Navjot Sidhu & Ravi Shastri: Sidhu ‘exposes’ Shastri on Kapil show: an aunty, a girl and a flying cushion
Navjot Sidhu & Ravi Shastri: Sidhu’s Ravi Shastri room-partner tale from The Great Indian Kapil Show teaser: a corridor, a cushion and a two-hour wait. All in fun.
North Desk Correspondent
Chandigarh, October 9
A teaser for The Great Indian Kapil Show has Navjot Singh Sidhu spilling a room-sharing story from his early India days. Ravi Shastri, sitting right there, answers with a cushion. Sunil Gavaskar watches the chaos. The full episode streams on Netflix on Saturday, October 10.
The teaser for the new episode of The Great Indian Kapil Show on Netflix brings together three cricketing voices who have spent decades on the field, in the commentary box and, apparently, in shared hotel rooms. Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri are the guests this week. Sidhu, a fixture on Kapil Sharma’s couch for years, has other ideas about who gets to be the star of the episode.
The story, as Sidhu tells it
Navjot Sidhu & Ravi Shastri: Sidhu begins by recalling his selection for the Indian team at 18. There were no single rooms in those days, he says; players shared rooms in pairs. His room partner was Ravi Shastri, and he was “very hopeful” that his captain would…
That is where Shastri hurls a cushion at him, playfully, and Sidhu’s sentence ends. The studio audience gets the rest of it from the expression on Shastri’s face.
Sidhu carries on. He walked into the room and found an aunty sitting inside, and being a well-brought-up young man from Patiala, he greeted her with a namaste. Shastri’s instruction, in Sidhu’s telling: come back in an hour or two.
So the young debutant went for a walk, up and down the corridor. “Forget batting,” he says, he was tired from roaming the corridor for an hour and a half to two hours.
When he finally returned, the aunty was gone. A girl was sitting in the room instead. She said hi. Behind her, Shastri was waving frantically, signalling Sidhu to leave. Sidhu says she said hi, he said bye, and that was that.
That’s the whole anecdote in the teaser. Sidhu does not name the woman, nor say what Shastri’s visitors were doing there, and the teaser doesn’t say either. Shastri’s only on-screen reply so far is the cushion.
A word on the numbers
The record books put Sidhu’s first-class debut for Punjab in November 1981, when he was 18, and his Test debut against West Indies at Ahmedabad on November 12, 1983, when he was 20. The teaser doesn’t say which tour or series he is talking about, so we’ll let the full episode settle that.
Navjot Sidhu & Ravi Shastri: Why room partners mattered
It was an era when team hotels didn’t hand out single rooms, and a debutant could find himself sharing with a senior who had already made his name. Shastri had debuted in 1981, and went on to play 80 Tests and 150 ODIs before becoming India’s head coach (2017–21) and one of the country’s best-known commentators. For a young opener from Punjab, as Sidhu paints it, being locked out of his own room while a senior played host was part of the initiation.
Sidhu’s own start in international cricket was not smooth either. After two Tests against the West Indies attack in 1983–84, he lost his place, and was labelled a stonewalling batsman. He returned in 1987, when he made four fifties in a row at the World Cup, and spent the rest of his career reinventing himself as an attacking batsman who loved taking on spinners. Though Kapil Sharma keeps teasing how he got out to Pakistan cheaply!
The couch crew
Gavaskar, who retired in 1987 as the first man to 10,000 Test runs (125 Tests, 34 hundreds), and Shastri have long shared commentary duties. Sidhu has his own second career in commentary, with a reputation for mangling metaphors with gusto, and he is the man the show’s cast has been affectionately spoofing for years.
Sidhu on the real couch is something else. The teaser suggests that Sidhu’s room-partner tale is just the opening act, with Gavaskar and Shastri likely to hit back with stories of their own.
The Great Indian Kapil Show episode streams on Netflix on Saturday, October 10 at 8 pm.
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