Open Stance

On playing the same game from a different position

You know that jolt when someone you haven’t seen in years hits you with, “Are you working in _____ now?” Especially when you are not doing that. It totally caught me off guard. It’s like cracking open a time capsule and staring at this frozen version of me and thinking that identity stuck, didn’t it?

Ever since I was about twelve years old, I said it out loud: “I want to be a sports journalist. A cricket writer. A presenter.”

Until then, I had interests, not identities. Cricket changed that. It gave me something solid to hold on to, a language for ambition. I did not just watch cricket, I absorbed it. I watched panels and press conferences not just as a fan, but as someone imagining herself on the other side of the table, asking the questions, shaping the conversation. Somewhere along the way, I stopped saying I like cricket and started being known as the cricket girl.

For a long time, that identity felt comforting. People remembered it. They repeated it back to me. They built their idea of me around it. And I leaned into it because it felt good to be legible, to be known, to have a clean, confident answer when someone asked who I was or what I wanted to do. I tried to honour that dream seriously. I did what you are supposed to do when you fall in love with a field young. I stayed loyal to it. I built proof around it. I let it define me. This weight grows heavier when that dream has been spoken aloud, remembered by others, and invested in by people who care about you and are rooting for a very specific version of your future.

I still smile at that tidy story we all crave: girl falls for cricket young, rides it to the dream life. It would’ve been beautiful.

That clarity felt especially tangible before COVID, when cricket was a defining part of my identity; I dreamt up every possible scenario of interviewing Rohit Sharma. It changed slightly when I came to college; most did not know the intensity with which I had loved cricket, or how deeply it had shaped me. And yet, my relationship with cricket had not disappeared.

My love for it became more internal because I had discovered so many other things that sparked the same intensity. Writing. Media. Politics. Storytelling. Pop Culture. Social. Journalism. Content I was still a fan girl, just no longer devoted to one singular object. My devotion redistributed itself. And slowly, I realised that I owed all of these discoveries to cricket itself. It taught me how meaningful it is to follow a passion fully, to stay with it long enough for it to open doors you did not know existed, and to let it branch into new paths without fear.

And yet, I could feel people watching. Waiting. Almost hoping I would circle back to cricket as I took up internships that had nothing to do with it. I didn’t realise how deeply that expectation sat with me, perhaps because internships are, by nature, temporary. They felt like detours, not departures, which made everyone assume I would eventually return.

It was in that in-between space, stuck between who I had been and who I could become, that the opportunity at Arka Mediaworks appeared. I did not even know this kind of role existed, let alone that it was something I could do or enjoy. I did not grow up imagining myself in this role. I did not rehearse it in my head the way I once rehearsed cricket panels and bylines. It arrived simply as an opportunity, and I stepped into it without the weight of destiny attached.

That’s when the gentle prods started rolling in, even stronger: “What about your true calling, cricket? Is Arka just a side step?

Beneath those questions was the suggestion that what I was doing could not be the whole story. That this phase was temporary by default. That my present needed to be explained in relation to a past dream in order to be taken seriously.

There is something disorienting about having your current life framed as a pause. About being told that the thing you wake up for every day is meaningful only in its proximity to something else.

What often gets lost in this conversation is that my relationship with cricket was never just about cricket. What struck me most was that stepping into Arka was that it felt like an extension of everything I had loved about cricket. Cricket had given me a model for curiosity, for attention, for deep engagement with a story and with people. Arka offered me the same thrill in a new form: a space to grow, to learn, to be part of a story, and to share that story with others. That had always been what I had wanted to do in cricket too: immerse myself in the narrative, understand its layers, and communicate it to the world.

It allowed me to take everything cricket had taught me—attention to detail, love for storytelling, patience for complex processes, curiosity for human experience—and channel it in a new direction.

Still everytime someone reminds me of the cricket girl I once was, there is a tiny ache, a sense of betrayal toward that past self who dared to dream boldly. It is a feeling I recognise, though I also recognise that it is unnecessary. It makes me pause long enough to wonder whether I have drifted away from something essential, whether I have been disloyal to the version of myself who once named her desire so clearly. Did I abandon my truer self?

We often mistake consistency for integrity. We tell ourselves that staying the same is proof of sincerity, and that deviation must mean confusion, compromise, or loss of direction. People are not singular projects. We gather layers. Interests deepen, collide, resurface in different forms. These are not competing selves. They are connected ones. I am sure I could be doing many different things, just as I am sure that many of us could. But we are always living one version of ourselves at a time. That does not mean the rest of us have disappeared.

The first dream is treated as the truest one, when in reality, it was simply the first doorway we were brave enough to walk through. A dream can be sincere without being singular, and a past version of me can be meaningful without needing to define every version that follows.

Maybe I will return to cricket someday. Maybe I will not. Maybe it will exist in my life differently, not as a profession, but as love, memory, or context. Maybe this role is much deeper than I anticipate. Or maybe it will lead me somewhere I cannot yet imagine. I do not know. And I am learning to treat that uncertainty not as a failure, but as evidence that I am still alive to possibility.

What I do know is this. My present is not a compensation for my past dream. It is an expansion of who I am allowed to be. My twelve-year-old self did not know everything. She only knew what lit her up then. And she did her job beautifully. She gave me confidence, direction, and the courage to name a desire without shame. Honouring her does not mean freezing myself in time. It means trusting that the same openness that once led me to cricket is now leading me somewhere else.

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

P.S. The title is inspired by Virat Kohli’s shot against Pakistan at the MCG only because of his “Open Stance “ to get it over the rope.