About 200 people turned up at the CK Nayudu Hall of the Cricket Club of India in Mumbai to listen to former India batsman Vijay Merchant's few surviving team-mates speak on the occasion of his birth centenary on October 12. Former players Madhav Mantri, Madhav Apte, Vasant Raiji and Merchant's fellow commentator Anand Setalvad related stories of their interactions with a cricketer who was widely acknowledged as the best Indian batsman of his generation, and who later became a respected administrator, commentator and writer.
Mantri said that after his nephew Sunil Gavaskar's early success as a Test opener, he was asked who he felt was the better opening batsman. "I said then that a great of one generation will be a great in another generation as well. But it is the way an opening batsman leaves the ball that is more important, and in that aspect Merchant was a master. Sunil later wrote to Merchant saying: 'and they say blood is thicker than water.'"
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