Varun Chakravarthy , A incredible story
Varun chakravarthy not only a name now he is a traum card for team india captain rohit sharma . varun played a cameo in the 2014 Tamil movie ‘Jeeva’, starring Vishnu Vishal in the lead role. Little Varun would have known then that he was playing a cameo in a movie almost resembling the story of his life. The movie revolves around a talented cricketer, who with his modest means struggles to keep his dream alive while fighting the system.
Varun Chakravarthy
varun was born on 20 august 1991 in bidar , karnataka . his father vinod chakravarthy an its officer while his mother malini is a kannadiga . he didi schooling in chennai at kendriya bidyalaya .then varun palyed cricket their as a wicket keeper . But quit the sport to focus on academics. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in architecture from SRM University. At age 25, he gave up his job as an architect to pursue cricket professionally . Starting out as a pace bowler, a knee injury in early 2017 kept him out of action for six months, after which he turned to spin bowling. He made his List A debut for Tamil Nadu in the 2018–19 Vijay Hazare Trophy on 20 September 2018. Varun was leading wicket taker for tamil nadu in the 2018-19 vijay hazare trophy .then he made debut in ranji trohy at the same year .
In December 2018, he was bought by the Kings XI Punjab in the player auction for the 2019 Indian Premier League (IPL) at the price of 8.4 crores . and also he was released by the Kings XI Punjab ahead of the 2020 IPL auction. also read new rules in IPL 2025 for players .
In the 2020 IPL auction, he was bought by the Kolkata Knight Riders ahead of the 2020 Indian Premier League.On 24 October 2020, he took his first five-wicket haul in the IPL, with figures of 5 wickets for 20 runs, against the Delhi Capitals in Abu Dhabi. He was Kolkata Knight Riders’ highest wicket-taker in the 2021 IPL tournament . also read IPL 2025 match list Venue, Date And Time (Full Details) .
Varun untold story – As Varun admitted recently on a YouTube channel Fries With Potate, he did feel out of place in those years. “Obviously, when I was 26, I didn’t have a history of hitting the gym because I was in a 9-5 job earlier. Then I directly got into a cricket team and first three years I kept failing the fitness tests. If someone says, ‘You have a yo-yo test slotted for tomorrow’, I never used to get sleep. Have got panic attacks. People who don’t know the process will panic more. Of course, even now I have anxiety and pressure, but I know how to handle them.”
Varun’s journey is similar to that of Jack Iverson, who played five Tests for Australia in 1950 and 1951. A jackaroo in the mallees of Victoria, he participated in World War II in the Middle East before moving to Papua New Guinea where he learned to spin the ball by gripping it between his thumb and middle finger. Having first played club cricket for Melbourne CC in 1948, he would play Test cricket in 1951. Varun’s arc too is similarly impromptu. The changeover from an architect in 2016 to a mystery spinner in 2018 who got the IPL cap in 2019 happened in just three years.
For someone who wants to make suspense-thriller movies once he finishes his cricketing career, a rewind of his career would provide him with all the unpredictable twists.
Before he became a professional cricketer in 2017, for a year Varun played local tournaments because, “those were matches when somebody was batting, a random person would come and say if you hit a six, you will get Rs 500. If you hit a boundary Rs 300. It was giving me money,” he would recall. If not that, he would go searching for opportunities to bowl in the nets to league-level players. At one stage, he was a net bowler to former India opener Kris Srikkanth’s son Anirudha in the nets, who used to pay him Rs 500 for a session. With offers opening up in lower-division cricket, he would get a reality check when he knocked on the doors of the academies. “I was the odd one out because at every academy you will find only players below 20 years of age. I used to tell them, don’t teach me anything, just allow me to bowl for three hours. Because at that stage you can’t teach someone to how to play cricket so every day I would bowl 300 deliveries to prepare for the league cricket,” he says.
When an opportunity opened up in the second division, the team would stop pacer Varun from becoming a mystery spinner. “They didn’t take me, so I went to the fifth division (lowest in TNCA back then). Even there I started as a pacer and had just 8 wickets to show in 7 matches. But in the next game, in the middle of the game, I just ran in and started bowling spin and ended up with 28 wickets in 4 matches. And I was in the newspapers now,” Varun adds.
ALSO READ ; KKR Player List For IPL 2025: Complete List With Price
