Being an Ophthalmologist myself I can understand what the medical fraternity has been deprived of in terms of surgical skills from the day VVS decided to opt for the willow instead of the scalpel his parents wanted him to.
Some people are talented , some god gifted but then there are men like VVS Laxman . . an artist so immaculate and effortless with his strokes it would put the Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel to shame according to me.They just need an inner desire to say " thats it today I want to please the world around me " and what follows is invariably a masterpiece.
Talking from a pure cricketing point of view : His batting was pure gold,elegance combined with strokeplay perhaps only matched by a certain Mark Waugh n Damien Martyn to an extend with a willow in their hand.There were moments when you felt as if someone thrust a knife into a dollop of butter and gently spread it over a slice of bread over breakfast : Thats what VVS did to a seamingly good delivery pitched outside the offstump off a good length and then with a twist of those magical wrists hit that ball through the mid-on fence with some nonchalence attached to it.
No one will forget Sydney , Adelaide , Mohali , Durban and certainly no one will forget Kolkata : Without showing disrespect to any other batsman to have played the game right from the Don's Era to the Era when Shahid Afridi is still 18 years old , i must say that the 281 at Eden's Garden 2001 was the single greatest knock ever the game has seen not only for the pure artist at work but also the situation the team was into . Its like imagining a painter painting with a brush held between his toes and then now imagine the same guy hanging upside down and then painting . . . . That's the magnitude of awe and shock attached to that knock for whoever had seen it including me who bunked school in 9th grade on a hot sunny day just to watch test cricket that day hoping something good will happen.
Its like James Cameroon's has his Titanic , Roger Federer has his Centre Court at Wimbledon similarly VVS had his beloved Eden Gardens : some love stories last forever and this one surely was a blockbuster for sure everytime he came out to bat in the middle .
VVS for the greater part of hs career as the part of the Fab Four of Indian cricket was the fuel in the reserve tank of your family car ,basically a man for crisis situation and not when the team was on Autopilot mode with 300 on board with the loss of 3 wickets . It's like he needed a challenge to rise to the occasion , a meteoric rise when the opposition landed the so called knockout punch or as my mom would say " Start Studying one day before the Exams " like situation.
