Shayan Khan

📚 NEW BOOK RELEASE The Boom Effect: amazon.in/Boom-Effect-Decodi… ABOUT THE BOOK Last year, @brookeswrites and I travelled to Ahmedabad in search of Jassi - the lanky boy from Thaltej who grew up to be ‘Boom’. More than a decade since Jasprit Bumrah’s international debut, the footsteps of his stuttering approach to superstardom remained obscured. Who coached him? How did that awkward, hyper-extended action come to be? What alchemy allowed him to bowl with such ferocity, from a run-up barely longer than a yard of string? And where did that preternatural calmness come from - the ice-cold composure that never seemed to crack? As the sport increasingly resembled a gentleman’s agreement to let batters prosper, how did he - an unrepentant saboteur of such arrangements - keep finding new ways to be a nuisance? For most Indian cricketers, mythology begins to calcify within days of their debut. Before long, there are endless interviews, breathless profiles, even biopics. The machinery of hero-worship churns out stories like an all-you-can-eat buffet - shiny new narratives emerge and disappear faster than they can be gobbled up. But Bumrah wilfully let the public starve. He emerged from Ahmedabad like a magician bursting forth from a cloud of smoke. One day, no one knew his name; the next, his broad smile and splayed limbs were being beamed into living rooms across the world. With each new discovery, we had newer questions popping up. We came to realize that the lack of any parasocial relationship between Bumrah and his fans, or of any sense of public selfhood, was itself a part of the story. We tried to find our answers. A generous foreword by @afidelf