Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma shared photos of their wedding last December with millions of fans. Credit:Instagram

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Virat Kohli is a big star. Not a big star as we would understand it in Australia. Not the kind of star who wears sunglasses and hides behind a newspaper when he goes to a cafe in Mumbai. In Mumbai, the captain of the Indian national cricket team does not step out – at least, not without a Pope-like entourage in tow. He's a huge deal in a country where cricket is both a kind of religion and a barometer of national pride (even though Kohli personally finds the intense attention alarming and embarrassing at times). So who is this man – and why are Indian cricketers like rock stars? We consulted former Indian cricketer Aakash Chopra and Age cricket writer Jon Pierik to help toggle between the legend and the man. Who is Virat Kohli? “Virat is a very passionate Indian,” says Aakash Chopra, “who’s in love with a sport called cricket and is driven to achieve excellence – and also he is winning a lot of games for his country.”


Even though hockey is the official national sport of India, it's cricket that has been weaving itself into the DNA of the place since the British imported it in the 18th and 19th centuries. “They say it is a religion," says Chopra, “and yes, it is – and a little more.” The game has evolved with the huge changes that have swept India, including independence from the British in 1947, to become a magnet for the glamorous and powerful. “Cricket in India is a powerful tool,” wrote commentator Sharda Ugra, “and everything depends on who chooses to wield it.” A host of Bollywood stars have interests in the Indian Premier League (IPL), which is India's professional Twenty20 league, including matinee idol Shah Rukh Khan who co-owns the Kolkata Knight Riders. With its dancers and fireworks and fast-paced play, the format itself feels like a Bollywood extravaganza. Kohli's upbringing was not especially glamorous. The youngest of three children from a middle-class family in Delhi, he joined the first intake of West Delhi Cricket Academy when he was nine. His father, Prem, a criminal lawyer, drove him to practice every day. When Prem Kohli died one night in December 2006, his son was just 18. “From the very beginning he taught me how to work hard,” Kohli said on Father's Day years later, “to have ultimate belief in my own hard work and not look anywhere for favours. That lesson is the essence of my life now. ”


Aakash Chopra played cricket with Kohli about 10 years ago. “Even back then he had a lot of self-belief and, yes, aggression, but you could see the confidence oozing out – that he is pretty sure of who he is and where he wanted to be. And that passion never really died down.” Apart from having risen through the ranks to be captaining his 44th Test for India right now in Perth, Kohli is also one of the team's most successful captains. And he is regarded as the world’s finest batsman right now. World's finest batsman – says who? Cricket greats Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting, Michael Vaughan and Brian Lara are among those who have lauded Kohli for his batting prowess in recent times. Aakash Chopra concurs. “I honestly feel that he is the best batsman in the world right now,” Chopra says. “And he has the potential to, actually, whenever he retires, to be one of the finest the world has ever seen.” From an objective standpoint, Kohli is unequivocally ranked the top batsmen right now by the world's governing body of cricket, the International Cricket Council (ICC). As Age sports number cruncher Paul Sakkal puts it, the ICC rankings tally the success of each player over the past 12 months. These are based on a series of calculations leading to a sophisticated moving average and with no human intervention.


There are many measures of a cricketer's success; another is that Kohli already has the 20th-best batting average in the history of Test cricket, sitting at an average of 53.96 in his 126 innings. To put this in perspective, Kohli's current Test average is marginally superior to the career numbers of Australian greats Ricky Ponting (51.85) and Greg Chappell (53.86). Kohli reacts to the dismissal of Usman Khawaja on day two of the first Test in Adelaide. Credit:AAP So he hits a lot of runs – what about his style? “His cover drives are the best in the world,” says Jon Pierik, “as are his whips through mid-wicket with his soft wrists.” A cover drive is one of cricket's most graceful shots, described by the India Times as “gentlemanly”. Deceptively difficult to execute, it requires spot-on timing and wristwork. The batsman steps forward, head down, and sends the ball rocketing. “He's adjusted over the years to playing the short ball really well,” says Pierik. “He's equally at home on the spinning decks of India as he is on the pace-friendly conditions of Johannesburg.” “Some players go for weird, funky shots in Test cricket that they've picked up from Twenty20. Virat is a traditional technician across formats – but he can lift the tempo when required.


“He's a brilliant fieldsman too – quick, with a good arm – and he inspires his team with moments of brilliance such as a throw to hit the stumps from mid-field, runnning out his opponent. “He’s also brought far more professionalism to his teammates. He’s an obsessive trainer – he loves posting stuff on social media about lifting weights – he’s a fitness fanatic in terms of mind and body and he’s demanded far greater levels of fitness from his team. They train with far greater intensity than ever before.” Kohli in Adelaide for the first Test. Credit:AAP Why the 'super-duper' fame? The extent of his fame is partly a matter of the numbers: when you are famous in India, you are famous with one-fifth of the world's people (India is projected to have more people than China by 2024). As with his game, his fame is about timing: Kohli's moment in the spotlight has dovetailed with the explosion of internet access in India, particularly in the past couple of years. India has 294 million Facebook users, more than any other nation including the US with 204 million, according to Statista; 37 million of them follow Kohli. Only the likes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and actor Priyanka Chopra have more Facebook fans. He is ranked number 11 in ESPN's World Fame 100 list of athletes in 2018. (Soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo is first and basketballer LeBron James second.) A keen gamer, he also features in a range of online games in India with names such as Virat Super Cricket. Demographics play into it too. While any cricketer in India – especially the God of Cricket, former Indian captain Sachin Tendulkar – elicits unbridled adulation, 30-year-old Kohli has youth on his side. Half of India's 1.3 billion people are younger than 25 (and 65 per cent are younger than 35). In 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 compared with 37 in China.


Consider the gravitational pull for the more than half-a-billion young Indians – many of them part of a burgeoning, aspirational middle class – of a cricketer such as Kohli, a self-made, uber-success story and trendsetter with his “cool” tattoos and facial hair, love of online gaming, fast cars (including Audis, which he endorses), family and clean living. Add to this X factor-ness his ability to wield a selfie stick with almost as much skill as a cricket bat and multiply it by his disarming propensity to post social media tributes to the women in his life – his mother, sister and wife – and to support women's empowerment in India. “Everyone should be a feminist.” Another day at the office: Kohli takes a seflie at a Wrogn store launch in Hyderabad. Credit:Virat Kohli Then consider this: the other big milestone Kohli celebrated during the first Test in Adelaide in the summer of 2018-19 was the first anniversary of his wedding to Anushka Sharma, film producer, fashion doyen and Bollywood megastar. As the story goes, in a nation of hundreds of ethnic groups, where 22 languages are spoken and a caste system retains some sway, two things are widely loved: Bollywood and cricket. When Kohli and Sharma tied the knot in a private ceremony in Tuscany in 2018 it was not the first marriage of a cricketer and a Bollywood star but it certainly struck a chord with young Indians. While the English have Posh and Becks, India has … #Virushka. How rich is he? Kohli earned $33 million ($US24 million) as of May, according to Forbes magazine. He is the only Indian and the only cricketer to make Forbes' 2018 list of the 100 highest-paid sportsmen in the world, at number 83. His earnings from playing cricket include $3.6 million ($US2.6 million) in salary and match fees to captain the Royal Challengers Bangalore, a team in the IPL, for the couple of months a year of the competition. The IPL is the second-highest-paying sports league in the world, according to this year's survey from Sports Intelligence. (The US National Basketball Association is the highest-paid league and Major League Baseball is third.) His endorsements add up to nearly $28 million ($US20 million), Forbes estimates. In India, he is the face of everything from Colgate- Palmolive, Oakley and Puma to Audi, Uber and Herbalife. It's clear from his social media posts that he is a face of fashion brand Wrogn (slogan: Be Your Own Hero), a men’s fragrance (made in France, natch) and a mens' shoe brand (slogan: Best Foot Forward). So the man is quite well off – but apparently not in an unreconstructed way. He reportedly opted not to renew a lucrative endorsement deal with a softdrink company last year, for example, saying he would not promote something that he would not himself consume. How does he represent a 'New India'? After what he has called a “chubby” start to his career, Kohli follows a strict fitness and diet regimen, becoming a vegan this year. “I don’t know exactly the reason why or how,” says Chopra, “but one thing is for sure, if he is doing it, there is a solid cricketing logic as to why he’s doing it.” Clearly mindful of his influence, Kohli's mix of social media messages to his fans include exhortations to exercise and, on International Women's Day in 2016, an apology on behalf of men: “Sorry for the jerks, the cat-callers, the stalkers. Don't let them ruin it for the rest of us. Happy Women's Day.” He has condemned the view of women “as inferiors” in India and posted a video on Twitter in which he says women are “better than equal”. On International Women's Day this year, he thanked his mother for looking after the family through tough times and Sharma – a producer as well as an actor – for “standing up for changing norms”. And then there is the collective goodwill of Virushka. One tweet posted by Kolhi shows Sharma having words with a driver she has spotted littering out the window of a luxury car in Mumbai. “If you see something wrong happening like this,” writes Kohli, “do the same & spread awareness.” On a trip from Adelaide to Perth in the summer of 2018-19, the couple were reported to have given up their business class seats – which Sharma had apparently paid for as part of a wedding anniversary gesture – to give more space to a couple of India's long-legged fast bowlers. All of which is to say that Kohli, Sharma and Virushka all represent a fresh kind of message. “He is what’s termed New India,” says Pierik. “This began under Sourav Ganguly, the former Indian captain, in the early 2000s. He really got under the skin of [then Australian captain] Steve Waugh. He was the start of the [post-colonial] 'we’re not copping this from you guys any more' approach.” Kohli's distinctive fame is “a reflection of how a new age of modern young Indian is”, says Chopra. “The modern young Indian – irrespective of their profession – they are confident beasts. They do believe that if they want to live a certain way, they have every right to live a certain way, and also a belief and confidence in doing things differently.” “He is absolutely super-duper famous,” says Chopra. “I don’t think he likes it this way – nobody actually likes that kind of intrusion in his private life – but I don’t think he can avoid it. He has made peace with that, this is how it is going to be. Like it or hate it, it is part of the package.” Kohli in Mumbai. Credit:Alamy