‘THE UNQUIET ONES A History of Pakistan Cricket’ has to be of the finest books on cricket to have come out in recent times.  And let me also say that the author Osman Samiuddin is without doubt the best cricket writer in south Asia especially when it comes to Pakistan cricket.  As the subtitle suggests, the book is primarily a chronological history of the evolution Pakistan cricket, but in broad terms you could also take it as a pithy and humorous observation on the state of Pakistani society and its rulers.  Although the author is a proud Pakistani, he doesn’t wear his patriotism on his sleeve and hence not blind to its faults.  What is quite remarkable is that how cricket and state of the nation have generally mirrored and reflected each other’s chaos and disorder.  But because of what the author describes as the innate ‘’jazba’’ or passion of its players and some brilliant administrators that Pakistan has enjoyed quite a lot of success and yet because the overall structure is inherently fragile and dependent on the whims and fancies of individuals, the descent into hell has been also spectacular.  This book is a true labor of love.  It is witty in style and ambitious in scale.

The couple of chapters devoted to unarguably the most influential cricketers that Pakistan has produced namely Imran Khan and Javed Miandad make for a riveting reading.  Their respective characters have been deconstructed like an accomplished psychoanalyst.  For someone like me who’s always had this curious fascination with Pakistan, our neighbor with whom we have shared a love-hate relationship for nearly 70 years, this was a kind of book I’d been looking for quite a while now.