Taunts about his colour haunted Laxman Sivaramakrishnan and shaped his cricketing resolve
Taunts about his colour haunted Laxman Sivaramakrishnan and shaped his cricketing resolve
A former India cricketer recounts years of taunts about his colour, the toll on self-esteem, and how he battled back to shine on the field.
On his seventeenth birthday, while touring Pakistan with the Indian team, Sivaramakrishnan was asked to cut his birthday cake. A teammate looked at the cake Sunil Gavaskar had ordered and quipped: “Hey Sunny, you ordered the right colour cake. Such a dark chocolate cake for a dark boy.” He started crying and refused to cut the cake. Sunil Gavaskar had to pacify him, and he finally cut the cake with tears in his eyes. This was not an isolated incident. At fourteen, a senior India batsman mistook him for ground staff at Chepauk and told him to clean his shoes. In the Tamil Nadu dressing room, prominent players called him Karupa. When he fielded on the boundary in the north of India, crowds chanted Kalia. At a hotel in Mumbai — the Trident at Nariman Point — a gatekeeper refused to let him back in. He waited an hour for a teammate to vouch for him. “After that I realised I should take the keys with me. But I would be trembling when I got near the gate for the fear of being rejected and kicked out again.” He was sixteen. The Pakistan crowds had their own version: “Kalia, Kalia, Kalia.” For a month. These taunts contributed to very low self-esteem, making confidence hard to build. “I was down completely and I didn’t want to see myself in the mirror. I would have a couple of drinks and go to sleep because I could not bear anything.” Sivaramakrishnan would rise beyond these memories to be part of India's 1985 Benson & Hedges World Championship of Cricket squad in Australia, a testament to resilience in the face of prejudice.
