Virat Kohli- The Loneliest Man On Earth

I watched a cricket match after a long time. Maybe the last time when I was regularly watching the game was when Sachin-Sehwag used to play. I thought nothing could match them, but then today, I watched Virat playing.

Sports can be seen from many different perspectives. Is there ugliness of ultra-nationalism in it and or the also the beauty of the human struggle to achive something? What I find interesting in the sport is the human philosophy of defeat and triumph. Individuals touching the peak of success, then falling flat into low phases of self-doubt and then bouncing back to achieve something again. These are mental struggles that most of us go through in our lifetime. What is interesting about the sport is that this existential struggle is being telecasted on the screens placed inside our bedrooms.

I read that Virat Kohli has opened up about his mental health challenges.

"It's not a great feeling to wake up knowing that you won't be able to score runs... I felt I was the loneliest guy in the world," he said on a podcast with English commentator Mark Nicholas in February.

But then there comes a game where he picks up the gloves, walks inside the stadium and wipes away his inner demon. As the team wins, he screams and breaks into tears. Those tears pehaps perhaps hold within it all the days of mental burden, and cruel voices in his head that tell you every day "your best days are now over."

On the canvas of the cricket field, he comes out as champion. There is no guarantee that he might not feel again as.

"the loneliest man on earth," but now, perhaps once he has seen the phase and experienced that there is a way out, then maybe he can be more prepared to not feel absolutely hopeless. The pain and beauty in this struggle is what makes the sport humane.

Virat Kohli is rightly titled, King. A real Übermensch in the Nietzschean sense.