Last Updated:January 18, 2026, 15:29 IST
After years of rejection, Harshit Rana joined KKR in 2022. In 2024, he took 19 wickets, won a title, earned an India call-up, crediting his father.
Indian team celebrating. (PTI Photo)
India pacer Harshit Rana revealed on Sunday that he spent a decade of his life chasing ‘nothing’, facing several rejections at trials, and coming back home to cry in front of his father, Pradeep, every day.
Rana’s rise was initially slow and then precipitous. He was picked up by the Kolkata Knight Riders in the 2022 auction for his base price of ₹20 lakhs. For the first two years, he played like a promising talent who was still raw. In 2024, then, he picked up 19 wickets, the highest for an uncapped player that year, helping the franchise win its first title in 12 years, and immediately becoming a key component of their attack.
India call-up followed in Tests later that year and now he’s an all-format regular.
“I know how to handle failure now,” Rana told MensXP. “I have seen those ten years where nothing happened. I would go to trials and my name would not come. I would come back and cry every day in front of my dad. So now I think that failure is gone; whatever comes, I can handle it. I had given up. But my dad kept pushing me literally.”
Rana’s early life was so focused on cricket that he didn’t have any friends or even a phone till he was an adult. Pradeep slept beside him for years, waking him up early in the morning and even fighting with his mother to stop him from going to school.
“I didn’t even have a smartphone till I was in 12th,” Harshit said. “Papa used to wake me up at 4:30, bring me back from training at 6. Mom used to tell me to go to school, and he’d ask me to sleep. That’s where they’d fight. Mom would scold me, say that I don’t like going to school, but I used to ask her, ‘What can I do if he’s stopping me?’ Because then I’d have practice at 1 pm again, and that place was 2.5 hours away from home, so he thought we’d get late if I went to school, and that I should just sleep instead. I didn’t even have friends. He’d sleep with me and wake me up at 4:30 every day.”
First Published:
January 18, 2026, 14:52 IST
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