PROFESSION ACTOR
HOBBY SPORTS
FOR A CRICKET agnostic like me, watching actor Saiyami Kher speak about pace bowling, reserve days, yorkers and off-stumps on Cricbuzz, where she’s been a host since 2023, is like listening to an indecipherable foreign language. Kher speaks it with such panache that one can almost imagine her first words as a toddler being something like ‘boundary’ or ‘innings’. Or, more likely, it was ‘Sachin’, because she can’t remember a time when she wasn’t a Tendulkar fan. For one of his matches, she got tickets in each stand of the stadium so that she could see him from every angle. “That’s how crazy a fan I am when it comes to live sports,” she once said on Cricbuzz, adding that she’s mostly a “north stand girl”, because that’s where the loudest cheering happens. Her biggest fan moment was when her manager got her a ticket in the pavilion where Tendulkar’s family was sitting. “I felt like I was in Disneyland,” she says with a smile.
She spoke to THE WEEK about her love for sports and watching it live. From Wimbledon and the Australian Open to the Boxing Day Test, her bucket list is full of ticked items. She spent 01.8 lakh for a ticket to watch the Cricket World Cup in Mumbai in 2011. “I earn money only so that I can blow it on watching live sports,” she says.
And guess the celebrity with whom she loves to geek out about cricket: Abhishek Bachchan. While they were shooting for Breathe: Into the Shadows, the IPL final was happening in Chennai. They kept hurrying the director to finish the shoot so that they could watch the final. Bachchan was planning to take a helicopter to Chennai and return the next day at 6am. Kher begged him to take her with him, but unfortunately they couldn’t fly out that day. Bachchan’s also a huge Tendulkar fan and they would spend hours on set discussing his technique and game until the director was forced to put an end to their banter.
Bowled over: Saiyami Kher plays cricket during promotion of her film, Ghoomer | PTI
Incidentally, Breathe is not her last outing with Bachchan. They also co-starred in the R. Balki film, Ghoomer (2023), which she says is one of her favourites as it let her combine her two passions―acting and sports. In the film, she plays a promising cricketer who loses her right hand in a car accident on the eve of her international cricketing debut. She’s absolutely crushed, until a failed Test cricketer Padam Singh Sodhi (played by Bachchan), enters her life and trains her to become a left-handed bowler. She masters a unique spin technique that gets her a spot on the Indian women’s team. The film received rave reviews and three nominations at the 69th Filmfare Awards. “It was the best experience of my life,” says Kher. “Right outside Balki sir’s office, they kept these nets for me to practise. I still go there and play cricket.”
There is a scene in Ghoomer when Kher, after losing her arm, gets a call by the selectors of the women’s cricket team. She turns to her grandmother (played by Shabana Azmi) and gushes, “Dadi, they’re calling me for the Indian camp.” There is no expression on Azmi’s face. “Why are you underacting,” asks Kher’s character, Anina. “Please show some emotion.” To which Azmi quips, “I’m a Federer fan. I don’t show emotion.”
Kher, too, is a Federer fan. Maybe that’s why, over Zoom, there is a steadfastness about her. She is both warm and aloof at the same time, as though she is holding something of herself back. There are only two places where she lets herself be unhindered―on the playing field and in front of a camera. Kher’s love for sports began during her growing-up years in Nashik. She started playing badminton at the age of seven and started participating in tournaments a year later. “Because Nashik is such an outdoorsy place, I learnt how to swim in lakes and would often go trekking and mountaineering,” she says. “I was also obsessed with cricket.”
She won her first under-10 district tournament at the age of eight. The prize was 0800, with which she bought her parents a cordless phone. She remembers how it used to get really cold in the mornings in Nashik. Still, she would wake up at 5am every day to train. If she was late, her coach would hit her on the shins. She got admission to St. Xavier’s in Mumbai on sports quota, but over there, she discovered her second love.
“I started doing a lot of theatre in college, because St. Xavier’s has a rich theatre culture,” she says. “I was very shy, so acting was an outlet to express what I could not otherwise and be somebody who I was not in real life.”
In a way her love for sports has been like a dress rehearsal, getting her ready for the main act. “When things don’t work out with your films, so much of bitterness starts creeping in,” she says. “Sports has taught me, in such times, to just put my head down and work harder.” Or, as Bachchan’s character puts it more poetically in Ghoomer, “This life is not a game of logic. It’s a game of magic…. But the magic only happens when you are 100 per cent ready for it. You have to earn the magic. Otherwise, end of play.”