quotes

“I derive a lot of my mental and my physical strength from my spiritual strength. If spirituality doesn’t teach you to speak up, what price are you paying? Speak up not for the heck of it but when desired. I’ve often been told that I’m a crusader kind of person. They say ‘you are in a absolute minority’ but I say, ‘No, I am, by the grace of God, in a majority of one’. ”

—Bishan Singh Bedi. 

“The challenge is that you should be making newer mistakes. Newer mistakes means you are learning.” 

—Sunil Subramanian, Ravichandran Ashwin’s mentor,  describes his evolution as an off-spinner. 

​”Every successful player has an equally great captain behind him.”

—Virender Sehwag. 

“In this modern age of living in limelight,  everybody wants to be a hero. People will bark,  let them bark,  they will look bad themselves. I will run my race. Till a junior comes and says ‘Lee,  I am beating you all the time’,  till I am winning Grand Slams,  I will continue to play. I had to earn it and others will also have to earn it. ”

—Leander Paes. 

“I don’t know how to fix an ancient civilization’s uncertain romance with sport. I have no idea how to build a sports culture. But I do know that among the best gifts you can offer an athlete is presence.” 

—Rohit Brijnath. 

“My body is my journal and my tattoos are my story.” 

—K L Rahul. 

“Yes,  vegetarianism is supposed to be healthy and all that,  but I have seen many fat,  unhealthy vegetarians to know that it is more about eating less and eating healthy,  than being a vegetarian or non-vegetarian.” 

—Sanjay Manjrekar. 

“In the last few years, somewhere down the line, we have lost the importance of physical movement. We have moved a lot more towards alphabetical literacy, numerical literacy and forgotten what the basics of physical literacy are. I think in our race to become more and more educated alphabetically,  we have lost the fundamental of physical movement and it brings us back to our early days when our own native games used to have so much physical literacy in them.”

—Pulella Gopichand. 

“Sport is fundamental if we want our happiness index to go up. The physical activity brings new brain cells. Sports, physical exercise  and education have a lot of synergy. Sport needs to be up there.” 

—Pulella Gopichand. 

“… as a player,  you are internally driven. It’s about you,  your body and mind working in unison on the court. As a coach,  it’s the same but in reverse—you take that drive and channel it onto the player.” 

—Pulella Gopichand.