Cricket and Life – The seamless Connection!

Cricket has always been such an integral part of my life that sometimes I wonder what my life would be without it. No, seriously, it has made such a big impact on my life, it has taught me so many things that I cannot imagine a life without cricket.
Cricket has taught me so much in life, and at times I feel it is cricket that is responsible for who or what I am rather than my education and surroundings. I know it is hard to believe this but I have instances to prove this.
There are a lot of things that I have learnt from cricket that apply to my daily life. Simple things like, the idea to keep innovating, be it your bowling skills by coming up with variations in pace, to variations in the way you hold the ball and release it, to the way you can deliver it, to keep improvising your shots, to keep innovating and staying ahead of the game to be successful.
It was through cricket that I got to know about my leadership skills or the fact that I enjoyed responsibility, or the fact that I had the power in me to lead a pack without being the leader. I had the capability to get the best out of my team and perform at our best especially when the chips are down.
It is during matches in our complex that I along with my team members I too would get so pumped up when we had only a few runs to defend that we would go all out. It was the belief that we had that we can pull it off that made us win more often than not. It is the same thing that I believe in life, that when the chips are down is the time when you need to work the hardest and keep the belief that you will win in the end!! It is these things, these positive thoughts that have kept me in such goo stead all this while and have made me stronger and helped me come up when I was down in the dumps.
Like the time when I had quit engineering to start a new career in Media and start my journey towards a graduation degree right from scratch that I would think that it is like changing your home ground. The pitch conditions will be new, the crowds will be new, but one thing that will be old will be my spirit, will be my attitude and the strong will to perform and do well that will take me through any situation.
After every match I would come back and analyse my day’s performance and see what went wrong and where did I bowl and why was I taken to the cleaners by the batsmen. Same applied to my work, I would sit down and assess my work, how am I doing, what was my best work of the week and stuff. I was trying to keep tabs on my progress and wanted to see if I was improving and learning from my mistakes or not.
I keep thinking of how to bowl, I practice my bowling action at home all the time and have imaginary situations and then would do the bowling keeping the wall as my target. Similarly, I would do so for my work, have imaginary clients and then think of solutions for them and would come up with new ideas. That is how I would prepare for my work and try and get better at it.
Infact to think of it, my writing skills are also a big thanks to my love for cricket. It is only because of cricket that I even read. I am one of those writers who does not read much. I would read each and every article that would come in the newspaper that would even remotely talk about cricket. My vocabulary and writing skills are all thanks to those beautifully written articles by either Ayaz Menon or Sunil Gavaskar or Harsha Bhogle or Sanjay Manjrekar or one of those many writers on different cricket websites.
I even judge people on the way they play cricket and trust me it is a good scale to judge people on. Like, when we play cricket and the kind of player the other person is tells me how good is he when it comes to his work. For eg: if the person is cautious while batting and isn’t the one who takes risks or goes down the track you know what kinda person he is. Also, is that player good enough to play you or competitive enough on the field tells me how competitive or good he is off the field and more often than not, this seems to work.
It is like if the person is serious about winning he would try and fight it out and not give up easily, in cricket and similarly in a professional life he would be one who does a good job and is the kinds who actually works hard and pays attention to each and every thing and makes sure he does everything well.
The way you approach a sport tells a lot about your personality and your habits. And that is what I feel is the seamless connection between cricket and life.