Ravichandran Ashwin: The man who never believed in playing it safe

Ravichandran Ashwin sparred with his insecurities as a child for far too long and perhaps did not want to be drawn into a battle of insecurities again. It is for this reason that an abrupt withdrawal from international cricket would not seem out of the blue to anyone who has followed the man’s journey. It could have happened in Sydney after the fifth Test against Australia, but he didn’t want to hang around. No one needed to tell him it was time to walk away from the game that consumed nearly three decades of his 38-year existence. Ashwin, the straight-shooter, made a cameo presser to let the world know in John Denver style “My bags are packed and I’m ready to go”.

He wore many hats as an active international cricketer and it would take just a five-minute conversation with him, would be enough to know that he can sift through word salad quite easily.

It is very difficult to stereotype Ashwin even after 14 years at the top level. The 765 international wickets are not good enough data to decipher the veteran who admitted to being insecure as a child in his book. He gradually won that battle with cricket which played a major role in molding him into a confident person.

“I’d rather fail in life than be completely sure. That’s my character. I don’t have the common insecurities that people have,” Ashwin had recently told PTI when the first part of his autobiography “I Have The Streets ” published a few months back.

“If you go to the casino and think about how much money you want to make, you’ll basically end up without a rupee. But when you go with the intention of having fun and want to lose the money you have, you always go back a much richer person. It was actually a great learning experience,” he had said.

So when he told his team-mates of his decision, he didn’t care whether his 106 Test caps could become 107 or, for that matter, 108. It didn’t matter anymore.

If one has to analyze the cricketer Ashwin, it is very difficult to ignore Ashwin, the person who had a very independent mind and a brain that probably ticked 24×7. He believed in de-constructing his art and getting better one ball at a time.

He never believed that an off-spinner can only bowl doosra (the wrong ‘un) with a legal action. But he developed his own wrong ‘un’, patenting it as the “carrom ball”, which could be bowled with a flick of the middle finger and thumb, hitting the outside edge of a right-hander.

The ball became Ashwin’s calling card throughout his career, but he had the courage to tell the world that he had learned it by first watching Sri Lankan Ajantha Mendis during a junior camp in Chennai.

From 2011 to the series against England, he was lethal at home.

Critics can talk endlessly about the nature of Indian stripes over the last 13 years, but no one can deny that Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja were a force of nature in these conditions.

You can get favorable terms, but the player must also know how to capitalize. The 383 wickets on Indian soil and 433 out of his 537 Test scalps in Asia are testament to his mastery of these conditions.

He has had some fantastic spells in England and Australia, but sometimes statistics hide more than they reveal. No one can measure how much pain he endured due to a lower abdominal injury during the 2018 Southampton Test against England, which India lost.

Ashwin’s greatest overseas Test feat would surely be hitting 40-plus overs with an equally hoarded Hanuma Vihari as the two saved a Test match in Sydney in 2021. If the ‘Gabba’ was India’s Sholay, Sydney was certainly ‘Ankur’.

That day, Ashwin played through the pain to salvage a game that felt like a win.

He is a man with strong values. In his junior cricket days, it was his father Ravichandran who asked him from the sidelines to run out the non-striker when he saw him gain unfair ground. That started his attempt at run outs at the non-strikers’ end. He believed in rules and played by them.

The ‘Spirit of Cricket’ in the guise of cheating was unacceptable to him.

He could stand for a colleague, just as he did for Mohammed Siraj, who was subjected to the most exquisite abuse in Australia.

But he always knew that cricket is a part of life, not the heart of life.

The engineer from Chennai’s Ramkrishnapuram First Street never hesitated to leave a COVID bio-bubble when family members fell ill and left a Test match when his mother Chithra survived a heart scare.

A former agent who worked with Ashwin in his earlier days had once said, “There are people who pitch ideas and deals. And there are people who close the deal. Ashwin is the other,” he had said.

He always had a plan B, whether it was buying a cricket team in the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association league or a team in the Global Chess League.

His Tamil YouTube channel of ‘Kutty Stories’ and interviews has a huge Pan India following. His refreshing take on cricket’s myriad problems, players and laws is a huge hit with fans.

“I had realized that I don’t need an intermediary (media) to connect with people who might have a preconceived notion of me,” he had once said.

Ravichandran Ashwin, the cricketer will always be one of a kind. A sequel to ‘I Have The Streets’ would be equally fascinating.

(With the exception of the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)