Kohli: I try to be like a monk living in a civil society

How could Virat Kohli deal with the kind of pressure we put on him day in and day out? To what extent does it entail being left with no ‘me time’ at all? Is it
impossible to be living a life dictated by having to deal with the 24x7 news media, who wants to know everything about his private life?

Kohli, it seemed, was ready for the question. He said to me with a smile, ‘I try to be like a monk living in a civil society, you know and I don’t have any regrets.’


‘HERO AT PERSONAL CONVENIENCE’

Anything Kohli can’t be peddled as news. He can’t be our hero at our convenience; we cannot worship him when he scores a hundred and criticise him for not telling us if he is indeed getting married or not. Kohli, commenting on such inane speculations, himself puts it best, ‘Everyone makes choices. You choose what you do. Some choose good some choose bad. Bad is easier.’ His concluding statement is, perhaps, most revealing, ‘I am a hero at personal convenience.’

TRIAL BY MEDIA

A news item in the last week of October 2017 speculated on Kohli’s then prospective marriage with actor-partner Anushka Sharma. What is interesting in this case is how Kohli was being consumed and appropriated in the media. First, anything Kohli does is news—whether it’s right or wrong.

That he might get married to Anushka was considered breaking news. Wonder why? But it was and that’s the ground reality.

And once a news platform puts something out in India, it just gets copied and multiplied, without being given a thought to what Kohli might feel or what his opinion might be on the issue. ‘What can I say to this,’ he wrote to me when I asked him about the media play. ‘How many people can I personally go and correct? This is their way of selling news,’ he said.

TRANSFORMATION

It was around 11.15 pm in Dhaka on a muggy evening in March 2012, and Virat Kohli had just plundered 183 against Pakistan. Each of us had been eagerly waiting for Kohli to come and answer our questions but to our surprise, he stopped midway into his walk towards the press conference area. A section of the crowd was screaming his name when all of a sudden the star of the night started walking towards them.

He spent a good 10 minutes with the fans, signing autographs, and then almost sprinted across to see us at the presser venue. Soon after he had taken his position in front of the microphone, he offered an apology for the delay and said that he felt it was his duty to spend a few minutes with the fans. He added that if any of us had a deadline to meet, he was sorry to have kept us waiting. There was a hushed silence in the room. Here was a man known to be brash and aggressive, passionate and temperamental, and the last thing we had been expecting was to hear Kohli speak like a statesman. It was a sign of the things to come. His transformation from being a match-winner to contemporary cricket’s biggest brand had only begun.

THE CHASER

Between March 2012 and May 2016, Kohli, the batsman, had made gigantic strides towards seeking immortality. Through these years, Kohli, in a run chase had been fast becoming a subject of folklore.

He single handedly beat Australia in the World T20 in Mohali in March 2016.

Sourav Ganguly had deftly summed up Kohli’s unbeaten 85 against Australia. ‘Sheer class,’ he said when asked to decode Kohli’s prowess in a chase.

‘What is it that makes Kohli so special when chasing herculean totals? How is he different to others, and is he the best white-ball batsman in the world on current form?’ I asked him.

‘The last question is the easiest to answer. It is an overwhelming “yes”. No AB De Villiers, no Joe Root and no Kane Williamson come near Virat in the 50-over format. In T20 it is ABD and him,’ reasoned Sourav.

Ravichandran Ashwin puts it even better. ‘He just knows some grounds like no one else does. He can work out strange angles when batting and place the ball at will. He hunted down the Australian score in Mohali with the asking rate touching 13, something that we have very rarely seen in cricket.’