The beastly bouncer from Charlie Griffith that nearly killed Indian captain Nari Contractor in Barbados on the 1961-62 tour of the West Indies was a vicissitude of fortune, a turning point in Indian cricket. Mansur Ali Khan, the ninth nawab of Pataudi who had then just qualified as a voter - those days you had to be at least 21 years old to be eligible to vote - found himself filling the vacancy, no matter if he was blind in one eye, the result of an accident in which a sliver of glass had pierced his right eye.
The upward move should have been automatic by the logic that Pataudi, aka Tiger, was the tour vice-captain. Still, it needed some courage and not a little serious thought on the part of manager Ghulam Ahmed to arrive at the decision. Pataudi was too inexperienced at the highest level of the game and had insufficient feel of Indian cricket to be given the job.