SPIRITUAL BOWL

At Pune’s Vedic schools, a game of cricket can be an enlightening experience

With his white linen dhoti gathered around his knees and a cotton shawl draped around his shoulders, 15-year-old Narsimhan Purshottam Kulkarni swings his bat. The ball finds its way to the fence and loud cheers follows. It’s the kind of applause that fills the ground every evening, hours after the Vedic chants die down. “You should line up for Twenty20,” one of Kulkarni’s teammates suggests.

Ghaisas Guruji, Kulkarni’s teacher at the Ved Ashram in Pune, looks on indulgingly. “These children cannot seem to get cricket out of their systems and there’s nothing I can do about it,” says the teacher who trains young boys in Rig Veda. The 12-year course at the ashram is based on the strict tenets of the guru-shishya tradition.

“The boys come to me after they turn 12 and by then, cricket is already an integral part of their lives. So though it’s not part of the curriculum, I let them play the game in the evenings,” he says.

Fifty kilometers away, in Lonavala, Swami Parthasarthy has no such conflicts in his mind about mixing cricket with spirituality. Not only does the sprawling yet spartan Vedanta Academy have its own cricket team — they have toured six countries and played league matches — 80-year-old Parthasarthy sometimes gets his chance in the batting and bowling line-up, though “purely on merit”. “Just last year, he took a hatrick,” says Prayagraj, a senior disciple and captain of the academy’s cricket team.

So there. Die-hard cricket fans are right after all when they say that the game may not have originated here, but India is the spiritual home of the game. Cricket figures high on the daily agenda of many spiritual centres in Pune — amidst the prayers, meditation and scriptures.

“The basic tenet of Arya Samaj is that it wants the spiritual, academic and physical advancement of every person. Cricket as a game does all of that,” says S.C. Nagpal, former income tax commissioner and the managing trustee of Pune’s Arya Samaj trust. “We encourage all games in these camps, but cricket specifically teaches youngsters to be winners. At the camps, the mornings are devoted to Vedic sanskars, the afternoon to arts and dramatics and the evenings to the sport.”

At the Vishwa Jagriti Mission Trust in Pune, around 30 children play the game regularly. “We use cricket to teach them the value of team spirit,” says Ma Krishna Kashyab who runs the ashram.

Story continues below this ad

The Vedanta Academy not just merges cricket principles with those of life but also proves how the two complement each other. “Vedanta teaches you how not to buckle under pressure and to stay focused on the present rather than slipping to the past or worrying about the future. It’s exactly the kind of mindset a player on the cricket field needs to have. What did Misabah (Pakistani cricketer) do after hitting all those sixes? He tried to play a short fine leg and gave away the match. It was all a result of his agitated state of mind at that moment. Do you know that the Academy team — made up of amateur students who have come here to learn Vedanta — has defeated professional league teams of South Africa and England,” says Prayagraj.

Parthasarthy, the 80-year-old off-spinner and vice-captain of the Vedanta team, proclaims that if he took the Indian team under his wings, they would win not just the Twenty20 championship but also the 50-50 World Cup.