The BCCI crown has tightly embraced N. Srinivasan in a decade India could've destroyed everyone in the room. Happily, it didn't. ©Getty
The great and the good, and a fair chunk of the rest, of the world's cricket press gathered around a small, squashed, suited man in the MCG pressbox on the day of the 2015 men's World Cup final. His eyes were glassy behind rectangular spectacles. His skin was the brown of a Montecristo No.4 cigar, his hair had congealed into slick waves of greyed black. Words escaped his flat tyre of a mouth like puffs of air, only just reaching the ears of his audience leaning in from a respectable distance.
Clearly, what he said was important to a great many people far beyond the confines of the room. Even more clearly, he believed he was inviolate. He wore his power as easily as his pinstripes and spoke as if he was instructing underlings. He might have been Al Capone. Instead, his name, all of it, was
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