Letter 157. Nobody passed me the ball.

Dear friend,

We had a new car. A Tata Sierra, the first one in the family, and the longest drive any of us had ever taken. Pune to Kodaikanal, down through the ghats, my parents up front and me in the back, my nerves and my excitement fighting it out the whole way. I was fourteen. We were going to look at a boarding school, Kodaikanal International, the kind of place that was supposed to be good for a boy like me.

When we arrived we walked the grounds, just to get a feel of it. On one of the courts a group of boys was playing basketball. Now, I played. I was on my school team. Not a star, somewhere in the honest middle, but I belonged on a court. My parents nudged me. Go on, join them.

You know exactly how heavy that small thing is when you are fourteen. I did not shy away from it. I walked up and asked if I could play. I got a shrug. A "sure" that did not bother to look at me.

I joined. And then, nothing. The ball never came. I ran the floor. I found the open space. I put my hands up. I called for it. They passed around me as if I were a post someone had planted in the ground. Not once. I was on the court, and I was invisible.

I still remember the exact temperature of that feeling. Embarrassment, and underneath it something heavier, the quiet certainty that I would never be let in. The game ended. We drove home. The heaviness came with us. I did not join that school.

For a long time I thought that afternoon was about basketball. It was not.

It was the first time I felt a thing I would go on to feel for years, in different rooms, with different people. The feeling of being somehow too much and not enough at the same time. Of running hard and still not getting the pass.

Because I was a restless kid. Curious about everything, constant about nothing. I would burn for music, then machines, then theatre, then drop all three. I started far more than I finished. The adults had words for it. Distracted. Inconsistent. Not applying himself. Some days I argued with the words. Some days I believed them, and decided I was simply built wrong.

I wrote a whole book this year for that boy. It is called Restless to Remarkable, and it is really one long argument with everyone who ever called that restlessness a defect. Because it is not. That buzzing, hopping, cannot-sit-still energy is not a flaw to be ironed out. It is raw material waiting for a direction. The boy on that court was not broken. The ball just never came to him.

Here is the quiet thing I have learned since.

You can spend your whole life on that court. Hands up. Waiting for the group to choose you. Waiting to be passed to. Waiting to be seen. You can wait a very long time, and call the waiting your personality.

Some passes do come, and they land harder than you would believe. Years into my work, my father wrote me a personal email. The first in thirty eight years. He was never a man given to praise. The expectations in our home ran high and the appreciation came quietly, if at all, and you learn as a child to stop waiting for it. And then one morning, out of nowhere, a single line about something I had simply made. "Compliments, Congratulations and Kudos." It was for a creative project, not anything I had earned or sold. I have kept it for the days my self belief wobbles. One pass, decades late, and it still warms me. I wrote about that morning once, if you would like to read it, here.

But you cannot build a life on waiting for that pass. The deeper work is the one nobody teaches you on the court. It is to stop waiting to be seen by them, and to start seeing yourself. To pick up the ball and put up your own shot. The pass you have been waiting for your whole life is one you can learn to make to yourself.

And if you are reading this with a restless child in the next room, this is the part I most want you to hear.

Somewhere there is a court where your kid is running hard, hands up, uncalled. They will not tell you about it. They will just come home a little heavier one evening, and you will think it was nothing.

Be the one who passes them the ball. You do not have to fix them. You have to see them. A look that says: I see what you are becoming. It is not too much. It is exactly enough.

This April a fourteen year old from a village in Bihar, Vaibhav Suryavanshi, walked out in the IPL and scored a hundred runs off thirty eight balls. Long before the country knew his name, his father had left his job and was driving him close to ninety kilometres to practice, day after day, for years. Someone passed him the ball while he was still invisible. That is the whole job.

There is a line in the Gita I keep close. Better to live your own path imperfectly than to perform someone else's to perfection. The restless child is not failing at the standard game. They are looking for their own. Help them find the court where the ball finally comes.

If you know a parent watching a restless, hard to place young person right now, forward them this letter. And if this was forwarded to you, welcome. You can get one of your own every Sunday. Subscribe here: https://qrto.to/66f8cc1e

I made pulled jackfruit burgers this week.

Raw kathal, the big spiky green thing, simmered with a little oil until it goes soft, then ginger and garlic, onion, tomato, a smoky spoon of red chilli and cumin and garam masala, a touch of something sour and something sweet, tamarind and a little jaggery, cooked down low until the whole thing collapses into strands you can pull apart with a fork. Piled into a toasted bun with a sharp onion and cabbage slaw, and a cool mint yogurt to settle it. It pulls like meat. It was never meant to.

Here is the thing about jackfruit. For years it sat at the edge of the Indian kitchen. Too odd to be a fruit dish, dismissed as not quite a vegetable, never quite a thing in its own right. Nobody passed it the ball. And then somebody looked at it properly, gave it time and heat and a little faith, and it turned out the ingredient nobody chose was the best thing on the plate all along.

That is the whole letter, really. The restless kid, the odd ingredient, the player nobody passed to. None of them were broken. They were waiting for someone to see what they could become. Be that someone, for the restless one in your house, and for the one you used to be. And on the days nobody passes you the ball, put your own hands up and take the shot anyway.

Write back and tell me about the restless one in your life, the kid, or the grown up who still feels fourteen on that court. I read every reply.

In fratitude (friendship and gratitude),

Adi

P.S. I wrote a book for the parent standing at the edge of that court, unsure whether to call out, and for the kid still waiting for the pass. It is called Restless to Remarkable. You can find it here.

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