My father was a fairly mild-mannered person. While still a young boy, I have rare memories of anything getting his goat. Among those rare ones was an incident when I was in my pre-teen years. A newly-married couple came visiting armed with a reference of an old friend of dad’s and wanted to stay with us for a few days. Given the Indian tradition of Athithi Devo Bhava how could we turn them away?

So they stayed with us – being given the self-contained guest-room unit with an attached toilet and very conveniently opening into the dining room. There was very little interaction between the couple and us. After the first day, they also did not join for meals and instead opened the refrigerator and ate at odd-times after warming the food. The rest of the time they either stayed locked inside or walked all by themselves in the garden. For all they cared, they could have been living in a hotel.

Almost a week later, my mother displayed her resentment to dad. But she wondered what could be done. Dad kept quiet but before leaving for office that morning, he knocked on the door – called the young man aside and told him tersely that he must leave by that evening. When I came back from school, I saw that they had left. Later in the night on the dining table my father said sagely: “One should never overstay one’s welcome.”

I was reminded of this episode when the clamour for the Gen-Next to take over Indian cricket began in the course of India’s woeful summer Down Under. I was reminded of the agonising wait for Kapil Dev to overtake Lance Gibbs’ record of 432 Test wickets in the early 1990s. I was reminded of how painful each wicket and its wait had become for Dev and cricket lovers of the country.

At the end when the ace all-rounder finally hung his boots, the nation heaved active sigh of relief but many also felt that the curtain on the illustrious career should have been drawn earlier. In the final analysis, Dev being a couple of wickets ahead of Gibbs really did not make any difference to his greatness. Or for that matter, Don Bradman’s last innings duck only added to his enigma.

Not just Kapil Dev, some other great Indian batsmen fared very poorly in their last series: GR Vishwanath – 16.75; Mohinder Amarnath – 11.2 and Dilip Vengsarkar – 17.55.  When Sourav Ganguly became the first one among India’s Fab Four to call it quits a couple of years some felt that he had some more steel in him. But he chose his moment to take the final bow and did not wait for the moment when the world shook his hands and waived him goodbye.

This post is not to express an opinion on if and when Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman should retire. They should be able to decide the right timing for the most important stroke of their lives without for a day overstaying the welcome. It would be a tragedy if they have to be dropped prior to that for reasons of poor performance.