A Hero's Journey (Diptych) by Rohan Joglekar

An original painting by Rohan Joglekar.

Rohan Joglekar’s diptych, “A Hero’s Journey,” captures the emotional highs and lows of life, set against the vivid backdrop of a cricket pitch. This isn’t just any cricketing tale; it’s an ode to the personal resilience of Sachin Tendulkar during the 1999 World Cup—a poignant moment when he chose to play for his country amid the grief of losing his father.

The two canvases, standing in dialogue with each other, present the cricketer on a seesaw—a metaphor that visually echoes the ups and downs of a sporting life and beyond. The first painting shows him at the seesaw’s low end, looking upward, locked in a position of introspection. The ground is dry, textured, and flat, framing a figure that seems isolated, gazing towards something greater than the game. The distance and foreshortening push you into the space between hope and desolation, mirroring that moment when life’s pressures and personal loss weigh you down. It’s the gut-punch of gravity.

But then you swing into the second painting. It’s like the camera shiŠs, and suddenly, the cricketer is buoyant, seesaw tilted skyward, a figure almost soaring against a bright, limitless backdrop. The yellow sky feels triumphant, like a stadium of cosmic applause, liŠing him not just above the field but beyond the weight of the earthly. His expression is joyous, his arms thrown open—not merely in celebration but in liberation. It’s a moment when performance transcends the field, touching something primal, something deeply human.

What Joglekar does so brilliantly here is collapse the grand theater of sport into the universal theater of human emotion. The works hold a perfect tension, not just between low and high, failure and triumph, but between what it means to rise above oneself. This isn’t just about cricket or even Tendulkar. It’s about all of us who have ever been pinned down by circumstance and found a way to look up, who have soared only to fall again.

It’s deceptively simple, yet packed with an emotional undercurrent that plays like a familiar song—one you can’t quite remember the words to but feel every beat of. Joglekar captures the seesaw of life, the strange and constant motion between joy and despair. In “A Hero’s Journey,” we see not just a cricketer but a person, battling on the field and in life, reminding us that it’s the ups and downs that shape us.