Ravichandran Ashwin, the Encyclopedist

Ravi Ashwin's life immersed in cricket, from gully cricket to international stardom, explored in depth and detail.

John Arlott said of the great English seamer Maurice Tate that he did not play cricket; he lived in it. The same might be said of Ravi Ashwin, who has retired, somewhat unexpectedly, aged thirty-eight.

He was born into the game — his parents Ravichandran and Chitra were obsessed with his career. He married the game — his wife now runs his cricket academy, Gen Next, and media company, Carrom Ball Media. He covers the world on his YouTube Channel, and is a compulsive communicator on Instagram. In amongst all this, he has harvested 765 international wickets and nearly 5000 runs.

Sometimes cricketers and their cricket are readily separable. Yet it was hard to imagine a conversation with this proud Madrasi that did not circle back to his passion and obsession. He did have other interests, I know. He liked movies, with a special affinity for the cult classic Chennai 6000028. It is, of course, about cricket.

To an outsider, this might make him sound a little….narrow? But there is what you’re interested in, and how you’re interested in it. Few cricketers can have explored the game to such a minute level. Sometimes you wonder whether Australia’s top players see cricket as getting in the way of their golf; they fondly nicknamed Mike Hussey, Ashwin’s Chennai Super Kings colleague, ‘Mr. Cricket’.

But Ashwin’s encyclopedism kind of makes you feel a little proud of cricket, that it could be subjected to a life’s intelligent study, and protective of it too. After all, nobody ever said to Einstein: ‘Gosh, Albert, do you reckon we could talk about something other than physics?’ Or of Steve Jobs: ‘Steve could be a really fun guy if he wasn’t so obsessed with the graphic user interface.’

The argument then becomes whether it is possible to be a genius in such a seemingly esoteric realm. To which the straight-forwardest retort is: cricket in India is anything but trivial. And even if it may be of lesser importance than the fate of nations, then, as Hazlitt observed in his immortal essay on Cavanagh the fives player, what of it?

“It may be said that there are things of more importance than striking a ball against a wall — there are things, indeed, that make more noise and do as little good, such as making war and peace, making speeches and answering them, making verses and blotting them, making money and throwing it away. But the game of fives is what no one despises who has ever played it.”