While often addressing each other, Indian players use their nicknames. And over time these names have become a part of their identity. While sometimes these names are shorter versions of their own names, other times they have a completely different origin story, let’s find it out.
To begin with the skipper, Virat Kohli’s nickname Cheeku. Virat was a chubby kid during his childhood days and had big ears. This one time he had got his hair cut short which made one of his coaches think that he looks like cheeku the rabbit from Champak. Since then the name Cheeku has been his nickname.
Ajinkya Rahane and his nickname jinx. It is quite a funny story with the origin of this name. Foreign players while playing alongside Ajinkya in the IPL could not pronounce his real name and came up with a shorter version for it, jinx.
Shikhar Dhawan’s gabbar. While he was playing during his Ranji days, he would field at the silly point and when the opposition would have a great partnership, he would often call it out saying bahut yarana lagta hai which is a famous dialogue of Gabbar from the movie Sholay. From there on the name, Gabbar has stuck with him and it also matches his personality.
Apart from these other cricketers just have shorter versions of their names as their nicknames, mostly because the original name would be difficult to pronounce. Like Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s Mahi or Yuvraj Singh’s Yuvi or Bhubaneshwar Kumar’s Bhuvi.