Dubai Diary

It’s with the pleasant exhaustion of a holiday upon me that I look back at the season that just ended. With my wife Manali and daughter Pallavi, I had slipped down to Dubai for a four-day break. Much needed too, it was—I was in the thick of things ­before that, as usual. There was the England-India Test match at Wankhede, over and above my regular day at the office: looking after my three cricket academies in Mumbai-Pune and organising age group tournaments for them.

Don’t get me wrong—work is fun. Fact is, I love watching young cricketers, going through junior and middle school as it were, expanding their vocabulary of skills, developing a cricket personality of their own, growing up to the state level, maybe even international. Basically, I love nothing more than being at cricket grounds—that green outfield, tree-lined around the edges, the kids throwing themselves at their game with a...