The first time I saw our city Ranchi on-screen, was when Shushant Singh Rajput portrayed you in your biopic. And in every match of yours, when you scored a sixer, our entire country would erupt into a festival. They say we can look up to the sky and gaze at the stars, but you brought stars to the ground itself, within its diameter of a hundred and fifty meters—a star, always down-to-earth, the jersey number 7, always confident, yet composed.
From leading India to win its first-ever World Cup in 2011 since 1983, to sipping soft drinks with your daughter Ziva after the IPL win, when the entire team celebrated the trophy—you always took the lead to play, but never the stage for attention. Always quick in skippering the wicket, but always unbothered about taking credit, and calling it a team victory, instead of an individual accomplishment.
Every time the world stuck to the scorecard, you casually but confidently aced on the field, and explained later—“I would say, I feel equally frustrated. I also feel angry at times, disappointed. But what is important is that none of these feelings are constructive.”
And whenever I would look at you—this guy from a small-town, humble background, who climbed the ladder patiently, never cribbing about the elevators others had, who could any day have the world at his feet, the next day there was a viral video of yours getting selfies clicked with the most normal people. To an entire generation, you taught, that you can be a normal human and an achiever, both. That you can break the records of your idols all across the globe and come back to have singhada at the dhaba with your childhood friends. That you can always learn new things, but need not lose the old you. So every time you won new games using different techniques and came back home, I woke up the next morning to the local newspaper printing how you went on a bike ride at dawn, without care.
Love and gratitude,
The billions whom you taught to dream
~ Ankita Apurva
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