An ascetic at the Ranji final

As Mumbai and Tamil Nadu toil in the morning sun at the Wankhede Stadium, Swamiji walks past me. He is not the kind of man you would expect to see at a cricket match. Lean and white-haired, he wears a cream satin lungi and kurta. An elegant red tilak adorns his forehead. Swami A Parthasarathy is a specialist in Vedanta. And yes, that has plenty to do with sport. Sportstars go to him regularly in an effort to become better at their game - Geet Sethi, former Billiards World Champion, paid him one such visit a short while back. But what draws him to cricket?

To begin with, he used to play it. "I played cricket in my youth," he tells me, "and just when I had started to represent Madras in the early 1950s, I left it." He is 76, but looks anywhere from one to two decades younger. The secret of his vitality - and the area in which he has helped many sportsmen in his time: concentration.

"The human mind is always wandering," Swamiji - as he is known - tell me. "That affects concentration, which is vital for a human being and even more so for a sportsperson. Vedanta helps you concentrate better. What makes you lose concentration is the nature of the mind, which is constantly worrying about what happened in the past and anxious about what is going to happen in the future."

In the process of controlling the mind, peace of mind is achieved. Swamiji elaborates: "players are very tense: thinking about past failures or future selections, the cricketer's mind is always lost." He says that when there is peace of mind one becomes more productive.

So what is the route to peace and productivity? Swamiji says: "At the Vedanta Academy in Malavli, in Maharashtra, we have developed this scientific course by which we try to teach the student to achieve the balance between peace and productivity."

Swamiji has never worked with any particular cricketer individually, but he had conducted a session for Sourav Ganguly's men during the India-Australia Test match at the Wankhede in 2000-01. He had spoken to them about the three Cs. "I told them how to concentrate, how to be consistent and how to cooperate with each other."

What about sports psychologists? Don't they teach players the same things? "They are mad men," Swamiji retorts, "some of the psychiatrists attend my sessions themselves." His face turns red, and before he can lose his peace of mind, I change the subject.

In all his years of watching cricket, I ask him, how has cricket evolved? Swamiji says that during his time the cricket was more relaxed, but "unfortunately these days there's a lot of money involved in professional cricket". He has no problem with cricketers earning money - but he feels that the financial stakes can make a cricketer anxious about his performance, and thus affect the way he plays.

Swamiji says that there is scope for improvement even in a player like Sachin Tendulkar. "He [Tendulkar] is also a human," Swamiji says. "Where he differs from others is in his talent, but when it comes to concentration, he too needs to train more."