Ever imagined intense, introverted Mahendra Singh Dhoni as a happy-go-lucky railway employee ganging up with friends to pull off goofy pranks on strangers? Neeraj Pandey who’s produced and directed the upcoming biopic, MSD: The Untold Story, learnt in the course of his research that Team India’s Captain Cool had forced many a panicked motorist to lose their cool in the rush to make a quick getaway from a ‘ghost’.
Twenty-year-old Dhoni left Bihar for West Bengal in 2001 in search of a job. He landed in Kharagpur, best known for the Indian Institute of Technology and the longest railway platform. The then divisional railway manager of South Eastern Railway, Animesh Kumar Ganguly, was scouting for a wicketkeeper-batsman. It took just 60 balls for Mahi, as he is popularly known, to land the job of a Train Ticket Examiner (TTE) in the sports quota and cement a place in the South Eastern Railway cricket team.
Over the next three years, the quiet boy would ferociously hit tennis balls around every ground in the city. In the process, he won not just Ganguly’s heart but that of his family too.
Neeraj has filmed at the late railway manager’s home and also the quarters Dhoni shared with three-four roommates, including Satyaprakash Krishna who got him the job. He was taken on a tour of the cricketer’s former ‘addas’, introduced to the food he liked and learnt about a prank the bachelor boys’d pull off on quiet nights when they were looking for a bit of fun.
“The tallest of them, wrapped up in a white sheet, would stand under a lamppost waiting for someone to come along the road. The driver would brake to a sudden halt on seeing the ‘ghost’ who would then run towards the car, causing him to desperately press down on the accelerator as he attempted to flee. As they watched the tyres screech and the car skid, Dhoni and his roommates would guffaw in the shadows, later patting the ‘ghost’ for a job well done,” Neeraj chuckles.
Dhoni’s family moved from Uttarakhand to Ranchi where his father, Pan Singh, worked in a junior management position in Metallurgical & Engineering Consultants India Limited (MECON), moving into the self-sufficient and huge MECON Colony in Shaymali. Dhoni grew up here in the ‘M’ Block quarters.
“They moved houses a few times and one of them overlooked a cricket ground. Dhoni would stand on the balcony and watch matches, never imagining that one day he’d play a Ranji match on the same ground,” says Neeraj, who has shot in the family home where his parents and brother Narendra live. “He has imbibed his sense of discipline from his father, is really close to his sister Jayanthi and loves dogs.”
India owes one of its sporting heroes to the DAV Jawahar Vidya Mandir, Shyamali, which has always had a strong sports culture. A natural athlete, Dhoni a good student, excelled on the football field and the badminton court, representing his school and his district. He was not particularly interested in cricket then and would only play it in his locality.
It was one of his teachers, Keshab Ranjan Banerjee, who first spotted the talent of this sixth standard student during PT periods. He was the goalkeeper of the football team then, agile and diving all over the place, and Banerjee was convinced he could be a replacement for their team’s wicketkeeper who had moved to the ninth standard. It was an added bonus that he was an excellent fielder and a batsman who threw his bat at everything. Dhoni played a few matches representing his school in the Ranchi inter-district tournament in 1997. And, once the senior wicketkeeper passed out of school, stepped into his shoes.
