Cricket’s social media circles lit up this week after Congress leader Shashi Tharoor posted a photograph with former Sri Lankan cricketer Arjuna Ranatunga, taken during a meeting in Colombo. The picture left many fans struggling to place the legendary skipper at first glance.
“Cricket fans might have some difficulty in recognising this former Sri Lankan cricket captain who called on me in Colombo,” Tharoor wrote on X. “Yes, this is the new, svelte, post-bariatric surgery @ArjunaRanatunga!”
Tharoor went on to relay a detail from their conversation that captured just how far Ranatunga’s physical transformation has taken him. Asked how it felt after years of being famously round even at his cricketing peak, Ranatunga told Tharoor he now plays charity matches and bats comfortably for three hours at a stretch. This is in contrast to his playing days, when he could barely last three overs before the toll showed.
The transformation is the result of bariatric surgery, a procedure on the digestive system aimed at facilitating substantial, long-term weight loss and managing obesity-related health conditions. Ranatunga, now 62, underwent the surgery to address years of health concerns that had built up since his playing days ended.
During his career, Ranatunga’s stocky frame was as much a part of his identity as his batting. He was never a quick runner between the wickets, leaning instead on crisp timing, precise placement, and, when required, a runner, to keep the innings moving. None of that blunted his effectiveness. He remains one of the more productive middle-order batters of his generation.
Tharoor is currently in Colombo as chief guest of the inaugural Colombo Literary Festival, engaging with Sri Lankan literary, cultural and political figures during his visit, a trip that also brought him face to face with an old-guard cricketing name whose current look has become the story in itself.
A friendship that predates the transformation
This is not the first time the two have crossed paths in recent years. In May 2022, Tharoor hosted Ranatunga in Thiruvananthapuram, his Kerala constituency, for what he described on X as a discussion on contemporary Sri Lanka and its many challenges, adding that it was always refreshing to touch base with his old friend. The photographs from that meeting show Ranatunga still carrying the heavier build cricket fans knew him for, a useful before-and-after marker against the Colombo picture now doing the rounds.
Both men have long since moved from their original careers into public life, Tharoor as a former UN diplomat turned senior Indian parliamentarian, Ranatunga as a former Sri Lankan cabinet minister, giving their meetings, four years apart, a shared thread beyond cricket and literature.
A career that reshaped Sri Lankan cricket
Ranatunga’s standing in the game goes well beyond one viral photograph. He is regarded as the foundational figure of modern Sri Lankan cricket, the captain who took the island nation from perennial underdogs to world champions.
He made his Test debut in 1982, as an 18 year old schoolboy, in Sri Lanka’s inaugural Test match, and promptly scored the country’s first Test half-century. Fourteen years later, he sealed the defining moment of his career, finishing 47 not out and striking the winning boundary as Sri Lanka lifted the 1996 World Cup in Lahore.
Across 93 Tests, he scored 5,105 runs at an average of 35.69, with four centuries. In 269 ODIs, he made 7,456 runs at 35.84, also with four hundreds. Beyond the numbers, he is remembered for a combative captaincy style that reshaped how South Asian teams carried themselves on the field, including his defence of Muttiah Muralitharan during the fraught 1995–96 tour of Australia, when the spinner’s action was repeatedly called into question.
Ranatunga’s international career ran from 1982 to 2000. After retirement, he moved into public life, serving as Sri Lanka’s Minister of Ports & Shipping from 2015 to 2017, Minister of Petroleum Resources Development from 2017 to 2018, and later Minister of Transport & Civil Aviation from 2018 to 2019. He also had a spell as Chairman of Sri Lanka Cricket in 2008.
Nearly three decades after that unbeaten knock in Lahore, it is a very different image of Arjuna Ranatunga doing the rounds, one his old friend Tharoor made sure the cricketing world did not miss.
