Rahul Dravid is tired of the good boy image

Screen grab of the advertisement featuring Rahul Dravid (Courtesy: YouTube/CRED)

This is what Rahul Dravid said on the show Breakfast With Champions in 2019.

“I guess if you get labeled as a good boy, as someone who does everything correctly, when you make one mistake, that gets highlighted even more. ‘Oh, he threw his cap!.”

Further on, with a smile but with the palpable exasperation of a man annoyed by his sanskaari image, who wants the world to know he has done sexy bad boy things, Dravid says, “That’s the image I want, that I’m human, I make mistakes, so don’t blame me when I make mistakes.”

Dravid’s advertisement for Cred, which shows him throwing a road rage fit, has allowed him to be what he has always wanted. A generally good man but interesting enough to sometimes be bad. How bad, of course, depends on an individual’s personal penal code, on what they can live with. For most conscientious people, the right amount of bad is where they know how to let their hair down, within reason, and show fight if they are being taken advantage of.

In that sense, Dravid has never been the joyless kind, or someone you could mess with. In fact, even before the Cred ad, Dravid did commercials that were playful, and seemingly out of character for him.

Back in the garish 90s, in an advertisement for Kissan, Dravid is reprimanded by his fictional mother for eating too much jam. He returns to the house in various disguises – as a girl, as a monk and as Dracula – all to score some jam. “Ban jao Jammy,” he says in the end, popping his collar Azharuddin style, again not something we would associate with Dravid.

There also were two Pepsi ads which featured the fun Dravid. One was with Amitabh Bachchan and the rest of the Indian team. They dance to the jingle “Oye bubbly, oye hoye bubbly, be my lover bubbly.” Another showed Dravid and Sourav Ganguly running away from a snarling lion with a crate of cola.

Was there also a bit of ‘Gunda of Indiranagar’ in the infamous declaration in the 2004 Multan Test against Pakistan, which left Sachin Tendulkar stranded on 194? It is possible, along with an exaggerated sense of team cause. Dravid was the stand-in captain, and the plan was to declare at such a time that Pakistan would have to play 15 overs before close of play. The message was conveyed to Tendulkar. But the declaration came an over earlier. According to Tendulkar’s autobiography, Dravid had batted on in Sydney even when Ganguly had wanted a declaration. And that was on the fourth day of the Test, unlike Multan, when the declaration happened on Day Two. Bad boy Rahul.

The evolution of Dravid’s personality over his 16-year-career gave hints about his journey in finding himself. For example, now and then he tried wearing flashy clothes like his teammates. There was a flirtation with designer jeans and a Dolce & Gabbana belt. For an ad campaign he spiked up his hair. However, he would quickly return to his regular guy look. It was clear that he was not himself in fancy threads.

But Dravid does not look that miscast in an ad which shows him going apeshit in traffic. And he’d be happy about that.