Who is the author of the autobiography “I Have the Streets : A Kutti Cricket Story” ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, R. Ashwin and S. Monga. In June 2024 Ravichandran Ashwin released his memoir I Have the Streets: A Kutti Cricket Story, co-authored with the sports writer Sidharth Monga and published by HarperCollins India. The title is the fastest route to the answer for anyone who has not read the book: 'kutti' is Tamil for small or little, and the memoir is about the small-time cricket of Ashwin's Chennai childhood — the street games, the gully rules, the local leagues — rather than about international cricket, which the book barely reaches. Note that the option names two people, and that is not a trap but an accurate description: the book is a sportsman's memoir written with a professional writer, a standard arrangement in cricket publishing, and BPSC has simply reproduced the credit line as the book carries it. Ashwin himself is the natural subject for such a book. Born on 17 September 1986 in Madras, now Chennai, he became India's foremost off-spinner, took a five-wicket haul on Test debut against the West Indies in 2011 — the seventh Indian bowler to do so — was part of the sides that won the 2011 World Cup and the 2013 Champions Trophy, and was named both ICC Cricketer of the Year and ICC Men's Test Cricketer of the Year for 2016 after a season of 48 wickets and 336 runs in eight Tests. He had already received the Arjuna Award in 2015. There is a striking coincidence of timing here that is worth remembering with the question: candidates sat this paper on 13 December 2024, when Ashwin was still an active Test cricketer, and he announced his retirement from all forms of international cricket five days later, on 18 December 2024. The Padma Shri followed in January 2025.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Raina has written a memoir, which is what makes him a credible distractor, but it is a different one — Believe: What Life and Cricket Taught Me, published in 2021 and co-written with the journalist Bharat Sundaresan. He is from Uttar Pradesh and played for that state, so a Tamil title about Chennai street cricket does not fit him in any respect.  (b) Sreesanth has been the subject of a great deal of writing, most of it about the 2013 spot-fixing case and his ban, but he is not the author of an autobiography of this name. The initial-plus-surname form of his name resembles the way Ashwin is usually printed, which is the only real pull the option has.  (d) The most tempting wrong answer for a general reader, because a great deal exists in print about Dravid — including the 2006 biography The Nice Guy Who Finished First by Devendra Prabhudesai. But a biography is written about a subject, not by him, and Dravid has not published an autobiography. The stem's word is 'autobiography', and it is doing work.

Concept: Books-and-authors is a fixed sub-section of Indian competitive current affairs, and it rewards a specific habit: attach every recent title to its author, and note whether the book is an autobiography, a memoir, a biography or an authorised account, because examiners use that distinction as a discriminator. The difference matters here. An autobiography or memoir is written by the subject, usually with a named co-writer in the case of sportspeople; a biography is written about the subject by someone else. Cricket publishing in India has produced examples of every kind in the last few years — Suresh Raina's Believe: What Life and Cricket Taught Me with Bharat Sundaresan in 2021, Ashwin's I Have the Streets with Sidharth Monga in 2024, and, decades earlier, a biography of Rahul Dravid by Devendra Prabhudesai. A second habit worth building is to read the title for internal evidence. A regional-language word in a title is almost always a clue to the author's home region, and 'kutti' is Tamil, which points at the only Tamil cricketer among the four options.

State PCS 2024 Q106 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q106 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer