Audio Interview

Shobha Ponnappa, former Tamil Nadu, South Zone and India player was one of the pioneers of women's cricket in Madras. After her playing days, Shobha made a seamless transition to the corporate world, working in advertising for many years before deciding to open her own Internet startup, Avigna Technologies Limited. Avigna, meaning 'no barriers', which started in 1996, is India's foremost multimedia and web content developer company today. Here she talks to CricInfo on her early days in cricket and the subsequent career shift that has so successfully paid off. Shobha notes how the women's game needs to be marketed more efficiently and offers advice to youngsters on how to balance their sporting ambitions with a career outside the game.

What inspired you to take up the game because when you started playing, I don't think cricket was a very popular pursuit for girls?

In fact I have a curious distinction of being the first person to start women's cricket in Tamil Nadu. Our family friends VV Kumar and Venkataraghavan were very close to us. My parents were members of the Madras Cricket Club. And since we knew them and on a lark I'd read an article about how the Australian women were playing, I persuaded VV Kumar to organise the Gandhinagar nets for a few of us girls to just go and try our hand at it. Suddenly it became something very serious because we started liking the game. In those days there was very little competition so a lot of what you did started looking like very good cricket at least to us. There was another rival team in Anna Nagar called Skylarks and we used to have little matches among each other. A little down the line we heard Bombay had a team and we invited the Bombay team over. We did exceedingly well against Bombay which was quite a surprise to us and then we suddenly realised that the state also had some players who could get into the India league.

Did your parents approve of your pastime?

My parents are completely supportive people. Both of them have had sporting backgrounds. My father was very good at rifle shooting and billiards. My mother was a very serious table tennis and tennis player in her college days. So I guess a little bit of that sporting culture was there in the family. But nobody had represented the country or state or anything. It was more of a pastime and a hobby.

Were there any people whom you looked up to, any cricketing idols when you started playing?

Yeah, eventually I found that my forte was offspin. I started getting training with Venkat or Kumar in the initial stages and also had some stints with EAS Prasanna. I realised that these are the kind of people who were my idols at that time because they were just too terrific at what they were doing and they were of a calibre which was different. But it was such a steep learning curve in those days, so almost everybody you met became a role model for a space of time. We had camps with Abid Ali, Lala Amarnath and Mushtaq Ali. So every now and then we'd be exposed to some big cricketer and start falling in love with the way they were playing the game till the next person came along.

You played for many years with distinction. What was the most memorable moment for you on the cricket field in all your career?

I once got a hat-trick. I got three wickets for zero runs which stood out as one of those things which I remember. And then on another occasion I scored a fifty which I thought was in good style, very few chances in that innings. For the rest I just had a ball. I think I was very young at the time. It was never a do or die thing for us in cricket at that time. All of us were playing of our own volition and will. So we just basically enjoyed ourselves by travelling all the time, missed college like anything and had a ball.

So looking back would you say you're satisfied with whatever you achieved on the cricket field?

I think the experience was more life maturing than anything else. In those days, even now I think, women's cricket is not getting too much money or sponsorship. We played for the love of the game and we burnt big holes in our parents' pockets. The nice part of it was that we got to mix with a whole lot of people from different states and different cultures and forever it was like being on a picnic. There is however one part of it which I hope has changed from the time we played. Women's cricket somehow attracted a lot of politics at that stage which was a little disheartening especially when players were trying to make their way in a field which was a little ruthless on the expenditure it required and the commitment it required. In many cases girls were coming in to the game when families were a little hostile to their playing. The sport was not friendly to people who were trying to make a commitment to it.

How did you make this transition from cricket to a fulltime professional career? Was it something you'd planned for even as you were playing cricket?

These are two separate parts of my life. I always knew that I would be in the advertising career. I knew it very long back in school because I had met up with a lot of people from the industry and I knew that I did not want to go from sport into a job with customs or railways or a bank or something. That was not my future prospect. So since I'd decided on advertising, around my second year of college I used to go in my summer holidays and work with advertising agencies just to see what it was like. When I finished college I decided that since I wanted to make a life in this profession, you wouldn't be able to tour the country for eight months and continue to play cricket the way you did. It was no heartbreak for me. I had a real good time at that and now I'm having a real good time at this. So I guess it's just your mindset.

Playing cricket must have taught you a lot of things about how to deal with real life situations like the importance of teamwork and so on. How did it stand you in good stead in your professional career?

I think essentially everybody is a team player all the time in life. Unlike tennis which is an individual sport where you're looking for personal excellence, cricket I suppose prepares you to work with other people. Sometimes you like the people you work with, sometimes you don't like the people you work with, but still you learn to get along with a lot of different types of people and different types of situations. If you're in and out of the team of the team as I was, then you're also learning to fight very hard which I think is working very well right now for me.

In those days women's cricket didn't have a lot of money or a lot of sponsors. Twenty years down the line probably it's a bit better. If you were beginning your career today, would you approach it differently?

I still think I would not play because there's money in it or no money in it. If I like something I would be still in it. Eventually I made a career in advertising and learnt all about the need to project yourself properly if you want to attract sponsorship. I think the malady about women's sport is they're not projecting themselves correctly enough to attract the kind of money and sponsorship that are needed. People don't come out and sponsor things which they feel is of no use to them. It's up to you to go and sell to companies and to corporates their benefits in sponsoring you. I think the projection skills are missing and I'm sure the sport will also earn a lot of money if it learns how to hit that critical mass in publicity and generate a lot of corporate response.

You're now a fulltime professional. Do you have time to still keep connected with the game?

I'm a Madras Cricket Club member and often when you drop in at the club there's something going on, a division match or a league match or maybe a Ranji Trophy match. So definitely I keep in touch with the game. I travel a lot so I don't always get the time to watch TV. But if you see a snatch of cricket happening somewhere, the old culture takes over and you stop and watch for a few overs. That old feeling washes over sometimes. I keep fit by jogging a bit now and then and sometimes I play squash at the club, so a little bit of sport still lingers.

Would you like to be actively associated with the game, maybe in terms of promoting it in schools and colleges, that sort of thing?

There is very little time on my hands right now. But I know that I can probably help them project their image better. Maybe if they need some help in that direction I'd be able to show the association how to elicit the kind of corporate sponsorship that they may need to build up their images. Again the association and the game itself should have that orientation to want to go in for that kind of thing because cultivating an image and acquiring sponsorship is also a fulltime job. So if there's someone at the other end committed to that kind of a cause maybe someone like me can help them.

You've managed to have a successful cricket career and also go on to a successful career outside cricket. How would you advise youngsters who're playing the game today to manage both their cricket and professional careers?

You can't do anything in life if you don't have a very very strong goal. The idea is if you want something you must want it badly enough to go across all opposition and still do what you want. When I wanted to play cricket, I wanted to play cricket more than anything else and I saw to it that I did it. When I wanted to take a professional life, I just went the whole hog and did it. The level of commitment that you're putting into something is going to make a big difference. If you want to excel in sport or excel in professional life, it takes a very heavy toll of you. It takes your time, your effort, your mental space, takes time away from family, takes time away from other commitments that you like. A lot of people don't give things the 100% commitment that they should. If you are able to give that 100%, any field is good to excel in.

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