No, Shubman Gill Didn't Hire a Lookalike as His Personal Driver

A viral video convinced half the internet that India's cricket vice-captain had staged the world's strangest hiring decision. He didn't.

Social media erupted Thursday after clips began circulating showing Shubman Gill, the Indian cricketer, driving his own luxury car through the streets of Mumbai while a passenger sitting beside him bore an uncanny resemblance to the star batter himself. The internet, predictably, ran with it — the theory spread fast that Gill had hired a personal driver who happened to look almost exactly like him, with fans finding the idea of a superstar chauffeuring his own "twin" around thoroughly amusing.

The reality is considerably less dramatic. The person in the passenger seat isn't a hired lookalike at all — he's Sebastian Shaji, Gill's manager, whose genuinely similar appearance to the cricketer sparked the entire rumor in the first place. There was no elaborate hiring scheme, no double, and certainly no chauffeur-twin arrangement. Just two people with comparable features sitting in a car together, filmed by curious onlookers who put two and two together and landed somewhere well short of the actual answer.

It's a fairly harmless example of how quickly a viral claim can spiral once a video clip gets separated from its actual context — a passing resemblance, captured at the right angle, turned into a full-blown internet narrative within hours. The correction, as is often the case, traveled considerably slower than the original rumor.

For now, Gill remains focused on his actual job: leading India's batting lineup, most recently in the ongoing Women's Asia Cup coverage cycle drawing attention across Indian sports media this week. His manager, meanwhile, gets to enjoy his brief moment of viral, mistaken cricket stardom.

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