They say love-at-first sight doesn’t exist in the age of Tinder — and yet Ishant Sharma and his wife Pratima Singh are proof that it does. The national-level basketball player and the Team India cricketer are poles apart in their nature and their approach to life, but they blend in a way that makes you go weak in the knees.
This is the story of how he wooed a National-Level Basketballer and what it takes to make their marriage work.
They revealed their story in a no-holds-barred webisode of Cricbuzz’s new show Spicy Pitch. And their courtship is genuinely the stuff of old-school romance. Ishant saw Pratima for the first time when he was invited as the Chief guest for Delhi’s IGMA Basketball Association League. Ishant says it was love at first sight— in fact, he knew he wanted to marry Pratima on that very first day he saw her.
Pratima, on the other hand, was utterly clueless about Ishant’s intentions. She says, “I was actually a little annoyed at all the attention he got when he came as the Chief Guest. My three sisters and I were all present at the event — and we were all Team India basketball players— and yet he got all the attention because people knew who he was.”
The Hindi-movie style saga doesn’t end here. For close to a year, Ishant nurtured these feelings for Pratima without once revealing them to her. He spoke more to her sisters than he did to her.
Pratima says, “I had no idea he had such strong feelings for me. It was only before he left for Australia that he told me he had something important to tell me when he came back. And that’s when I guessed that he was serious about us.”
While their meet-cute and subsequent courtship are the stuff fairy tales are made of, it’s the actual marriage that’s even more aspirational. They’ve both evolved from being single-minded sportspeople to caring for the other person’s life and dreams. But the maturity that comes with marriage doesn’t mean they’ve left the fun behind.
“We absolutely love playing UNO together. Rather, Ishant loves cheating and winning against me. And he never fails to recover the money I owe him from our UNO games— even if it’s just Rs. 100!” Pratima concludes.
