Had a DDLJ moment with my childhood sweetheart: Manish Pandey reminisces of his adolescence as an army kid

Army kids generally have a nomadic lifestyle, continually shifting from one place to the other. Apart from the challenges an army personnel faces, even their family has to go through similar hardships.

Indian batsman Manish Pandey recently opened up about his life as an army kid, and let go of that during his teenage, similar to the epic scene from the blockbuster Bollywood movie ‘Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge’.

“As an army family, we would have to keep shifting base every year. I loved it — meeting new people, finding new friends, learning from different cultures,” Pandey told Manish Batavia on SpicyPitch.

Pandey reminisced one of the instances when a group of family friends came to bid farewell to his family at the railway station.

However, his childhood love story had an anti-climax where the father of Manish”s crush and asked his daughter to stay back.

“But I remember one time that we moved when I was an adolescent. We were at the train station, and some army families came to drop us off. The girl I had a crush on was also there with her father. I know it was a full-on DDLJ moment! Except that instead of ‘Ja Simran Ja’, her dad held her hand and said, ‘Stay back, you are too young’!” Pandey recalled.

During his interaction, Pandey attributed the army lifestyle and the disciplines, induced in his routine repeatedly.

Also, the Karnataka stalwart went on to state that had he not made it as a cricketer, he surely would have served the army.

“To be honest, I loved The disciplined lifestyle. What made it more special was that my dad himself played with me. He would bowl to me for hours, and even involve the jawans on the ground to come and play cricket with me. It was a wonderful life,” added the 30-year old.

Pandey came into international reckoning during India’s famous 2008 U19 World Cup campaign in Kuala Lumpur, along with Virat Kohli, Ravindra Jadeja, and Siddharth Kaul.

Subsequently, Pandey became the first batsman to score an IPL ton in 2009, donning the jersey of Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB).

From there on, he went on to win the title with Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR), before being bagged by Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) for a lucrative amount of INR 11 crores in 2018.

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