Dear Virat Kohli,
You know everyone may take you up on their shoulders and ride on the bandwagon of calling you the King now. Well, you deserve that. I have also been calling you the King for a while now, but you know which moment of royalty stood out for me as always? It was the phase where you couldn’t get a century, things went horribly wrong and you kept on fighting.
No matter the failures, you kept on battling. No matter the downfalls, Virat Kohli kept on getting back up. You were knocked over a million times and yet you found a way to get back on your feet a million and one times. You know why those moments are more special to me?
Because they are the true moments that you learn to fight, you learn to survive, you learn how your life can still come a full circle to glory only if you believed. Virat Kohli could have given away yourself. I still remember how the Indian fans waged a war on social media saying that you should not be travelling with the team in 2021. How you have been hampering the team’s balance was the talk of the town. And yet, I believed.
I believed that you will make it. I believed that you will return. For a king never dies. It’s just a matter of how he wants to bounce back and you do that so well, so firmly, so wonderfully. For you are not a king but the cricketing God that we now believe in.
The strokes, those turnstile wrists, the beauty and elegance that you knit together, the firmness, the hunger in your eyes, they all point to the same road, the road of unparalleled greatness. You are my hero, the hero who fought. The hero who bit the bullet and stood back up. The hero who never knew defeat.
I am not an ardent advocate of biographies but if truth be told, this chapter from 2019 to 2023, I want to read it out aloud. I want to read it while I fail to conjure the Everest peak because I am not strong enough for your strength and inspiration will make us keep on going. I want to read this to myself when I fail and there are no glimmers of hope for your strength will make me believe, that the world is kind. Hang in there. I want to read this chapter on the streets where the fans still scream your name and that is out of the love that never came.
Virat, thanks for everything that you have done. This World Cup should not be a retelling of 2019 or 2015 or 2003. This World Cup should be ours. You have led us until now and now its time for you to show the world, what you truly are.
Yours sincerely,
A crazy cricket fan
