Book Review: My Summer of Cricket by Nikhil Kulkarni

Cricket in India is inexplicable to outsiders but needs no explanation for those raised with it. It is not a sport so much as a shared religion, a common language, a thread that runs through every generation, every household, and every memory of childhood in this country. Other sports exist, of course, and some of them are even watched occasionally, but cricket occupies a different category entirely, the way the sky occupies a different category from everything else beneath it. You do not choose to love cricket in India. You simply open your eyes one day and discover that you already do.

Nikhil Kulkarni opened his eyes in a village in North Karnataka, where cricket arrived not through a television screen but through a radio, which in some ways is the more intimate and more formative way to receive the game. Radio cricket demands imagination. It asks you to build the ground, the crowd, the light, and the tension entirely in your own mind from the raw material of a commentator's voice, and what it builds there tends to stay for a very long time. Kulkarni carried what that radio built in him across three decades and across continents, from Karnataka to Sydney, and My Summer of Cricket is the account of what a love like that looks like when it is finally given its full expression.

Kulkarni's pilgrimage in the summer of 2024-25 involved attending every match day of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy Test series between India and Australia in Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney. Not some matches. Not most matches. Every match day, in every city, for the entire duration of one of cricket's most storied bilateral contests. It is the kind of thing that sounds slightly mad when described in a sentence and makes complete sense when you have spent close to two hundred pages understanding the man who did it.

What Kulkarni has written is not, it should be said immediately, a cricket book in the conventional sense. There are no dense statistical analyses here, no tactical breakdowns of field placements or bowling changes, no attempt to explain the mechanics of the game to those unfamiliar with it. What there is instead is something considerably rarer and considerably more valuable, which is an honest account of what it actually feels like to love cricket the way a certain kind of Indian loves it, with the whole of themselves, across their entire life, in ways that are sometimes difficult to justify and impossible to abandon. He writes about the sleepless nights spent watching overseas tours in the small hours; the heartbreaks that arrived with a disproportionate personal weight; and the moments of joy so complete and so sudden that they seemed to justify every hour of waiting that came before them. For anyone who grew up in India in the 1990s watching this same game, none of this requires introduction or elaboration. It is simply the truth of how things were.

The passages about Sachin Tendulkar are, predictably and rightly, among the most affecting in the book, not because Kulkarni reaches for grand statements about greatness but because he grounds his account of what Tendulkar meant in the specific, lived experience of watching him from the beginning and being present, in person, for his final Test match. For a generation of Indian fans, Sachin was never simply a cricketer but a fixed point around which an entire emotional world was organized, and Kulkarni understands this phenomenon so completely that writing about it comes naturally to him rather than feeling like an obligation.

The Border-Gavaskar Trophy sections have the quality of a travel memoir running alongside the cricket narrative, and this combination gives the book a texture and a warmth that pure sports writing rarely achieves. Kulkarni moves through Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney with the particular attentiveness of someone who is there for the cricket but cannot help noticing everything around it: the cities, the stadiums, the strangers in the stands who become temporary family the way only a cricket crowd can manage, and the chance encounters with commentators and writers who have shaped how his generation understood the game. The book includes photographs from the journey, which root the narrative in something genuinely felt and genuinely lived rather than merely remembered.

What the book understands most deeply, and what gives it its quiet, lasting resonance, is that cricket for the Indian diaspora is not simply entertainment but a form of belonging, a way of remaining connected to something essential about where you came from even when you are very far from it. Kulkarni is an Indian who has made his life in Australia, and cricket is the language where both identities meet and converse without conflict. For the millions of South Asians living outside India, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in the Middle East, and in North America, this particular understanding of what the game means and what it does will need no translation whatsoever.

My Summer of Cricket is a warm, generous, and quietly moving debut that reads, as the best memoirs do, less like someone else's story and more like a version of your own. 

Title: My Summer of Cricket by Nikhil Kulkarni.

Published by: Notion Press. Also, available on Amazon and Flipkart.