Engineer, cricket player, well-liked YouTuber, and now writer. R Ashwin is an easy person to multitask or parallel process; in life or cricket, he would rather fail than play it safe.
In addition to having one of the best minds in cricket right now—the 37-year-old off-spinner has 516 Test wickets under his belt, which gives his opinions a lot of weight. His candor is refreshing.
Right now, he’s basking in the success that his book “I Have The Streets: A Kutti Cricket Story” has received from critics. Co-authored by Sidharth Monga and released by Penguin Random House, it details Ashwin’s life up until 2011 and provides an insight into his head, which finds equal pleasure in deciphering a challenging puzzle and probability analysis.
“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 in an exclusive interview.
But he wasn’t always this bold. He had an uneasy side as a child, but as time passed, he realized that his concerns were holding him back.
Ashwin claims that when that was resolved, he became more composed, and his development as a cricket player has shown this. His journey from bowling carrom balls on the streets of Chennai as a child to becoming India’s top spinner has been an interesting one.
He has taken the criticism head-on and answered with a slew of wickets, refusing to allow the “outside noise” to throw off his mental equilibrium. And as the engineer in him would remark, it’s this system optimization that lets him take chances and not be scared of failure.
“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 asserts with the same clarity with which he decodes complex cricket laws in his social media feeds, which don’t take long to become viral trends.
“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 explained, letting out perhaps the secret of his understated aggression on the field.
Referring back to parallel processing, the technical term for carrying out multiple computations simultaneously, Ashwin said that he reevaluated his outlook on life during the COVID-19 crisis, when nearly everyone struggled with loss phobia. He realized that, in the end, he had only one chance to accomplish his goals.
During the lockdown, his well-spoken opinions on cricket, cricket laws, and cricket players emerged on YouTube, where he currently has over 1.5 million subscribers.
It is important to remember that Ashwin, like the majority of those in his vicinity, struggled with the trauma of witnessing loved ones admitted to the hospital at that time because of the dreaded sickness.
“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 says, referring to his success as a rare outspoken voice in Indian cricket.
According to him, it all boils down to being fearless or having the ability to see the fun side of risks, something that a visit to a casino taught him back in 2009.
“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 a much richer person. It was actually a big learning experience,” he explains.
However, he might just as easily learn life lessons from a movie, a web series, or a book. That is not his only source of inspiration.
Speaking of books, he is aware of the risks involved in sharing one’s narrative with the world.
It goes beyond just letting others view a previously hidden aspect of you so they can pass judgment without knowing. When bad experiences are made public, there’s also the risk of unintentionally harming other people.
“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 says, underscoring his belief in the inherent goodness of individuals.
For this reason, he would rather see traumatic experiences as hard life lessons that are essential to developing a person. In his book, he describes one such incident during his time with the Chennai Super Kings, when he was a key player in the team’s 2010 IPL victory, but a team official turned down his request for a good ticket.
“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.
That incident was also an important lesson in understanding that the world is not a fair place.
“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 points out, the clarity of thought shining through once again much like his eyes, which light up at the first sight of a batter’s vulnerability.
