Read Before You Decide.
Then Decide Anyway.

There is a moment in every cricketer's life that stays with them forever.

A duck.

It is one of the loneliest walks in sport. No applause. No redemption. No time to explain. Just a quiet acceptance that today, you did not show up the way you wanted to.

But here is what most people miss.

For the longest time, I misunderstood failure. I thought it was a verdict. A final judgment on my ability. Something that defined who I was and what I was capable of becoming.

I was wrong.

If I look back at my life, I can see many ducks. Class 7. The school I had to leave. The cricket ground at DPS Vasant Kunj. The ICFAI result. The day I had to leave Pune. The phone call about the house being sold.

Each of those moments felt like the end of something. And in a way, they were. The end of certainty. The end of a version of myself that I had grown comfortable with.

But they were also something else.

They were the start of a different innings.

September 2006. I had just come back from Pune after one of the worst failures of my life. The journey home had been long and quiet. When I walked through the front door, I was met with something that hit me harder than I expected. The faces of my family. My father. My mother. My brother. All of them sad.

I went to the balcony and sat down. Alone. And then I felt someone sit down beside me.

My grandfather had earned the right to every word he ever said to me. He had been part of a family that left everything behind in Peshawar during Partition, watched a wealthy established life evaporate overnight, and arrived in a new city with nothing. He built a career from scratch, drove an autorickshaw in the evenings, and sold candles on weekends. He had lived through losses I was only beginning to imagine, and he had done all of it with a quiet dignity I had always admired without quite knowing how to put into words.

He looked at me sitting there, eyes red, shoulders heavy, staring at nothing. And he asked, very simply, "Why are you sad?"

"You know why," I said. I didn't have the energy to explain.

He nodded. He didn't push. He just sat there with me for a moment in the silence. And in that silence, I felt something ease. Not the problem. Not the pain. But the terrible feeling of being completely alone with it.

And then he spoke.

He told me that in life, there will always be failures. Some small, some very big. That is not something any of us get to avoid. It is simply part of the deal of being alive. He said this not as a warning but as a fact. The way you would tell someone that it rains in monsoon. Not to frighten them, just so they are not surprised when it does.

The failure itself, he said, is never really the point. The failure is just an event. It happens, it sits there for a while, and eventually, always, without exception, it passes. What time cannot move is your response to the problem. That stays with you. That becomes part of you. And that, only that, is what you actually have control over.

He told me there are two ways a person can respond when life knocks them down. The first is to face it bravely. Not pretending it isn't there, not minimising how much it hurts, but choosing, consciously, to carry it with your head up. And one day, when you are old and your grandchildren are sitting around you, you will look back at these tough moments. And you will feel something unexpected. Pride. Not pride that the problem happened. But pride that when it did, you faced it.

The second way is to sulk. To sit with the problem and make it bigger than yourself. The cruel irony of that path is that the problem still comes and goes on its own schedule. Sulking does not shorten it. The only thing that changes is you. You become smaller.

He looked at me steadily.

"Beta Bahadur Bano," he said. Be brave, always.

"The problem will always come. It will always go. What remains is only how you faced it. That is the only thing anyone, including you, will remember."

Then he was quiet. The kind of quiet that isn't empty but full.

If you had asked me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer would have been instant. No hesitation, no thinking, no weighing of options.

A cricketer.

Not because someone told me I should be. Not because it was sensible or practical. But because cricket was the only thing in my world that made complete, total, perfect sense. Cricket was not a hobby for me. It was an identity.

And I was doing well. Good enough to play for my school team. Good enough to be the opener. Good enough to be the vice-captain.

And then came June 2001. The Cibaca Cup. DPS Vasant Kunj.

My coach pulled me aside before we went out. He had the man of the match trophy in his hands and said, "Score a 70 today, Sumit. And this is yours."

I walked out as the opener, carrying all that confidence. And for a few deliveries, it was going well. Then Tapan Sir, the umpire, looked at me and said quietly, "Sumit, the ball is stopping out there. Be careful with the drives."

He meant it as advice. He was trying to help.

But I was seventeen years old. And those words landed in my mind and detonated.

From the very next ball, something changed in me that I couldn't see or name but could feel completely. My footwork stopped flowing. My hands became uncertain. I started second-guessing the delivery before I had even seen it properly.

I got out soon after. Not to a great ball. To my own doubt.

In five matches, I scored 21 runs.

I made a decision. I quit.

My coach did not tell me to go. No one sat me down and said this wasn't for me. I did all of that myself, entirely in my own head, based on one bad tournament and one piece of well-meaning advice that I had turned into a story about my own inadequacy. I never played a proper cricket match again.

The real failure of June 2001 was not scoring 21 runs in five matches. It was deciding, in the aftermath of a difficult tournament, that I already knew the ending of a story that had barely begun.

I did not quit because I wasn't good enough. I quit because I was afraid that if I stayed and worked through it, the flaw I had imagined might turn out to be real. It is so much easier to walk away on your own terms than to face down your own doubt and prove it wrong.

It felt like protection. It was actually surrender.

The thing fear does most efficiently is disguise itself as realism. It tells you that you are just being sensible, just facing the facts, just making a practical decision. And then it takes the thing you love most and quietly walks away with it while you stand there nodding, convinced you chose this.

I was reacting, not responding.

Because sometimes, it is not failure that ends your journey.

It is the decision you make right after it.

2020 was already a brutal year for the world before it became a brutal year for me personally.

One evening, I was sitting at home when something happened that I couldn't explain. I started feeling low. Not the way I felt low at the end of a hard day. This was different. There was something in my chest that didn't feel right. A tightness. My heart began to race without reason. I started sweating even though the room wasn't hot. My breathing wasn't quite right.

I told myself it would pass. I went to bed.

It didn't pass.

The next morning I went to the doctor. He listened carefully, asked a number of questions, and then said something I wasn't expecting.

"You had a panic attack. And I think you may be dealing with clinical depression."

I turned the word over in my mind the way you turn over a stone, not quite sure what you're looking at. I knew what depression was. I knew it as a concept, a clinical term, something that happened to people. I just had never, in any version of my future I had imagined, pictured it happening to me.

I was the positive one. The one who found the solution. The one people came to when they needed energy, when they needed someone to reframe a difficult situation. I was supposed to be holding others up, not sitting in a doctor's office being told that my own mind was struggling in ways I hadn't noticed.

I recovered. Slowly, unevenly. The years that followed were some of the best of my entrepreneurial life. The darkness of 2020 felt like a chapter that had closed.

I thought I had left it behind for good.

In 2024, it came back. And this time, it was worse.

In October 2024, I was on a flight to Mumbai with Vasudha and Amaayaa. Amaayaa was being cheerful the way small children are on flights, playing, giggling, full of energy. Any other time, that would have been the best two hours of my week. That day, I was unbearably restless. Irritated. Unable to sit still, unable to settle, unable to explain to myself or to Vasudha why my own daughter's happiness was making me want to climb out of my skin.

Those two hours were among the most disturbing of that period. Not because anything dramatic happened. But because I could feel something was very wrong with me, and I didn't know what to do with that knowledge.