🇮🇳 Ravichandran Ashwin

He was born in Chennai in September 1986 to Ravichandran, a Southern Railway employee and former club-level fast bowler, and Chitra, a homemaker. He went to Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan and then to SSN College of Engineering, where he completed a bachelor's degree in information technology — a degree he was, by his own account, on course to use professionally before he chose the gamble of full-time cricket at twenty-one.

He played for Tamil Nadu in the Ranji Trophy from 2006 as a young opening batter and part-time off-spinner. His batting was, even then, technically sound — he scored a domestic first-class hundred batting in the lower order — and his bowling carried the imprint of a man who had read every coaching manual ever written. Chennai Super Kings signed him for the 2008 inaugural IPL season, and there, under MS Dhoni's captaincy, he became the spinner who could bowl the powerplay in T20 cricket — an idea that essentially did not exist before him in the IPL.

His India debut came in June 2010 in a T20I against Zimbabwe at Harare. The Test debut, against the West Indies at Delhi in November 2011, was the start of a remarkable burst of wickets that has not really paused. He took the Test hat-trick that opened the 2017 home season, eight-fors at Delhi and Chennai, ten-wicket hauls in subcontinent series. He is one of the small group of bowlers in Test history to cross 500 wickets.

He invented, refined and weaponised the carrom ball — bowled with the middle finger flicked off the seam, swivelling away from the right-hander or in to the left-hander depending on grip — to a level no off-spinner before him had managed in modern Test cricket. He developed a side-arm wrong'un, a tweaked release point for left-handers, and a fingertip flipper that he uses, by his own admission, sparingly. He is the most studied tactical bowler India has ever produced.

His batting belongs in a separate biography. He has multiple Test hundreds — including 124 at Mumbai in 2016 and 113 at the West Indies in 2016 — and has won Player of the Series awards in eight Test series across his career, batting and bowling combined. He is one of the few Indian players to score a Test hundred and take a five-wicket haul in the same Test on more than one occasion.

He plays domestically for Tamil Nadu and has won multiple Ranji Trophy titles with the state. He is married to Prithi Narayanan — a childhood friend — and they have two daughters, Akhira and Aadhya. He runs the YouTube channel Ash Ki Baat, which has more than three million subscribers, and which has, in its own quiet way, become the most thoughtful contemporary analysis of Indian cricket — the engineer's notebook turned into a public broadcast.

He has had a complicated relationship with white-ball selection. After 2017 he was, for years, kept out of India's limited-overs sides in favour of the wrist-spin pair of Chahal and Kuldeep, a decision that visibly hurt him and that he has discussed with unusual candour. He was eventually recalled and played in the 2023 ODI World Cup squad as a late inclusion when Axar Patel was injured. He bowled three overs in the tournament. The pain of that selection arc — talked about, written about, and broadcast on his own channel — is, in his telling, the unfinished business of his career.

What he has won, and what he has not, will be argued for a generation. He has six ICC trophies as a squad member and one missed final by a single team-selection call. He has bowled India to home Test series wins against every major nation in cricket. He has, more than any spinner of his era, made the Indian Test bowler an intellectual figure — a man who reads, writes, talks tactics, and treats the carrom ball the way Garry Kasparov treated the Sicilian Defence: a thing to refine forever.