Happy Left Handers Day 2023
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Journey of a left-handed male born in India
Happy Left Handers Day 2023
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I am left-handed.
I tried learning violin when I was in school about 13–14 years old. I realized that the bow is not held as simple as a stick, but as a special grip - at least that’s what my Guru taught.
Not like this
Source: shutterstock
But, like below:
At that age, I did not feel that grip comfortable with my right hand - I used to feel pain in wrist and shoulder and not natural - some awkward twists in wrist after practicing for 10–15 minutes.
I did not feel similar discomfort while holding the bow with my left hand.
I gave up learning after my Guru and dad felt it would be too expensive and effort to shift the strings on violin.
When I grew older, in my late twenties, I restarted playing violin - I no longer feel pain/discomfort with the right hand grip - however, I don’t find time to practice and take to the next stage to actually see if I can play at a decent level.
For cricket, it depends on two main things -
The lesser likelihood of getting LBW, destroying bowlers’ lines are all additional unintended gifts.
Read this interesting article “On the Other Hand”[1] on why and how Hussey, a right-handed shifted to batting with LHB stance.
Hussey is naturally right-handed. He writes right-handed, plays tennis right-handed, brushes his teeth right-handed, picks up a spoon right-handed, and throws and bowls with his right arm. When he first picked up a cricket bat, he picked it up right-handed. But on that fateful sunny morning he decided to try batting left-handed, like Border, and ended up sticking with it for the rest of his life.
In so doing, Hussey may well have inadvertently bequeathed himself a natural technical advantage, for if there is one thing that the two main schools of batsmanship that exist in Australia - the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) school and the native autodidactic school headed by Sir Donald Bradman and Greg Chappell - agree on, it is this: a grip with a firm top hand and loose bottom hand is optimal for good batsmanship.
Logically it is easier for a batsman who holds the bat with his naturally stronger hand as the top hand (and his naturally weaker hand as the bottom hand) to grip it with a firm top hand and a loose bottom hand. When Hussey switched to batting left-handed, his naturally stronger right hand became his top hand. That wasn't what motivated his change - he did it "purely" because he "wanted to be like Allan Border" - and even when he became a world-class batsman, Hussey was generally not conscious of "the dominance of one hand over another", except when batting at the death of a one-day or T20 game. It was then, he told the Cricket Monthly, that he took the firm top-hand, loose bottom-hand grip to its logical apotheosis:
"At the end of a one-day game or a T20 game, when you're looking to basically hit sixes every ball… I made a conscious effort to really loosen the grip of my bottom hand. So I'd basically just rest the bottom hand [on the bat] on one finger - my index finger - because I was finding that when I was looking to slog, even though my bottom left hand was my less [naturally] dominant hand, it was gripping the bat too hard and taking control of the bat too quickly and affecting my swing. I wasn't hitting through the line of the ball as well as I would have liked."
Footnotes
I see 2 reasons -
Much later, while working for All India Radio, he received guidance from the reclusive Annapurna Devi, daughter of Baba Allaudin Khan. She only agreed to teach him if he was willing to unlearn all that he had learnt until then.Another version is that she only agreed to teach him after he (of his own) took the decision to switch from right-handed to left-handed playing to show her his commitment.In any case Chaurasia plays left-handed to this day.