Pakistan. He didn't need to, he didn't particularly want to, but he still did. I love Saurav for refusing the play when the selectors tried to foist Sharandeep Singh on him instead of Harbhajan, against Australia in 2001. All three great captains held themselves above the system. They made the system work for them.

Rahul is not hungry for power. Of course he's willing to walk away from the job, he's shown that he is. But he is not using this leverage to make a difference. He is not saying "give me Murali Kartik or I'm not playing". When Dravid's strike bowler Sreesanth shows the aggression that generations of Indians have prayed for, does Dravid back him to the hilt? No. He backs down. Rahul works within the system, as a middle class boy would. A middle class boy's first instinct is pragmatic self-preservation. No wonder he resigned.