THE TALK
Who can miss the drum beat of cricket’s New India? The world’s richest franchise league, the world’s most powerful board, the world’s biggest stadium, even one of the world’s greatest Test series victories were tools or products of this New India.
Having spent the three decades in and around Indian cricket, what we have seen is that our favourite sport has always been on the way to something new. To reinvention and reimagining.
Whether it was the Tendulkar-centric New India from what was called the Team of the 90s, the Ganguly-led “Give It Back” New India, the MS Dhoni-smalltown-emergence-New India or the post IPL New India and now the Virat Kohli New India. All through this churn cycle, Indian cricket has been reshaped by the country around it and it too has reshaped its society, its politics and its pop culture.
As a sports journalist by profession over the last three decades, Sharda been witness to this newness in constant ‘refresh’ mode and will talk about the many tides that have run through Indian cricket in the last three decades, its personalities, its stories, its energy and its darknesses.
SHARDA UGRA
Sharda Ugra has been a sports journalist for over three decades and is considered one of our finest sports writers.
She started her career with Mumbai tabloid Mid-Day before working with national daily The Hindu and India Today magazine and ESPNcricinfo.com and ESPN.in. Early on, she reported sports news for Radio Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s overseas service.
She has seen India play cricket in nine countries, written about cricket and other sport for popular and academic publications in England and Australia, presented conference papers on Indian sport, covered two Olympic Games and won Sports Journalists Federation of India (SJFI) awards for sports writing.
She has worked with former New Zealand captain John Wright on John Wright’s Indian Summers, his memoirs of his years coaching India and with Yuvraj Singh on The Test of My Life, an account of his his diagnosis and recovery from cancer. She was a fellow of the Australia India Institute, University of Melbourne in 2013.
