Nineteen years after I first met him, Sachin Tendulkar's zest for cricket remains undimmed. The 16-year-old prodigy is now a full-blown genius.The boy has turned into man, the slender frame has filled out and the curls on his head are not as flush with hair as they used to be. But talk cricket, and you detect that the child in him remains intact.
Tendulkar turns 35 on April 24. The 19 years since Tendulkar made his debut against Pakistan in 1989 have gone past in a flash, as it were, but he has etched out an era that will remain memorable to posterity: as much for the remarkable quality of his cricket as what he meant to Indian life metaphorically. His colleagues and various experts who have contributed to this special issue all testify to this, albeit in different ways.
Like cinema and politics, cricket is wholly integrated into Indian life. Tendulkar not only filled up stadiums around the country with his dynamic batsmanship, but also filled the nation with hope. At the physical level, he was playing sport, at a subliminal level he was nurturing the ambitions of a young country that was breaking its shackles from a restrictive past.
Tendulkar had arrived when the Mandal agitation was at its peak and was quickly to demonstrate that where skill was concerned, reservations were unmerited, unwanted.
So great was his talent and such was his appeal that he was to become the country's most recognised face.
Willy-nilly, he was also to become the symbol of liberalization too when he became the country's highest earning sportsperson through endorsements and the like. The equation between performance and reward was never clearer, and there could not have been a more deserving person either.
For in spite of his phenomenal fame, the glory and wealth he has garnered, Tendulkar retains his humility. He is a man of many strokes but few words. He likes to let his bat do the talking. When he does speak or take a position, the world listens, as happened in the Harbhajan Singh controversy in Australia.
He shuns controversy like the plague. It seems truly astonishing to me — indeed surreal — that anybody with such a high profile should have steered clear of controversy for so long. It reveals a man who knows his mind, man who takes his status seriously and lives up to the responsibility with due diligence. In many ways, it is not just cricket which makes him superhuman.
Tendulkar has frequently been compared to Don Bradman as a batsman, but for me the `biggest' similarity between Bradman and Tendulkar is the manner in which both have coped with the phenomenal pressures of personal and public expectation and lived up to it.
No two individuals in the history of the game meant so much for so many people for so long. Through their cricketing excellence, Bradman and Tendulkar not only established the identity of their respective nations on the world but, in the process, helped millions of their countrymen find their national identity too.
For all his centuries and records that, to me, is the true essence of Sachin Tendulkar.
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