Siddharth Saoji 
In today’s digital age, where Instagram reels and YouTube shorts dominate our attention spans, two seemingly unrelated experiences share a remarkable similarity: reading books and watching Test cricket. Both stand as bastions of patience in an increasingly fast-paced world, offering unique rhythms that feel almost countercultural in their deliberate slowness.
Modern life has conditioned us to consume content in bite-sized pieces. Our days are filled with minute-long videos, quick WhatsApp messages, and the instant gratification of Twenty20 cricket, where every other ball promises a boundary or a wicket. The irony lies in how this “new normal” has made traditional forms of engagement feel like radical departures from routine.
When you sit down with a book, something remarkable happens. After a few pages, fatigue might set in — not from boredom, but from the depth of engagement. You pause, reflect on what you’ve read, and process the author’s words or the events that have unfolded. This contemplative experience, so different from our usual rapid consumption of content, creates a unique mental space where understanding deepens through patience.
Test cricket mirrors this experience remarkably. Like a well-crafted novel, a Test match has its own narrative rhythm, complete with periods of intense action and contemplative lulls. There are spells of riveting cricket where batsman and bowler engage in an intense battle of skills — the bowler probing for weaknesses with varying lines, lengths, and subtle variations, while the batsman demonstrates resilience, technique, and adaptability. These 20–30 minute periods of tactical warfare keep spectators on the edge of their seats, hearts racing with each delivery. These periods parallel those gripping chapters in a book where you can’t help but turn pages rapidly, completely absorbed in the unfolding story.
Then there are the quieter periods — the stalemates where a well-set batsman methodically accumulates runs, or sessions where nothing seemingly happens. These mirror those parts of a book that might feel slow but are essential to the larger narrative. Just as not every chapter can be breathtaking, not every session of Test cricket can be filled with boundaries and wickets.
In a world increasingly driven by AI-generated content and instant gratification, the deliberate slowness of Test cricket and book reading becomes ever more precious. While we might consume hundreds of social media posts in a day, they rarely leave us with lasting wisdom. It’s the patient engagement with a five-day cricket match or a thoughtful book that creates space for reflection and deeper understanding — offering us not just entertainment, but the opportunity to develop insights that can only emerge from sustained, unhurried attention. These experiences are cherished not despite their slowness, but precisely because of it.