The Indian spinner Ravichandran Ashwin who is known for his multi-tasking of being an engineer, cricketer, and YouTuber has now become an author too.
The 37-year-old spinner, one of the sharpest minds in international cricket, is also a refreshingly candid voice with 516 test wickets lending considerable weight to his views.
He is currently enjoying the critical success of his book “I Have The Streets: A Kutti Cricket Story’. Co-authored by Sidharth Monga and published by Penguin Random House, it chronicles Ashwin’s life till 2011 and also gives a peak into his mind, which enjoys probability analysis as much as decoding a difficult batter.
“I am living my life, that’s it. I am not thinking about accomplishing ‘A’, ‘B’ or ‘C’ (targets). I am staying in the moment. I am a creative person in general, and if I feel I want to do something, I will go ahead and do it. (Whether it’s) right or wrong, is something that I will assimilate later,” Ashwin told PTI.
Despite his brave decisions, he wasn’t fearless though as he had an insecure side to him as a child. But he outgrew it as time went by, which made him realize his fears were paralyzing him.
“I’m not insecure at all. I would rather fail in life than be absolutely safe. That’s my character. I don’t have the common insecurities that people have,” he further added.
When he overcame his issues, he became unstoppable which has been evident in his growth as his growth is from a state of bowling carrom balls on Chennai’s streets as a kid, his metamorphosis into India’s premier spinner has been quite a ride.
“Breaking away from my insecurity (as a child) gave me a great insight into how I can exploit somebody else’s insecurity. And that’s how I see cricket or life in general,” he added.
He has taken many critics over his career and has overcome with a bagful of wickets, refusing to let the critics disturb the peace of his mind. “The time that I have is pretty limited. I do plan but for me, it’s about living life. I felt cricket took away a lot of my time since 2010 (his India debut) but COVID gave me a chance to take a break, and you know, assess where I was,” he recalls.
“It (the COVID-forced break) has given me wings over the last four years to be able to express myself, expand my creativity zones and so on and so forth.” He also recalled an incident that taught being fearless and can see the fun side of risks.
“If you go to the Casino, thinking of how much money you will make, you will pretty much end up without a rupee. But when you go with the intention of having fun and wanting to lose the money that you have, you always go back to a much richer person. It was actually a big learning experience,” he explains.
He highlighted that he did not use references for life lessons saying that he could pick those up as easily from a movie a web series, or books. The real point is something else.
“I think hurting someone is an immensely painful journey. But if tomorrow I do write about hurtful instances of mine then it’s because people who are on the other side, will have hurt me. They are obviously gonna feel bad about it, because nobody intentionally hurts you,” he added.
He also reminded another incident from another occasion, during his time with CSK in IPL 2010, when a team official refused to entertain his plea. “Look, people who give you an opportunity to learn harsh lessons in life are Gurus in my book. I didn’t want to go and confront the guy. But for me it is an incident, it happened, and it fuelled the fire in me.
“I wanted to become a better person. I wanted to become a better cricketer. I am thankful for the person who did that to me because I think in some way or the other he fuelled my desire to do well,” he says.
“It’s not. See a lot of people come to me and say, what goes around comes around. The world is a very fair place, it’s not. It can be very unfair on a lot of people. When you win, somebody else loses,” he concluded.
