This 2015 cricket World Cup isn't working out for me, it just isn't. I'm one of those people who think of ODIs as akin to those side snacks and achar you get with a meal, like papad, pakodas or the Gujarati farsan of dhoklas, khandvi and so on plus the various pickles that enhance the experience. It's occasionally very delicious stuff, and you miss it if it's not there, but in no ways can it replace the full thali, the whole, complex, multi-course main meal of Test cricket. Therefore, India's triumphs and setbacks in the 50-over game are, for me, invariably flavoured by how well or badly we are doing in the Test arena. Given that we've recently been playing appallingly in white gear, I was glad when the painful Australia tour finally came to an end. In my mind I threw it in the same recycle bin as last year's foul England tour and cleared my mind in readiness for a few cricket-free months. Adding to the expectation of protecting my time, our so-called Team India was also humiliated in the Tri-Series, thus defusing any last little hope-bombs for the World Cup that might have been hidden inside my cricketing heart. Good luck to Sri Lanka and New Zealand, I said to myself, and let the Plunder Down Under carry on without me.

But cricket, just like life, often fails to behave itself, and so here I am, like a relapsed addict, mainlining junk I don't even really like, and that too, often first thing in the morning, before I've even brushed my teeth. If I had to shift blame to someone other than myself - and I do - then I must blame the Pakistanis. As usual, it's all actually the fault of the dot-dot ke dash-dash pashchim- waale padausis, or, in the case of that first match against us, dash-dash (India) ke dot-dot (Paxtonies) Western neighbours. If those green clowns had played properly and broken their World Cup hoodoo against us, had they stuffed us big-time, a whole, tearfully thankful cricket-saturated nation would have switched off their TV sets and got on with making in India whatever needs to be made in India - money, infrastructure, Bollywood flops, babies, whatever. Instead, first we had the 'what do we need to do to get you to open up favourable trade with us' type ka bowling attack, then despite the Indian total being at least 30 runs light, we had their 'batting' and that too in tandem with our own bowlers, perverse, inconsistent creatures, suddenly failing to misdeliver. Bas, that was it. We were ensnared again, re-hooked to the habit we so desperately need to kick. Myself just one victim amongst millions.

For a certain kind of India fan the climax of India's World Cup had already been unfurled in the first match. Others, like yours truly, thought this was the one sparkling blip for India before the inevitable slide into the abyss of 'did not get past the group stage'. Despite the win against (the relegation group) Paxton, in print, I actually referred to some notables in our team, meaning like half the poser-posse, as 'mustachioed peacocks'. The memory of dominoing debacles since the Lords Test last year still fresh, it was a phrase with which I was well pleased - until India's second match. The lo and the behold, as a teacher of mine used to say, here we were again, with our top stubble-trouble turning Morkel into a run-stork, staining Steyn all over dale and down. And then, while defending (ye horrors of mutation), we also, le yaar, phir se! showed fielding and - once again - some vague verisimilitude of bowling. When Sharma No.3 (i.e the clean-cut one who shaves for everyone in the team, the one who looks like he enjoys nothing more than doing pappa's small import-export business ke accounts) affected the first of the two retaliatory run outs, I knew the game was up. For shirkers like me.

Thinking about the Indian team, it sits up to be hit that the whole thing is actually about two men. No, not the obvious ones, not all the 21st century, desi versions of Thomson and Thompson, and not the (so far) (unsung and heroically) blameless bowlers either. The two gents I'm thinking about are Dhoni and Shastri.

Let me be absolutely honest: till the point where he lifted the World Cup in 2011, Dhoni could do little wrong in my book. I much preferred him as a captain to Prince Amader Gaurav, Bongo-Shontaan el Funked-it-at-Johannesburg. It didn't matter what Dhoni's record was, of Test wins outside India and it didn't matter that Mr. Helicopter would never be able to curtsy into a cover drive like Ganguly. What mattered was a) the spirit, the frighteningly calm, almost good-humoured 'I'm coming to get you, no matter what' and b) the utter lack of pomposity, or airs and flatulences. But now, whenever I read the fawningly used initials 'MSD' I think of MSG, as in monosodium glutamate, that unhealthy substance that binds and bulks up restaurant food. Since the second half of 2011, MS Dhoni has had the same function in Indian cricket, providing tasteless ODI bulk while depriving us of proper Test nutrition. It started, of course, with the 0-4 white-out against England in the summer of 2011, followed by the same scoreline against Australia in Australia, as Imran Khan then gleefully pointed out to a simpering Calcutta audience, something that showed amazing consistency. The blame, at the time, went to the old greats being well past their batting prime and also slow in the field. Well, the oldie-goldies were duly archived and deleted from the current team after which the blame, say for last summer's post-Lords slide down the chute, was put at the doors of a team that was green behind the ears - a team so green that the captain, a veteran of a decade, couldn't realize for two whole Tests that his slips were standing too far back and were packed too tightly. It wasn't just the losing, it wasn't the absence of any draws, it wasn't the awful, repeated 0s against India's column, so much as the lack of interest that radiated out of Dhoni that put acid on one's team-love. For large parts of 2013 and 2014 it seemed as if the same bhoot of indifference, a kind of self-multiplying 'khelte- chai-na', can't play-won't play ghost had somehow climbed on to both Dhoni and one Rahul Gandhi.

When Dhoni announced his retirement from Test cricket mid-series, my first reaction was akin to that of a long-suffering Congress worker hearing that no one named Gandhi, Nehru or Vadra would be allowed to hold office in the party for the next 20 years, that is, a very light sprinkling of trepidation on a huge dollop of elation. However, there was still the matter of the pesky World Cup before one saw the last of this once great player, and one hoped it would be over quickly and painlessly. However, one grizzled old backroom boy had different ideas as he took over the management of the Indian team.

Twenty-odd years ago, I interviewed Ravi Shastri for a documentary on Indian cricket I was making for the BBC. Sitting at the edge of the ground at Wankhede, the recently retired RS was quite expansive during the interview, recounting great stories including the moment when, taking guard as a novice tail-ender, he had to wipe away with his bat two of the previous batsman Mohinder Amarnath's teeth. 'And then you look up and you see Michael Holding waiting for you.' I was slightly nervous about asking the Charmer with the Armer about his reputation as a ladies' man, but if he could face Holding and Co., I could also be brave, and so I asked. I needn't have worried, Shastri was more than willing to answer. 'Well, I was young and so, of course, I had flings,' he said, before pausing for emphasis. 'I had flings but I never had any affairs.' I asked a few more questions after that but the rest of the interview went in mentally dealing with the sheer, crazy topspin of that reply.

Since then, Ravi Shastri has grown and developed into what can be called the most complete Homo Indicus Cricketicus, the Complete Indian Cricketing Man: player, team mainstay, hero, winner, commentator, sports businessman, player impresario, and now manager. Unlike others who might have only shone on the field, Shastri is someone who can read everything from reverse-swing to reverse-Srinivasan. Unlike any other important dada of Indian cricket, Shastri's record, reputation, wiliness and calm are all more than a match for Dhoni's. Shastri is steely and not to be messed with, but, having dealt with personalities that varied from Gavaskar and Kapil Dev to Azharuddin, Sidhu and Tendulkar, RS is too smart to do anything but create a space where the various mustaches and non- muchhas in the team can prosper under the umbrella of his own famously coveted upper-lip. Unlike Dhoni, for Shastri the game seems to carry an ever-replenishing erotics of victory, and perhaps he has been transmitting this to the whole young team. If he can keep conveying to these young wild-oat vessels the difference between a fling, that is, winning the odd knee-trembling session, and a full-blown affair, that is, pacing yourself to repeatedly last both the fielding and batting parts of a whole day and come out victorious, who knows, we may even get past Bangladesh and into the 'deep end' of this tournament.