Saurabh Netravalkar is making waves in the ongoing T20 World Cup 2024. The Indian-origin USA seamer has made heads turn, not just with his skillful bowling, but also his arcane professional background while simultaneously playing top-flight cricket. (Full Coverage | Cricket News)
As is common knowledge by now, Netravalkar works as a software engineer at IT company Oracle, while living his dream of playing international cricket. The 32-year-old left-armer, who was India's leading wicket-taker at the 2010 edition of the Under-19 World Cup, moved to the US in 2015 to pursue a career in computer science.
He has been juggling the two disparate disciplines successfully over the years, evidenced by his achievements in both fields. After delivering a splendid Super Over that helped United States upset Pakistan, Netravalkar dismissed batting titans Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli during the India vs USA match.
As for his feats in the IT arena, few know that the southpaw has a patent in his name that enables fast autocomplete for search queries. Netravalkar himself disclosed this fact in an interview with Cricbuzz.
"I filed for a patent. It was an innovation algorithm that we had. I worked on it with one of my seniors. That was one of my earlier projects at Oracle and that patent got accepted. So that was a big achievement. The technology we invented gets you fast results for the word you're searching for.
"For example, if you type ORA, that word can be Oracle, that word can be coral. So how do we autocomplete that? How fast can you do that? How fast you can autocomplete our guess of the best word. That's called wildcard searching in technical terms, so it was a fast method of wildcard searching that we implemented. That was the first patent that I have right now. I have filed for another one as well. Waiting for it to be approved," Netravalkar elaborated.
A Cornell University graduate, Netravalkar had earlier developed CricDeCode, an app to help cricketers analyse their game. Apart from his technical prowess, the Mumbai-born cricketer is also well-versed in music, and a video of him playing the Uke while singing a Marathi song went viral on social media.
Indian cricket lovers are going gaga over Netravalkar's multifarious talents, though for him, the sole focus will currently be on trying to take co-hosts USA to the Super 8 stage of the T20 World Cup.
