STORIES OF EVERYDAY PUNE, FROM YORE AND NOW
Cornelius.Mascarenhas@timesgroup.com
The racing metaphors roll off his tongue with practised ease. Starting with the trite, “Under starter’s orders and they’re off”, Deepak Rajpal’s parlance while calling a horse race includes terms like “jockeying for position”, “two lengths behind” and “hitting his stride”, before culminating with “by a short head” or “just under the wire”.
Terminology aside, Rajpal has to identify brightly-attired jockeys and horses named as fancifully as Primum Non Nocere, know the pedigree of the odds-on favourites, and describe the track and weather conditions — all in a minute or two that a race takes to complete!
The 60-something Rajpal cuts a lone but happy figure in the commentary boxes of both the Pune and Mumbai racecourses. The top-paid horse racing commentator in the country, he gets to call races on 70-odd days in a year at both centres.
It’s a job Rajpal has been at for the past 33 years, having given commentary for around 100 Classic races (1,000 and 2,000 Guineas, Indian Oaks, Indian Derby and Indian St Leger). Of the 75 Indian Derbys held in the country so far, he has called 23 each in Mumbai and Pune and some in Hyderabad and Mysore too. Incidentally, the Mumbai Derby is the richest and most prestigious race in the country.
With a next-to-nothing education in his hometown Mysore, Rajpal decided he wanted to be a commentator the first time he sauntered into the racecourse with his father. The gift of the gab and a keen sense of observation saw him through a few rounds of interviews at the Bangalore Turf Club.
Still, the jitters were untamed when the club’s chief, Nawab Arshad Ali Khan, asked him to call his first race in 1985, a Class I event with five top-rated horses. Rajpal says he gave the commentary, put his binoculars down and pressed his legs against the wall in front of him to control the trembling. A minute later, Khan called to congratulate him but immediately told him to give the commentary for the next race, a crowded one featuring 16 horses. Rajpal remembers this race distinctly, with a horse named Lucky Lucky Lucky winning by a short head. Khan was delighted with Rajpal and shot off a letter titled,
“A star is born”, to the chief commentator who was then in the US.
Rajpal moved to the Pune racecourse in 1987, where veteran commentator Dr Inder Sood was all set to put down the microphone for good and another stalwart, Ivor Fernandes, had left the box a few years before to pursue his career as a trainer.
Fernandes, in Rajpal’s estimation, would have been a shoo-in had he applied for a racing commentator’s job anywhere in the world. A computer engineer with ICIM (now Zensar) on Nagar Road, Fernandes was coaxed into coming to the Pune racecourse by his gambling colleagues from office. While he chided them for constantly losing money on wrong horses, he himself grew interested in handicapping (allocating weights to faster horses to ensure fair competition).
The office colleagues once told Fernandes that the racecourse needed a commentator. Then just 24, he sat for an audition before a recording unit which ran spools, with a peon holding a microphone to his mouth. The first indication that he would get the job came from the peon himself, who told him that he had never seen anyone in the past display such confidence while speaking. But then, Fernandes never knew what stage fright was, having sang and played the Farfisa organ for a band before dancing crowds at the Byculla Mechanics ground and Antonio da Silva hall in Dadar, Mumbai.
It was 1971, and the racecourse would pay Fernandes Rs 30 for his commentary per race day. Alongside, his handicapping skills were drawing appreciation from horse trainers, and one of them, Dara Pandole, took him under his wing as an assistant. When Fernandes got his own trainer’s licence in 1983, race days would be manic — he would saddle horses, send them to the track, run up to the commentary box, call a race, and run down later to lead the horses back to the paddock. He eventually gave up calling races when his string of horses numbered a whopping 52.
Fernandes, now 71, says one can’t go wrong with commentary if the eye-mouth coordination is right. Asked about the racing centres across the country not having standby commentators, he says, “The very future of commentary hinges on the future of racing. Taxes are at their highest for racing. The overheads are not commensurate with what we trainers earn. It’s not a money-spinning sport any more,” he points out.
Courtesy: Times of India
