Favorite Passtime and Hobby

Describe your favorite hobby, pastime or sport and explain how it reflects your personality. I am a strong believer of the fact that sport is a very good starting point where one can develop important personal traits like leadership, commitment and team spirit. My favorite sport is cricket where each team takes it in turn to bat, attempting to score runs, while the other team bowls and fields and at the end, the team which score more runs, wins. I was exposed to cricket for the first time at the age of 6 when my grandfather gifted me a plastic bat and ball on my birthday. Since then I am associated with the cricket in both active and passive ways. I had started playing proper cricket when I was in 8th standard. I had built a team to participate in an interschool cricket tournament. We trained very hard during practice sessions organized by our sport teacher. The intense training and great team work paid off and we won the tournament. I felt so proud when I being the captain of the team, held the winning trophy. After school I also captained my teams in college and in university as well. Captaincy role had always given me a sense of responsibility where not only one has to lead by an example but also have to get the best out of his team members.

Cricket has contributed immensely to my personality. It helped me in developing leadership qualities and in fostering a sense of team spirit. It also inculcated a sense of competition which helped in dealing with success and failure in real life with a positive spirit. It is this competitive nature that helped me in my academic career where I had qualified many national level competitions e.g. “Graduate aptitude test for engineers-GATE” and “National Eligibility Test-NET” with high rank. In 2005 I moved to Germany as a part of Indo-German educational exchange program where I joined Technical university of Darmstadt for my master thesis. In Germany also I joined “cricket club-DCC” and participated in “Bundesliga”. We had a multicultural team which had players from different countries. It was a big challenge to communicate with in the team due to the fact that we did not have a single common language however we had lots of fun together. It taught me to interact in a multi-cultural environment and collaborate as a team to take a collective decision. I have earned valuable experiences in how to coordinate teams in critical situations and helped me to advance my ability to identify critical issues and prioritize tasks accordingly.