Smith’s Gaurav Bhalla explores South Africa’s ‘Curse’
Will South Africa choke again? The question is among storylines to the 2015 Cricket World Cup, underway in Australia and New Zealand.
A perennial leading contender, South Africa has failed to win the cup since returning in 1991 to the competition from its apartheid-caused ban. Gaurav Bhalla, an adjunct marketing professor and global business consultant, knows the back story. It’s the basis for his new, fiction novel, “The Curse and the Cup.”
In addition to his business and teaching career, Bhalla avidly follows international sports, including cricket, and writes poetry and short stories focused on the human condition. Some of his work was published when he was a young adult. He recounts aspiring to be a scholar-athlete like marathoner and medical scholar Roger Bannister while growing up in India. “I pursued both academics and athletics vigorously,” Bhalla says. “The former won out.”
Such experience and inspiration shapes “The Curse and the Cup” and its characters in South Africa’s apartheid-maligned cricket history and subsequent World Cup re-emergence and title drought.
Bhalla summarizes the plot: “On an ill-fated day in 1991, Vuyisa Lingani and his son Manga, legendary left-arm spinners who couldn't play international cricket for South Africa because they were black, die within hours of each other in a bizarre tragedy. Vuyisa’s wife, Mama Nonkosi, blames the white cricket establishment and places a curse on the South African cricket team to avenge their deaths.
The story, he adds, “spans many years, is populated by colorful characters and is drawn on a wide canvas. The story mixes elements of karma, superstition and fantasy with very tangible, real-world human conflict, aptly dramatized along the primary thread of the story: the sport of cricket.”
"The Curse and the Cup" is available on Amazon and Flipkart. Bahlla introduces the novel on YouTube. Read reviews at ESPNcricinfo and Hindustan Times, among other others.
Contact Bhalla at 703-251-4675 or Gaurav.Bhalla@knowledgekinetics.com.
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