It's going to be so hilarious watching John in Man of Tomorrow wearing his suit with all the wild constructs and then in season 2 of Lanterns he is stuck in a leather jacket exploring another bumfuck town while referencing all the cool Green Lantern shit he does off screen
Rajkumar is a fabulous actor. Dada was my fav cricketer. Vikramaditya is of course who he is. But with the poster of Dada, I am relieved that Greg Chappell was not the worst thing that happened to Ganguly.
2024 IPL auction room laughed without knowing his name. Priyansh Arya sat there & watched every franchise keep their paddles down. Friends mocked him over chai, made jokes about his worth, told him he would never cross one crore. He did not argue with them. He simply disappeared.
He vanished into Ratapani Forest near Bhopal with Sanjay Bhardwaj, a coach who runs an academy you probably cannot find on Google Maps. The regimen was brutal & deliberately old school. 12 hours of training starting at dawn. No phone except 1 hour in evening. No Instagram or any distractions.
Just the cut & pull rehearsed until they became muscle memory, until his wrists knew exactly what to do when fast bowlers tested him with short balls. He was preparing for a stage that had already rejected him.
His preparation found its voice on 31th August, 2024, at Arun Jaitley Stadium. Left arm spinner Manan Bharadwaj ran in. 6 balls later the scorebook read 6 sixes in an over. He finished SMAT 2024-25 as Delhi's highest run getter with 325 runs at 177 strike rate. IPL could not look away anymore.
Jeddah auction, 2025. Base price 30 lakh. Punjab Kings got him for 3.8 crore. Ricky Ponting needed Indian boys who were not afraid. Brad Haddin watched him face 8 balls in a practice match and told Ponting he had to play the opener. Sometimes 8 balls is all it takes.
Here is the thing about Arya that stats sheets miss. While other openers calculate risk, he sees ball & hits ball. Stable base, wrists doing the work. It looks simple because he made it simple.
But slump came early for him in IPL. Golden duck against Jofra Archer. Confidence cracked. Ponting found him & did not lecture technique. He simply said the next time you get that ball, hit it out of the ground. Permission to fail aggressively is sometimes the only coaching you need.
8th April, 2025, Mullanpur vs CSK. He smashed the first ball of Khaleel Ahmed for six. Went on to score 103 off 42 balls. Century in 39 balls. Punjab Kings reached the final & He played all 17 games, scored 475 runs at 179 strike rate. Not bad for an unsold boy one season ago.
Now it is 2026. He is striking at 250 after 5 games this season. He made 39 off 11 against CSK again & today he almost broke his 39 ball hundred record. His IPL career tally has crossed 650 runs at 194 strike rate.
The auction room that blanked him in 2024 would not recognize the beast they ignored.
This reminds me of an on-air conversation between Harsha Bhogle and Dravid during India's tour England in 2014.
There was a mention of the 2003 Adelaide Test (in which Dravid scored 233 & 72* in a winning cause) during the coverage of the Trent Bridge Test.
Harsha heaped praises on Dravid's 233. In response, Dravid only talked about the contribution of VVS Laxman (148) and Ajit Agarkar (6/42 in sec inn).
Harsha ended the discussion by saying: "That's Rahul Dravid for you. You will tell him he did well and he will tell you that somebody else also had a big part to play."
That was 12 years ago. In 2026, he is still the same - as consistent off the field as he was on the field during his long playing career ❤️
Amazing that the same side, South Africa, both dismantled Indian aspirations and gave them fresh hope within 5 days.
Tells you why stereotyping a team, in ads or the media, is such a bad idea.
Who would have thought on the 7th of Feb that England would be one shot away from losing to Nepal,that Pakistan would be one catch away from potentially going out of the tournament, that India would have a major scare against the USA and that Australia would be knocked out early
Canadian singer @justinbieber had shared an image on his Instagram story with the words "Praying for Israel" by using an image from Gaza, Palastine. He later realised and deleted/replaced the image.