Reimagining The Cricket Bat

A Mumbai-based startup, founded by two management school friends, aims to use modern technology and innovative design to make cricket bats more user-friendly and productive.

- Pallavi Mehra And Alshaar Khan

“This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way, so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock, like knocking the top offa bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly. What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might travel.”

For what are essentially ‘chunks of wood,’ English playwright Tom Stoppard, although referring to writing, once offered this most poetic description of a cricket bat. We, as enthusiasts, might or might not indulge in this romance, but do we invest in the expensive ones occasionally. Professionals spend up to five digits. A bat that looks like Virat Kohli’s could set you back by anywhere between Rs 25,000 to Rs 35,000, while the one that he uses would be far costlier.

Batmakers think they tender enough value for this money. A truly exquisite bat is made from the purest timber. The wood is then machined, to carve the perfectly hardened blade (the front) and a back that is curvy enough to generate power. The handle, a shock-absorbing piece of rubber-infused cane, is spliced into the blade and filed flush with the wood. The toe is coated with special materials to make it resilient, and the final product is then sealed with durable silicon wax. This is just the manufacturing; the process of knocking in, or making it game-ready, then follows.