China’s skyrocketing spend on war

                              Unheard stories of Virat Kohli

There’s really only one thing to do with Virat Kohli. Enjoy him. He has the balls of an extreme skydiver, improbable skills, and the determination of a cat in heat.Rid yourself of avuncular judgements, jealousy, or the kind of moralizing that confidently asserts that “in Indian culture, we don’t swear”. F**k that.Enjoy him. Enjoy the tattoos and the woodsman beard he is keeping even though teammates who once wore beards like they were part of the Team India uniform, are getting rid of theirs.

When it comes to cricket, of course, he is peerless in the true sense of the word. Strike away the elegiac note that cricket is not what it used to be because Kohli, to paraphrase the wonderful Australian cricket writer Gideon Haigh, has brought the cricket into Twenty20 (T20). Like Rahul Dravid, he seems absurdly attached to only playing shots where the elbow is held high; so he brings Test batting into T20, and T20 batting into Tests, and the breathless thrill of a heavyweight boxing match from an era now lost into all formats of the game.

In 2016, he became the only player in the history of the game to hold an average of more than 50 in all formats simultaneously. It seemed only natural. He has continued this monstrous rampage with the bat for the better part of this year, in which he became India’s One Day International (ODI) and T20I (T20 Internationals) captain, in addition to being the Test captain. The extra responsibility did not make him falter one bit—Australia were beaten at home in the Test series.

The 28-year-old walks into a room overlooking the dusty pitch at the Mumbai Cricket Association Club in the Bandra-Kurla Complex with a lupine gait. He has just finished a long session with the bat—he went into the nets straight after a flight from Delhi—and is yet to have lunch. He leans back into a long sofa, the first breather he’s got all day.

“I like to learn,” he says, when I ask him a question about his batting exploits. “I like listening and observing and learning. I like reading and I like reading body language, and I learn. You need to have the courage to change yourself.”

Over the interview, he repeated, quite earnestly, this theme of “learning and changing” a number of times, in a number of different contexts. I found this refrain, while researching, in many other interviews and comments he has made over the last four-five years.

Kohli is the great learner. It may sound trite, but simple truths often do: Our ability or inability to learn and adapt is what defines us.