Former cricketer Kapil Dev is ready for a new innings

Cricket legend Kapil Dev is now stepping up to the pitch — for a whole different ballgame. This time, he will be making an attempt at acting, as he steps into the full-fledged role of the Sutradhar on the upcoming show Sumit Sambhal Lega (the Indian version of Everybody Loves Raymond).

As Dev prepared for his new innings, he took some time out of his busy schedule to sit down with The Mumbai Age for a chat. Excerpts from the conversation:

How cricket is a whole different ballgame now

While the younger lot of cricketers get a lot of exposure to acting early in their careers thanks to brand endorsements and the IPL, Dev admitted, “All this wasn’t there during my time… but it’s a good thing, today’s cricketers get a lot more opportunities. You have to move with the times, you can’t stick to the old times and refuse to change. Some may see it as a distraction from the game, but if you can balance both, then why not?”

As for the trend of sports adopting the league model, and celebrities owning teams, be it in cricket or kabaddi, Dev was encouraging. “The important part is popularising sports, and youngsters do connect with these actors,” he pointed out.

On his narrator’s role on Sumit Sambhal Lega

The cricketer said that he himself was astonished when he was approached by the show’s makers to play the Sutradhar. “When I was approached for this role, I asked them, ‘Why do you want me to do this? This is not my cup of tea.’ But then they told me you just have to be yourself, not play a particular role, so that’s how I agreed to it,” Dev told us.

About his daughter’s disinterest in sports

Dev’s voice took on a fond note indeed when we asked him if his daughter took after him and was inclined towards sports. “Now she is a teenager, so all her time is for her friends,” he responded wryly. “There is no point getting angry over it — any time she spends with us is a bonus! She has no interest in cricket. She was born after I retired, so for many years in fact, she didn’t know what her father did. For a long time, she thought her father plays golf — because that’s what I played after retirement! Then she grew up, and through YouTube, realised that her dad is a cricketer. She had certain reservations about sports. It’s something we tried to figure out for a long time… But recently she saw a test match at Lords, which we won, and she was over the moon. She’s finally opening up towards sports now. But she has always had a fear of sports; she isn’t into sports at all. She enjoys creative things like cooking and handicrafts a lot more.” 

His own marriage

While his TV show is a wry commentary on the life of an Average Joe after marriage, Dev said that his own experiences were not entirely different. “My family comes from a village in Haryana and my wife was modern,” he recounted. “So my mother would say ‘yeh baal kati (short haired girl) ko kaha se laya’. It took her time to adjust, as she had never cooked and we have both had to adjust in some ways. There were times where I had to play the mediator… but every man goes through it. It’s always the woman who has to adjust more. Now-a-days some girls think, ‘I will change my in-laws overnight’ but that doesn’t happen and it causes problems in the house. When two families come together — no matter how similar — there will be some differences between them that call for adjustments to be made. That is something I feel young couples should be careful about.”