Writer and filmmaker Jaideep Varma took the stage at the closing session of the Impact/Failure Conclave 2022. “Looks like I’m here to give the last word on failure. But, well, you know my failure rate in life is 99 per cent. I made a calculation some time back about pretty much everything I’ve done. So, I don’t know — it could be because one takes more risks, or because one is not good enough, it could be because one has personality flaws, it could be because the world is not ready or the world is not in sync with what you have to offer. I don’t know what it is and I’m sure all of you have had different answers to the same disquiet,” he observed poignantly.

He took the stage to discuss the journey of a property that he had developed in 2009 called Impact Index, “For a long time I have been a cricket fan, which is a team sport, not an individual sport. I wanted to see what happens when you compare Dravid and Tendulkar. We looked at the big matches — where it either affects the series or even just in the match when you come up with a big performance under pressure. It was very interesting because I found that on a very qualitative level Dravid came out on top. That’s when I got a call from the International Cricket Council saying they had seen my Indian study and requested me to do a similar study. I was invited to Oxford to present the findings. For the next eight years I gave up everything else and for the first four years I ran it with my own money and I was broke. By the end, I was borrowing money and it was an insane time.”

The editor of Wisden (Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack) took a shine to this new method, and subsequently, Wisden India bought a majority stake from Jaideep in 2014. That solved his financial problems and the Impact Index went into a new phase where it was written about and talked about as an alternative statistics system in cricket. However, monetising it has remained an issue. “We had things and I still believe we have things. For example, the Impact Index can be used in broadcast very innovatively. It could make you actually look at cricket history differently; it can make you look at the game that you’re watching differently. It can be used as branded content and can be used in team consulting while forming a T20 side like IPL teams for gaming fantasy cricket. There were a lot of things that we could have done and we had some success with it, but I had sold my stake to Wisden India who had veto power on the marketing team.”

In the end, Jaideep brought us back to where he had started, he said, “I started by talking about Rahul Dravid versus Sachin Tendulkar and that in 2009, when we said Sachin Tendulkar was not the greatest test cricketer or the greatest test batsman to come out of India, people abused us. Recently, in 2018, Akash Chopra, a former test cricketer and commentator did a Twitter poll asking who was the greatest Test batsman to come out of India. Rahul Dravid came out on top over Sachin Tendulkar. We can take some part in starting that conversation and we can take some satisfaction from that but is it enough, I don’t know. Let’s hope, the mindset prevails in some way.”