Rare non-subject update post!
Bracket last published an article in July last year, and has been on a radio silence since. I owe you an explanation. Dear Bracket Bimbos (sorry), that’s because things have been happening in the life of Mr. Bracket. Big things, too.
This February, I got an opportunity to work on the IPL 2022 auction with the CSK management. I can definitely say that was a bucket list item I’ll treasure for the rest of my life. I’ve said this a million times and I won’t tire of saying it: I remember sitting with Omkar in the high school library looking at the assembled squads for the newly started IPL, back in 2008. I remember passionately discussing with him the retentions of the 2013 season. I remember rejoicing with him when MI bought Ben Dunk - after that one really good BBL season he had - as a random, late base price buy in 2014.
We worked together for the last two months for this auction, we built a product we’re really proud of, and we were able to help the CSK management plan for a tricky auction because of two new teams and an additional 180 Cr of money in a not-very-expanded pool.
As Mumbai Indians made their crazy Jofra Archer gambit after being quiet the entire auction, we were both freaking out, on two different sides of the world now.
But one of us was sitting at the auction table watching it unfold, ten feet away.
Felt like we made it.
A week after the auction, I had an incredibly surreal experience: I went viral. On LinkedIn, of all places. I made a (fairly generic) post on LinkedIn on Saturday about my experience at the auction and how much it meant to me. I made the post, shut my laptop down and went to play some board games. When I came back, the post had more than 500 likes, and I thought that was weird, but hey, I guess a lot of people liked it.
Sunday afternoon, we were at 5000 and still climbing. By Monday, we were at 10,000 likes, and I had ten times as many connection requests as I’d had connections to begin with. As of this writing, we’re at 21,000. It’s been viewed more than two million times. I have no idea what I’ve done to earn this. My imposter syndrome has been doing somersaults for a month. I still have no idea how to feel about this. But it happened. It’s a crazy, crazy world.
I think I fell right into the sweet spot of LinkedIn virality, albeit unknowingly. It was a short enough post to be read in two minutes, not my usual 5000-word treatise on the quirks of the auction. It had zero stupid jokes and zero arcane Parks and Rec references. Which is to say: if I’d read that post anywhere, I wouldn’t have given it a second look. But so many did, which means my experience must really have connected.
And then came the comments. They were overwhelmingly positive: I think the dream of that 16-year-old me is a dream so many people share, no matter their age, and I had managed to strike a chord with so many lovers of one great, funny, beautiful sport.
But of course, I got yelled at for CSK not bidding for Raina, more than my mom has ever yelled at me for not buying anything. Some of it got kinda personal, too. Some of the assholish comments kinda hurt me in the moment, but they got funnier to me the more I thought. The fact that you’d visit a post from someone you had no idea existed, celebrating a personal milestone, and try to shit on them personally because the team you really love did not buy a player you really love? You gotta admit, that’s kinda funny. And very human.
So: I was away doing crazy shit, and crazy shit was happening to me.
And now I’m back! How often I write will again be limited only by my laziness, perfectionism, intense self-criticism and procrastination, and not circumstances in my life and once-in-a-lifetime events happening!
Thank you for hanging around, and thank you for your support and appreciation. I hope you’ll enjoy the upcoming posts, or at least I hope they’ll make you go “huh, interesting” before you go back to taking a picture of your cat for Instagram. That “huh, interesting” means a lot to me. As do all cat pictures. Thank you.