Hamara Sachin

As the little master bid a teary adieu to cricket on his home ground, 25,000 people in the stadium wept along. Meenakshi Rao, who witnessed the event at Wankhede Stadium, explores why Sachin Tendulkar is a phenomenon so fiercely loved and respected by fans and rivals alike

We have been the one-in-a-thousand generation to have witnessed a one-in-a-thousand event — the change of a millennium. That was the biggest transition for Planet Earth. Today, we are on to a day that will witness a just as big if not bigger change of guard — this time on Planet Cricket — the slide from a ‘With Sachin’ to an ‘After Sachin’ black hole. Like the millennium, this is a momentous occasion unlikely to see a repeat with any other face at any other time.

Imagine a world where Sachin is not walking in at No 4, looking into the sky, rotating his arm, adjusting his crotch guard, surveying the field placements, flexing his knees and taking guard. Imagine Team India without him guiding youngsters or advising the skipper from the first slip. Imagine a stadium filling up for and emptying out after just one player, imagine all the cussed bowlers all over the world not daring to sledge a batsman, imagine that delectable upper cut, that lofted six, that picture perfect straight drive being orphaned forever. Above all, imagine that next century not coming from the bat of a man who has been the nation’s proudest, stoutest asset of all times.

Yes, ‘the day after’ is here and it looks really wintry. Today is the last day that our homegrown wonder will be playing cricket. It’s a daunting thought and one wonders if the burden, yet again, is more on Tendulkar to go tackle this vacuum than his fans and yet maintain his sanity and reason to be.

What is India without Tendulkar in the middle and what is Tendulkar without cricket? The double whammy is imminent even as the adulating public and its legendary icon, together, try to make sense of this huge tectonic shift in the cricketing world. The only difference is that the little master has trained to bear the cross of this inevitability with stoic silence and legendary reserve but his fans will be noisy, brittle and emotional all at one go. He will go into his private space while his subjects will roam the streets mindlessly. He may yearn for the applause, for the spotlight, for the perennial public gaze with great resolve but his fans will talk about their loss loudly and longingly.

Come to think of it, will it ever be the same kind of joy when a Rohit Sharma or a Virat Kohli hits a scintillating century post-Tendulkar? Will anyone fire the love and imagination of generations as Tendulkar did? Not possible one would say and therein lies the crux of this Sunday moment.

So, marking the big occasion, I forgive Sachin for refusing to sign my autograph book, twice making my personal Sachin moment a soiree of deprivation — made up only by feasting on his innings since 2003 live! I forgive Javed Miandad for queering the pitch by saying it’s time for Sachin to go so why the fuss. I forgive my nation for its unrelenting obsession with seeing Sachin succeed always; I even forgive that crowd at Wankhede which had booed Tendulkar for that tiny singular moment in 2006 after the Sourav-Chappell controversy had dented team spirit and endeavour. Last but not least, I forgive my fellow colleagues for doing Sachin to death.

All this and much more is forgiven because Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar has done the rare deed of giving the less than ordinary mortals their most extra-ordinary moments, their reason to smile, hope and be happy in the face of tears, hopelessness and sorrow. He has been that singular force which provided a bridge from one world to another — from the world of high prices, low life, extreme poverty and stark woes to a globe where aspirations and inspirations swept away the ifs and buts of daily churn.

But, really! What is it about this small little guy that makes him such a reverend? Social activists do the same don’t they, bring smiles to the faces of the underprivileged? After all, for the last 24 years, Sachin Tendulkar has merely swung around a heavy bat assembled by someone else and made more runs than anyone else, that too in a game that’s a pygmy before football in sheer reach. It was not as if he jumped off a spaceship to save humanity — and saved humanity at that — or lifted mountains to reset tectonic plates.

But what he did instead was dress up the art of polished effort as no man had ever done before — with poise, perseverance and singular determination. Along the way, he crossed the rubicon of ordinariness to become a genius from whom everyone could take away a slice of meaning and a platter of purpose.

To limit Tendulkar’s wonderment to just his mindboggling longevity would be criminal. For he is no ordinary sportsperson, he is a novel phenomenon, an apostle of impossible achievements and a saint of gentle aggrandisement. Yes, in all of this, longevity is often the casualty, but only for the humdrum. Tendulkar is the God among the beings and anything that means failure has been consistently slipped under the door by him into his competitors’ dressing rooms.

All through his journey one thing about him was that he was like a good family drama — he appealed to all ages, all tastes and all communities and at all times. He could make a nation of one billion stop in its track merely by walking into the crease and taking guard on a 22-yard pitch in some circular stadium in some corner of the world. Only BR Chopra’s Mahabharat being aired on Doordarshan had shown similar signs of such absolute popular captivation. But all the adulation apart, Sachin Tendulkar’s genius lay in the fact that he may have aged in 24 years but he never let his love for cricket age. He is 40 but his cricketing passion is still 16. He loved and practised it with a boyish ability and hence has always been the little one in popular imagination. In short, despite not being a saint or a politician, he has been a unique phenomenon — an orthodox innovator. Oxymoronish as this may sound, it is for this very reason that he is considered to be a genius wedded to immortality.

All through his delectable career, he has sported the paradoxes well. He’s been cautious yet aggressive, measured yet fertile, young yet an adult with the bat. He has unleashed fury with control, anger with gentleness, vocal inadequacy with a speaking willow, youth with incredible adult poise, greatness with humility and persistence with determination.

They all say it’s hunger that drove him to accumulate runs at such a fierce pace and the joke goes that coming from a malnourished nation struck by poverty, oppression and deprivation, the hunger for anything was but natural. More seriously, it was the awe and fear he struck in bowlers with his relentless pursuit of a “tear them all” intent that yet again contrasted with his cherubic looks, curly locks and unexplained humbleness.

In that sense, in cricket at least, he gave humility a whole new meaning, something that a brash and abusive lesser genius like Virat Kohli was to be moved by two decades later to reshape his manners on his idol’s impeccability in all situations.

In Sachin’s book, humility meant respect, smile and kill, much like Novak Djokovich would do almost two decades later — slay with a smile. At best, Sachin’s been a master of quiet decimation. At his worst, a dogged disciple of the game he played. Add to that a splash of class, innovation and energy and you have a Steve Jobs at work in the middle.

Of course, when Sachin debuted, Jobs had been thrown out of Apple and just then reinstated and the much fabled iPhone was not even a concept in his mind. All that Apple had done by then was to secretly ideate about a device akin to iPad.

Meaning to say 1989 was no year of revolution, till Sachin shook its precincts. Reagan had been replaced by Senior Bush and Licence to Kill, the 16th film in the Bond saga, had just been released. When Sachin debuted in 1989, his idol Lata Mangeshkar was at her peak and his disciple Amitabh Bachchan still an angry young man. The rupee to the dollar was 17 and gold priced at just Rs 3,100 per 10 grams. Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister and the nation that was India could have done with at least one more sporting idol other than Vishwanathan Anand whose complex sit-down sport made him a restricted hero.  

That Tendulkar predated the world wide web and, to a certain extent, even night cricket, and that he saw off greats like Sergei Bubka, Chris Evert Lloyd and Carl Lewis, to name a few, speaks about his incredibly long shelf life untouched by even a whiff of controversy. That’s a saga in itself, a reason to put him in the hall of fame. But for a tampered ball here, a demand for duty exemption there and a defence of his beleaguered colleague in an away series, there is very little that could be used to corner Tendulkar.

By all standards then, he should have been neighbour’s envy, owner’s pride. But Tendulkar is and always be a class apart — he is no one’s envy and everyone’s pride — across national boundaries, the unanointed harbinger of vasudhaiva kutumbakam. 

Source: The Pioneer, November 17, 2013