What will Vaibhav Sooryavanshi's career record look like in 20 years? It is a voyeuristic question. The boy is not old enough to change his shirt in front of his team-mates. And here we are trying to peep into his future.
Yet the question is irresistible. When a child so violently yanks apart the contours of what we thought was possible, we cannot help but imagine what shape the future might take: A career of 5000 sixes, a 20-ball hundred, 200 international centuries - all silly-sounding fantasies suddenly made plausible.
So let us peep. Where to begin? Sachin Tendulkar is the obvious answer, screamed already in the television promos; in the malted milk drink advert unsubtly echoing the one Tendulkar featured in in the 1990s; in the ten million Instagram likes that sprout simultaneously every time you put Sooryavanshi's name next to Tendulkar's in a post. But Sooryavanshi is - blasphemy alert - perhaps more of a prodigy than even Tendulkar. At 16, Tendulkar was doing things no 16-year-old batter had done before. At 15, Sooryavanshi is doing things no batter has done before.
The world beyond cricket might offer more suitable reference points.
Mozart and Michael Jackson: the visionaries
By age eight, Mozart had performed concerts in most of Europe's major cities, played in royal courts, and composed his first symphony. Michael Jackson was 11 when he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and sang the first note of "I'm Loving You" with an impossible mix of innocence and wise soulfulness. As children, both Mozart and Jackson could effortlessly do things adult musicians struggled with. One could do it blindfolded, the other while dancing.
But neither was content with simply continuing in the same vein as their predecessors. Mozart could have spent his short life composing jaunty waltzes to periwig-bobbing acclaim. Instead he chose to compose in minor keys, produce music that was branded overly complex at the time, and set the stage for a new age in music, the Romantic era, which still supplies the bulk of material for most modern concert programmes.
Jackson did not spend long covering old Motown hits and snapping his fingers while doing the jazz square. While still in his early 20s, he reinvented pop music. Though the allegations of child abuse later in his life have made Jackson's a complicated legacy, his influence is inescapable. Even today, many global pop hits, with their falsetto-laden, disco-inspired choruses, are easily recognisable as direct descendants of that first high-pitched "Wooh" and synth riff on "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough".
Sooryavanshi is already walking a similar path to Mozart's and Jackson's when it comes to inventiveness. His backlift and downswing are described by experienced cricketers as an evolution in six-hitting technique. Perhaps these are just the first of many innovations in batting mechanics Sooryavanshi will introduce. Maybe in 20 years batters will look unrecognisable from today, all modelled on this 15-year-old maverick.
Srinivas Ramanujan: the unsolved mystery
In the winter of 2010-11, a mathematician began dancing on the desk of his Paris office. He had just discovered a method to prove the significance of theories that had been scrawled into notebooks a hundred years earlier by the renowned Indian mathematician Ramanujan.
Ramanujan was born into poverty, the son of a sari-shop clerk and a religious mother, whose priority was to educate her young son in ancient Hindu scriptures. By the time he was 11, the gods were speaking to him in his dreams - telling him about numbers and how they were not what they seemed.
So outlandish were Ramanujan's speculations and theories about the true essence of numbers and how they could be broken down that when he wrote to the celebrated Cambridge mathematician Godfrey Hardy about them in 1913, he warned Hardy that some might think him fit for the "lunatic asylum". Though Hardy initially found Ramanujan's unproven theories almost illegible, some of their postulations nagged at him, and after further consideration he concluded they were so original they could not have come from the imagination of a madman and must therefore instead be the work of a genius.
Among Ramanujan's initial unproven concepts was that in certain mathematical contexts the sum of all whole numbers from one to infinity is -1/12, which might just have been the most mind-bending thing you had heard - until 2025, when someone told you to switch on your television because a 14-year-old was about to make the second-fastest hundred in the history of the IPL.
Ramanujan spent five or so years at Cambridge, working alongside Hardy and other mathematicians, before he sadly passed away from prolonged illness at just 32, but his concepts are still being deciphered a hundred years later and found to have new uses everywhere, from string theory to black-hole physics to data mechanics.
Like many of Ramanujan's theories, Sooryavanshi is a mystery. It is quite likely other batters will not be able to understand what he is doing, let alone replicate it. It may be decades after his career is done before a group of cricket data scientists can dance on the tables of a dressing room because they have finally come up with a metric that quantifies the benefits of his technique.
Daniel Radcliffe: the revivalist
Describing Radcliffe as a prodigy is a stretch. The main talents he displayed in the first few Harry Potter films can be broadly described as looking cute in spectacles and sounding posh in the way only truly posh people can while barely moving their lips.
He is on this list to make a point. At 17, Radcliffe, already a millionaire several times over, stripped naked on stage to play a deranged, barely verbal teen criminal in the classic play Equus. He said he made the left turn, which was considered something of a scandal, and jeopardised his casting in the final two Potter films, to "test" himself. Interesting choice of word.
What if in five years Sooryavanshi finds the comforts of flat pitches, lopsided rule sets and guaranteed Orange caps prosaic, and, like Radcliffe, decides to do something he heard his grandparents talk about: make Test cricket his priority.
Maybe he says no to the Rs 100-crore cheque, spends the months of April and May playing county cricket in the north of England, braving the spring rain as he trains his bat to travel from its beautiful backlift into the glorious arc of a Hashan Tillakaratne-esque leave and emerges into a Test summer as a batter capable of stonewalling for a 150-ball 40 on a greentop.
Lionel Messi: the protean
In numbers, Messi's career may be the footballing equivalent of Tendulkar's. Every record worth having seems to belong to him and to seem unbreakable for the foreseeable future. What has stood out in the last five years, though, is the new role Messi has invented for himself, now that his ankles can't twist at hummingbird speed as many times in a game as they did when his silky long hair slipped through flourescent-yellow blurs in 2007. Messi now saunters around the football pitch looking barely interested, bursting into motion only when the moment is just right. And he is still, at 39, the best player in his position in the world.
Sooryavanshi's batting style cannot be easy on the body. Lifting your wrists to shoulder height, pivoting your hip and then whipping your arms forward looks hard to do once, let alone every ball of a fast-paced game. What method will his mind concoct if his body cannot sustain his current one? Does he become six-hitting's minimalist, advancing on the efforts of Chris Gayle in creating a technique that generates maximum impact while exerting minimal force? Does he become a crafty accumulator, mixing in never-seen-before versions of the dab with the odd six? Or does he change his position instead, choosing, in his thirties, to wait in the dressing room, soak in the hysterical screaming of fans, and only appear for the final few balls of each… Okay wait, we've seen that one before.
Bobby Fischer: the renegade
Game three of the 2025 Freestyle Chess World Championship finals, played between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana, has 655,000 views on YouTube. Most games in marquee conventional chess tournaments fetch far less. Carlsen, the modern chess world's rock star, has been a leading proponent of the idea that freestyle chess, a version of the game that randomises the starting positions of the pieces, ought to supplant the traditional game as the most played chess format.
But whose idea was freestyle chess? In 1996, Bobby Fischer, four decades after becoming the youngest ever chess master at age 14, announced that he had found a solution to the problem of how boring chess had become. Even before he won his infamous two-month-long "Match of the Century" against Boris Spassky in 1972, Fischer had begun publicly lamenting how chess had become more a game of memory and preparation than one of strategy and quick thinking, due to the extensive research done on it over the decades. His solution: retire from the sport at 29, disappear from the public eye, and re-emerge decades later with a version of chess that ripped up the constraints of the traditional one.
How marvellously ironic would it be if Sooryavanshi, whose strike rate of 237.30 in IPL 2026 has incited panic about how imbalanced the game has become, and moral objections to the abuse of bowlers, grew bored of smashing sixes every second ball and became the catalyst for a set of rule changes that made T20 cricket a more challenging game for batters?