Update: In an inspired piece of bowling, Saurabh Netravalkar managed to get scalps of both Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma, the former for a golden duck. Kohli nicked one outside off stump as Saurabh Netravalkar as the Oracle techie got the USA off to a dream start. He added the cherry on the cake by also dismissing his former Mumbai senior and current India captain Rohit Sharma.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
These lines from The New Colossus, the 1883 poem by Emma Lazarus, are etched in bronze on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal and stand as a promise of the American Dream at the heart of the message for any immigrant coming to the US.
One of those stories that took a roundabout route involved Santiago Munez, the fictional protagonist of Goal: The Dream Begins (2005), an illegal immigrant from Los Angeles who travels to the Premier League and becomes a big-time ball player with Newcastle United. The tale of an illegal American immigrant from Los Angeles crossing the oceans to become a big-game ball player was a little different from the one promised by the words etched on the Statue of Liberty, but 19 years later, Saurabh Netravalkar, not an illegal immigrant per se, seems to be living the same dream but with whipped cream on top.
Netravalkar is living both the American dream (becoming a professionally successful migrant in the Shining City on the Top of the Hill) and the Indian dream (beating Pakistan in a crunch match) at the same time. Next up he faces off against the nation he represented as a youngster, against team members with whom he has shared the dressing room.
Netravalkar’s story is remarkably amazing.
As a profile in The Times put it: “Such is the fine balance America’s newest — and perhaps most unlikely — sporting hero has had to strike to keep his cricket dreams alive that software engineer Saurabh Netravalkar has even been known to spend the lunch interval during club matches hunched over his work laptop, either coding or in a meeting with colleagues via video call. At last, however, all those hours spent juggling the demands of a full-time job with tech giant Oracle while simultaneously playing professional sports have finally paid off.”
When he’s not bowling at Pakistan with the fury of an engineer asked to do a task without a valid JIRA ticket, Netravalkar’s day job is as a Principal Engineer at Oracle. And, as if being an international-level cricketer and a coder par excellence wasn’t enough to brag about, Netravalkar is also a talented Ukulele player and married to Devi Snighda Upalla, who also happens to be a Principal Oracle Engineer and a talented Kathak dancer whose Bolly X Fitness program is quite the rage. It would appear that talent and luck are not democratically allocated when it’s being handed out either by a higher being or evolution.
Netravalkar’s meteoric rise as an Indian-American migrant comes at a time when folks of Indian origin can be found on both sides of the political spectrum as well as the upper echelons of American society with the exception of sports. It’s fair to say that of all immigrant groups – turning up on American shores for a better life – none have made their mark on America much like Indian-Americans. They are the highest-earning minority group. In politics, the so-called Samosa Caucus – a term to describe a modest number of Indian-Americans in Congress – has exploded on both sides of politics. On the Republican side, you’ve Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley, while desis in the Democrats setup includes the vice-president Kamala Harris and several others serving in the House of Representatives. In business, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella are the headliners among 21 billion-dollar companies that are led by Indian Americans. Even among Nobel Laureates, you have the likes of Amartya Sen, Abhijit Banerjee, and Venki Ramakrishnan but none of them appear to have ticked more than one box like Netravalkar.
As one Instagram user put it: “Bro casually sings, works as an engineer full time, and owns Pakistan for a hobby.”
So, how did Saurabh Netravalkar become the poster child of the Indian and American dream? It all started in the greatest cricketing city on the planet: Mumbai.
The abode of many cricketing legends including Sachin Tendulkar, Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri, and current India captain Rohit Sharma, many youngsters grow up in the city with the hope of playing for India.
Mumbai has won the most Ranji trophies with 42 wins in 88 seasons. The wide gulf in class is evident from the fact that the number 2 spot is held by Karnataka who have won the domestic tournament 8 times. But Mumbai’s success can also be a hindrance and it’s perhaps the hardest team to break into for any player. Even Sachin Tendulkar’s son Arjun – a nifty fast bowler – had to switch allegiances to Goa to get regular game time.
But the odds didn’t appear to deter Netravalkar who came into the limelight in 2009 when he rattled Yuvraj Singh’s stump at the National Cricket Academy in Bengaluru. Yuvraj by then had already become part of Indian cricketing folklore after his stupendous India debut in the 2000 ICC Knock Out Trophy when he scored 84 unbeaten in 80 runs against an Aussie pace attack consisting of Bret Lee, Glen McGrath, and Jason Gillespie.
Fortune seemed to be smiling on Netravalkar when he was called up for the BCCI Corporate Trophy where he shared the dressing room with the likes of Yuvraj Singh, Robin Uthappa, and Suresh Raina, while the opposing camp had Messrs Virat Kohli and MS Dhoni. He also had a superlative 2010 U-19 Cricket World Cup, where he was the leading wicket-taker for India. However, breaking into the senior setup proved more difficult. At that time, the Mumbai squad was teeming with pacers like Ajit Agarkar, Zaheer Khan, and others.
Taking a call to give his cricket career a boost, he missed a full semester to focus on the game. Netravalkar made his Ranji debut in 2013 but being in and out of the team meant he bid adieu to the game he loved and took the more practical route of going back to his studies.
Fate appeared to have shut the cricket door forever when Cornell University in New York in 2015 offered him a scholarship after being impressed with his player analysis app called CricDecode (If you search, you can still find the app’s code on the developer platform GitHub).
After he graduated from Cornell, he was offered a job by Oracle in San Francisco and having left his cricket kit back home, started playing recreationally on weekends to fit in.
Fate intervened when the ICC changed its rules – from four years to three years – for residents to represent their adopted nations. An H1B card holder, Netravalkar broke into the US squad in 2018 and even captained the team for three years.
Like all cricket-crazy fans in India, Netrvalkar and his father Naresh watched many matches together in the 1990s and 2000s. His favorite bowlers were Wasim Akram, Chaminda Vaas, and Zaheer Khan. Perhaps those fantasies would have remained a dream had it not been for the US co-hosting the T20 Cricket World Cup as Netravalkar showed that he had what it takes to face off against the big boys. Incidentally, in 2010, in the Under-19 Cricket World Cup, Netravalkar faced heartbreak when Team India lost to the Pakistan team that had a young Babar Azam.
On June 12, Netravalkar will face off against players he knows from a lifetime ago, whose exploits he might have followed on the news or social media.
While Virat Kohli was in the opposing camp in the BCCI Corporate Championship, current captain Rohit Sharma was a senior in the Mumbai squad. Meanwhile, Surya Kumar Yadav, a batsman who has redefined T20 cricket with his avant-garde batting style was a contemporary in the Mumbai dressing room.
Opposing coach Rahul Dravid, who watched him bowl the Super Over against Pakistan, is also someone he bowled to at the National Cricket Academy many years ago.
In fact, there’s an almost epochal tinge to Netravalkar’s exponential rise in the first T20 tournament held in the land that Columbus thought he had discovered, and the one he actually discovered as Columbus as the USA faces off against the land that Columbus hoped to discover. That at the heart of the story would be a young man from Mumbai in US colours makes this an even greater tale.
In the vintage video game Cricket ’97, the sagacious Richie Benaud had a line that went: “You know not much is wrong with the world when you can hear the sound of leather hitting the willow.” For a long time, the United States was one nation where the sound of willow and leather hitting was missing (unless one counts baseball) but all that looks set to change after this World Cup. Americans, not just the diaspora, appear to have fully embraced the sport and amid the heart of that has been an Oracle engineer simultaneously living the American and Indian dream. There are engineers who play cricket and cricketers who are engineers, but there’s hardly anyone who is so proficient at both.
In fact, there’s a video on his Instagram where Netravalkar, while watching the India vs Pakistan game says in chaste Marathi that would make even South Bombay residents stop in their tracks: “Definitely come on June 12 to support us on the ground.” Many fans – irrespective of their nationality or giving a fig about the Tebbit Test – would be forgiven if, for a small moment, they decide to back the young lad from Mumbai in US colours who dared to dream as he bowls against the likes of Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
These lines from The New Colossus, the 1883 poem by Emma Lazarus, are etched in bronze on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal and stand as a promise of the American Dream at the heart of the message for any immigrant coming to the US.
One of those stories that took a roundabout route involved Santiago Munez, the fictional protagonist of Goal: The Dream Begins (2005), an illegal immigrant from Los Angeles who travels to the Premier League and becomes a big-time ball player with Newcastle United. The tale of an illegal American immigrant from Los Angeles crossing the oceans to become a big-game ball player was a little different from the one promised by the words etched on the Statue of Liberty, but 19 years later, Saurabh Netravalkar, not an illegal immigrant per se, seems to be living the same dream but with whipped cream on top.
Netravalkar is living both the American dream (becoming a professionally successful migrant in the Shining City on the Top of the Hill) and the Indian dream (beating Pakistan in a crunch match) at the same time. Next up he faces off against the nation he represented as a youngster, against team members with whom he has shared the dressing room.
Netravalkar’s story is remarkably amazing.
As a profile in The Times put it: “Such is the fine balance America’s newest — and perhaps most unlikely — sporting hero has had to strike to keep his cricket dreams alive that software engineer Saurabh Netravalkar has even been known to spend the lunch interval during club matches hunched over his work laptop, either coding or in a meeting with colleagues via video call. At last, however, all those hours spent juggling the demands of a full-time job with tech giant Oracle while simultaneously playing professional sports have finally paid off.”
When he’s not bowling at Pakistan with the fury of an engineer asked to do a task without a valid JIRA ticket, Netravalkar’s day job is as a Principal Engineer at Oracle. And, as if being an international-level cricketer and a coder par excellence wasn’t enough to brag about, Netravalkar is also a talented Ukulele player and married to Devi Snighda Upalla, who also happens to be a Principal Oracle Engineer and a talented Kathak dancer whose Bolly X Fitness program is quite the rage. It would appear that talent and luck are not democratically allocated when it’s being handed out either by a higher being or evolution.
Netravalkar’s meteoric rise as an Indian-American migrant comes at a time when folks of Indian origin can be found on both sides of the political spectrum as well as the upper echelons of American society with the exception of sports. It’s fair to say that of all immigrant groups – turning up on American shores for a better life – none have made their mark on America much like Indian-Americans. They are the highest-earning minority group. In politics, the so-called Samosa Caucus – a term to describe a modest number of Indian-Americans in Congress – has exploded on both sides of politics. On the Republican side, you’ve Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley, while desis in the Democrats setup includes the vice-president Kamala Harris and several others serving in the House of Representatives. In business, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella are the headliners among 21 billion-dollar companies that are led by Indian Americans. Even among Nobel Laureates, you have the likes of Amartya Sen, Abhijit Banerjee, and Venki Ramakrishnan but none of them appear to have ticked more than one box like Netravalkar.
As one Instagram user put it: “Bro casually sings, works as an engineer full time, and owns Pakistan for a hobby.”
So, how did Saurabh Netravalkar become the poster child of the Indian and American dream? It all started in the greatest cricketing city on the planet: Mumbai.
The abode of many cricketing legends including Sachin Tendulkar, Sunil Gavaskar, Ravi Shastri, and current India captain Rohit Sharma, many youngsters grow up in the city with the hope of playing for India.
Mumbai has won the most Ranji trophies with 42 wins in 88 seasons. The wide gulf in class is evident from the fact that the number 2 spot is held by Karnataka who have won the domestic tournament 8 times. But Mumbai’s success can also be a hindrance and it’s perhaps the hardest team to break into for any player. Even Sachin Tendulkar’s son Arjun – a nifty fast bowler – had to switch allegiances to Goa to get regular game time.
But the odds didn’t appear to deter Netravalkar who came into the limelight in 2009 when he rattled Yuvraj Singh’s stump at the National Cricket Academy in Bengaluru. Yuvraj by then had already become part of Indian cricketing folklore after his stupendous India debut in the 2000 ICC Knock Out Trophy when he scored 84 unbeaten in 80 runs against an Aussie pace attack consisting of Bret Lee, Glen McGrath, and Jason Gillespie.
Fortune seemed to be smiling on Netravalkar when he was called up for the BCCI Corporate Trophy where he shared the dressing room with the likes of Yuvraj Singh, Robin Uthappa, and Suresh Raina, while the opposing camp had Messrs Virat Kohli and MS Dhoni. He also had a superlative 2010 U-19 Cricket World Cup, where he was the leading wicket-taker for India. However, breaking into the senior setup proved more difficult. At that time, the Mumbai squad was teeming with pacers like Ajit Agarkar, Zaheer Khan, and others.
Taking a call to give his cricket career a boost, he missed a full semester to focus on the game. Netravalkar made his Ranji debut in 2013 but being in and out of the team meant he bid adieu to the game he loved and took the more practical route of going back to his studies.
Fate appeared to have shut the cricket door forever when Cornell University in New York in 2015 offered him a scholarship after being impressed with his player analysis app called CricDecode (If you search, you can still find the app’s code on the developer platform GitHub).
After he graduated from Cornell, he was offered a job by Oracle in San Francisco and having left his cricket kit back home, started playing recreationally on weekends to fit in.
Fate intervened when the ICC changed its rules – from four years to three years – for residents to represent their adopted nations. An H1B card holder, Netravalkar broke into the US squad in 2018 and even captained the team for three years.
Like all cricket-crazy fans in India, Netrvalkar and his father Naresh watched many matches together in the 1990s and 2000s. His favorite bowlers were Wasim Akram, Chaminda Vaas, and Zaheer Khan. Perhaps those fantasies would have remained a dream had it not been for the US co-hosting the T20 Cricket World Cup as Netravalkar showed that he had what it takes to face off against the big boys. Incidentally, in 2010, in the Under-19 Cricket World Cup, Netravalkar faced heartbreak when Team India lost to the Pakistan team that had a young Babar Azam.
On June 12, Netravalkar will face off against players he knows from a lifetime ago, whose exploits he might have followed on the news or social media.
While Virat Kohli was in the opposing camp in the BCCI Corporate Championship, current captain Rohit Sharma was a senior in the Mumbai squad. Meanwhile, Surya Kumar Yadav, a batsman who has redefined T20 cricket with his avant-garde batting style was a contemporary in the Mumbai dressing room.
Opposing coach Rahul Dravid, who watched him bowl the Super Over against Pakistan, is also someone he bowled to at the National Cricket Academy many years ago.
In fact, there’s an almost epochal tinge to Netravalkar’s exponential rise in the first T20 tournament held in the land that Columbus thought he had discovered, and the one he actually discovered as Columbus as the USA faces off against the land that Columbus hoped to discover. That at the heart of the story would be a young man from Mumbai in US colours makes this an even greater tale.
In the vintage video game Cricket ’97, the sagacious Richie Benaud had a line that went: “You know not much is wrong with the world when you can hear the sound of leather hitting the willow.” For a long time, the United States was one nation where the sound of willow and leather hitting was missing (unless one counts baseball) but all that looks set to change after this World Cup. Americans, not just the diaspora, appear to have fully embraced the sport and amid the heart of that has been an Oracle engineer simultaneously living the American and Indian dream. There are engineers who play cricket and cricketers who are engineers, but there’s hardly anyone who is so proficient at both.
In fact, there’s a video on his Instagram where Netravalkar, while watching the India vs Pakistan game says in chaste Marathi that would make even South Bombay residents stop in their tracks: “Definitely come on June 12 to support us on the ground.” Many fans – irrespective of their nationality or giving a fig about the Tebbit Test – would be forgiven if, for a small moment, they decide to back the young lad from Mumbai in US colours who dared to dream as he bowls against the likes of Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma.