The nets at Sonnet Club have a particular smell. Old leather, fresh sweat, Delhi dust that gets into everything. Twelve-year-old boys stand in lines that seem to stretch forever, waiting their turn. Tarak Sinha moves between them like a ghost. He speaks in single words. Adjust. Wait. Again.
In that silence, Shikhar Dhawan learned to become left-handed.
He wrote with his right hand. Ate with his right hand. Threw stones with his right hand. But when he picked up the cricket bat, he stood the other way around. People called it natural flair. They saw the backlift, the flow, the extra time left-handers seem to have.
Dhawan knew better. At twelve, he understood that Indian cricket produces thousands of right-handed boys with decent technique. The left-hander stood out. The left-hander forced selectors to pause. The left-hander made memory where others made only noise.
This is the Dhawan that gets buried under the stories about Gabbar and the moustache. Underneath all that theater, there was always a boy from Paschim Vihar who counted things. Who noticed that attention was scarcer than talent.
The Crouch
He began as a wicketkeeper. This matters more than any batting record.
A wicketkeeper sees the game from behind the stumps. He watches the batsman’s feet shuffle. He sees the bowler’s shoulder drop before the arm comes over. He learns to read the shape of an innings before it announces itself. Most of all, he learns to wait. The ball comes when it comes.
Until then, you crouch. You stay ready. You do not move.
Coach Madan Sharma remembers him at this age. A naughty boy, quick to anger. Hitting bad shots sometimes and needing, in Sharma’s words, a resounding slap to remember where he was. The talent was obvious. The temper was obvious too.
The slaps were not cruelty. They were calibration. Cricket in West Delhi was never soft. The boys who came through Sonnet Club learned that the game would test their patience. Their ability to sit with failure. Their willingness to return the next morning after a bad day and do it again.
Dhawan learned this slowly. By sixteen, he was making runs that people remembered. 755 in the U-16 Vijay Merchant Trophy. An average of 83.88. Then the Under-19 World Cup in 2004, where he made 505 runs and was named player of the tournament. The kind of tournament that is supposed to open doors.
The doors stayed shut.
Nine Years in the Waiting Room
Between 2004 and 2013, Dhawan was the best opening batsman in India who did not play for India.
Look at the Ranji Trophy records. In his debut season, Dhawan scored 461 runs in 6 games and he was the highest run getter for Delhi. In his debut season he outperformed seniors like Gambhir, Aakash Chopra, Mithun Manhas.
During Delhi’s 2007-08 title, his 570 runs were the difference between a good team and champions. The hundreds on dustbowls, scored before sparse crowds with no cameras running.
He was not ignored because he was bad. He was ignored because Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir were very good. Because Indian cricket has never had a gentle queue. Because sometimes the year of your birth determines the decade of your chance.
Nine years. Count them. Nine years of being told you are next. Nine years of warming benches on India A tours. Nine years of waking up and knowing that today will not be the day, but preparing anyway because tomorrow might be.
Most men break in that waiting room. They become cynical or they become small. They start drinking too much or talking too much about what might have been.
Dhawan started writing in a notebook.
He talks about this carefully. The visualization. The manifestation. Sitting in hotel rooms in small towns and writing that he would be the best in the world. Writing it before he had played a single match for India. Writing it when the evidence suggested he might never get the chance.
This was not magic. This was construction. Dhawan was building a mind that could handle what was coming. Because he understood something the cynics missed. The wait was not punishment. The wait was preparation.
The Duck That Did Not Drown Him
The chance came in 2010. ODI debut against Australia. All that preparation compressed into this one morning, this one walk to the middle, this one moment.
He got a duck.
Not a noble duck. The kind that makes people in the stands laugh into their chai. The kind that confirms every doubt you have about yourself at three in the morning.
He could have disappeared. Many do. The story of Indian cricket is full of men who got exactly one chance and failed and never got another.
Dhawan went back to Delhi. He scored more runs. He made himself impossible to ignore again. This is the quality that defines him more than any century. The ability to be rejected publicly and to return with the same smile, the same energy, the same belief that the next time would be different.
The Morning in Mohali
March 2013. The air in Mohali had that particular Punjab cold where the sun is bright but useless against the wind. Dhawan was twenty-seven. He had waited longer than any specialist batsman should wait for a Test cap. Sachin Tendulkar gave it to him. Told him to show guts.
What Dhawan showed was something beyond guts.
187 runs. The fastest century by a debutant in Test history. Eighty-five balls. But the number that matters is the ninety. When he was in the nineties, facing a proper Australian attack, he played a reverse sweep.
In a Test match. On debut. In the nineties.
Former selectors in the stands laughed. Not at him. At the pure audacity of it. At the complete absence of fear.
That shot was Dhawan’s entire life compressed into one movement. He was not playing for his place. He was saying that he belonged at this level and he would not shrink himself to fit into it.
How Gabbar Was Born
The nickname came from boredom. A Ranji match, slow fielding, afternoon stretching without end. Dhawan started shouting dialogues from *Sholay*. The 1975 film. The bandit Gabbar Singh with the theatrical cruelty and the moustache everyone remembered.
The name stuck. Dhawan leaned into it. He grew the moustache. He developed the thigh-slap celebration. He understood something many athletes never learn. Your performance makes you famous. Your character makes you memorable.
But here is the complexity the nickname misses. Gabbar was tough. Dhawan is gentle. Gabbar was cruel. Dhawan is kind. The young players who came through his dressing rooms talk about this constantly.
How he noticed when someone was struggling. How he made the joke that broke the tension. How he sat with you after a bad day and talked you through your fear without making you feel small.
Ashutosh Sharma remembers this. Digvesh Rathi remembers the public support after his disciplinary trouble. The private conversations no one heard about. Dhawan was, in one young player’s words, a cultural and emotional anchor in a world designed to drown you.
The duality is the brand. The tough exterior and the warm interior. The man who can play the reverse sweep on ninety and the man who will notice you are not eating properly and ask what is wrong.
The Smile That Never Left
Dhawan smiles. This sounds small. It is not.
He smiles when he gets out. He smiles when he loses. He smiled through a difficult marriage that played out in public, through custody battles that broke his heart, through not seeing his son for stretches of time that would destroy most men.
He talks about this rarely. When he does, he credits cricket. Says the game taught him to keep moving forward when things do not go your way. Says his mother used to say “Koi Baat Nahi” when things went wrong. No problem. We will figure it out.
This is not denial. This is discipline. Dhawan has practiced yoga for years. Meditation. Mind training. He does not post about it for likes. He does it because it works. Because an athlete’s mind is a machine that needs maintenance like any other machine.
The spiritual practice is not separate from the business. It is embedded in it. The Da One Group has team sessions. Affirmations. Positive thinking as operational policy. This sounds strange to corporate ears. But Dhawan has built something real with it. A structure that outlasted his playing career.
What the Money Means
They say he is worth between ₹120 and ₹125 crore now. The number appears in articles about athlete wealth. Dhawan would laugh at it. Not because it is wrong, but because it misses the point entirely.
The money was never the scoreboard he was watching. In his years of waiting, when he was making modest retainers from domestic cricket, he was already thinking about what came after. Not because he was greedy. Because he was practical.
Because he had seen what happened to cricketers who gave everything to the game and had nothing when the game moved on.
The wealth is a side effect. The real construction was always about building something that would last longer than his body. Something that would employ people. Something that would give young athletes the structure he never had. Something that would bring education to places the main economy forgot.
The Second Innings
Most Indian cricketers become commentators. Or coaches. They stay in the game because it is all they know. Because the transition terrifies them. Because they have been athletes since they were twelve and the world outside feels foreign.
Dhawan looked outward.
Coming from a business family he knew that lending your name is not enough. You need to build things. You need to understand supply chains and cash flow. You need to hire people who know what you do not know.
So he built a structure. Anshita Gupta as CEO. Sophie Shine as COO. Divided his ambitions into three parts that made sense together.
Da One Sports for the athletes coming up. Not just the obviously talented ones. The patient ones. The ones who could handle waiting because they had been taught that waiting was preparation.
The Shikhar Dhawan Foundation for education and healthcare in places the main economy forgot. Kargil. Remote villages. The Smart Shiksha Movement to put modern tools in classrooms that still used blackboards. The Digital Shiksha initiative that reached children who had never seen a tablet.
And Yashaa Global for investment. For putting money into companies that solved problems he understood.
The Portfolio Speaks
Look at what he chose.
SARVA. Yoga. Dhawan had done it for years, quietly, without the wellness posts other athletes made. He wanted young Indians to see it as modern, not just ancestral. He met Sarvesh Shashi and connected to the vision immediately. Not as an investor looking for return. As a practitioner looking for spread.
TagZ Foods. Healthier chips. The campaign was personal. Dhawan appeared without his moustache, claiming he lost a bet with friends. If he found a snack that was fitter and still tasty, he would shave. He found it. The moustache went. The product stayed.
Svish. Men’s health. The difficult one. Indian men do not talk about sexual health. They suffer in silence. Dhawan used humour to make it normal. He said grooming matters for athletes, and this was part of grooming. He put his face on products for performance anxiety because he believed the silence was hurting people.
QUE. Sunglasses. Premium but accessible. Dhawan understood that young Indians wanted to look good without spending money they did not have. That style was not about wealth. It was about confidence.
Each choice was personal. Each choice was strategic. None of them were about maximizing the net worth. All of them were about solving problems he had noticed.
The Big Bet
In 2025, Yashaa Global Capital got approval from the Abu Dhabi Global Market. Seventy-five million dollars. AB de Villiers and Ravi Shastri came in as partners. The focus was sportstech, gaming, media, esports.
Dhawan planned to invest eighty percent alongside other big funds. Only twenty percent would be his alone. This was his wicketkeeper’s mind at work. Read the game. Do not take unnecessary risks. Wait for the right ball. Trust the partnership.
He talks about startups the way he used to talk about batting partners. You need a passionate founder. You need a good team. You need collective growth. These are not buzzwords. These are the things he looked for in dressing rooms for fifteen years.
The things that made partnerships with Rohit Sharma work across 115 ODIs. The things that made him one half of the fourth most successful opening pair in ODI history.
The Giving
The Shikhar Dhawan Foundation is not a side project. It is not charity for tax purposes.
Kanika Dewan runs it as director, but Dhawan is present in the decisions. The foundation looks for sustainable initiatives, not one-time donations. Educational tools in Kargil. Learning centers that continue after the ribbon-cutting.
Sports programs that connect cricket’s resources to social causes at Lord’s, yes, but also in villages where no one has heard of Lord’s.
He calls this empowering communities with hope and opportunity. The language sounds like mission statements everywhere. The practice is different. The foundation measures impact in years, not headlines. It builds structures that survive without Dhawan’s name attached.
This is the difference between philanthropy and performance. Dhawan learned it during his nine years of waiting. The value is in what continues, not in what announces itself.
The Map He Drew
There is a generation of Indian athletes now who will retire with money and influence and no idea what to do with either. They will become commentators who repeat the same observations. Or coaches who try to recreate their own careers in younger bodies. Or they will disappear into silence and regret.
Dhawan has drawn a map for them.
First, wait. Then prepare. Then strike. Then build something that lasts longer than your body will. Understand that the ₹125 crore is not the score. The score is how many people you employ, how many children learn because of your programs, how many young athletes you guide through their own waiting rooms.
He is not the greatest Indian batsman of his generation. He would be the first to say this. Virat Kohli‘s numbers are different. Rohit Sharma’s peaks were higher. But Dhawan might be the most complete.
He mastered two innings in two completely different games. He took the patience of domestic cricket and the aggression of international cricket and the discipline of yoga and the theatre of Gabbar and made them into a working system that did not collapse when the cheering stopped.
The moustache is back. The smile never left. He is opening the innings again, this time for every athlete who wonders what comes after the boundary.
The answer, if they are paying attention, is everything.
Editorial Note: This is an independent profile. Shikhar Dhawanand their representatives were contacted but did not respond prior to the time of publication. In the absence of direct comment, this article was reported using publicly available records and regulatory filings, where applicable. This content was produced in accordance with FinancialExpress.com’s editorial guidelines.