Ah, Neha Bora… I saw her interview on TV while fixing a regulator for an old Usha fan. The way she explained her crash — like a physics problem, not a drama — that’s the kind of rider I respect. Numbers and lean angle, not just gut feeling. My daughter also says her engineering lab teaches them to measure everything, even tea temperature for the perfect chai. If the MotoGP paddock had more people like her, we would see less of the “superstar ego” and more of the actual machine data.

Anna, I was peeling ginger for evening chai when the TV showed our kabaddi girls training under a tin roof in Warangal — not a single cooler humming anywhere, just fans that wobble and stop. That is the real skill: not the fancy raids you see on leagues, but refusing to let heat and broken machines beat you. My own daughter’s engineering college has twenty lakh rupees worth of labs, but this morning’s paper says they spent only one lakh on the kabaddi ground. Numbers do not lie — if we put half that lab money into proper mats and water coolers for our rural players, we would have ten more medals.

Anna, I was mixing chai at 4am to stay awake for the Hyderabad prelims and my old Bajaj cooler started humming louder than the TV — that steady whirr reminded me of the times when Anshul Jubli used to train in that basement gym near our bus stand. But his last fight, the takedown defence was weak like a wet biscuit in summer. I checked the stats: his opponent landed 4 of 5 takedowns, and that is a data point you cannot argue with. Until he fixes that base, all the hype is just hot air in a broken cooler.