24 February, 2010.
Dear Sachin,
One could feel the anguish that you have in yourself for not having driven your team to a major tournament victory or in other words to a major victory that you have so longed for. It’s awful to find oneself at a stage where one is compared to God. You must have found it hard to visualize a situation in which gods are expected to perform, to show their power; we live in the age of paradoxes: Ever heard Leo Tolstoy getting a Nobel or even Gandhi making up to it? Ever heard Pablo Picasso gathering alms in the form of State awards? Do we now hear the names of greats like Pete Sampras, the one who broke many records in getting prizes? What would possibly make us believe that greatness one is not born with greatness one cometh through the passage of time? It’s inspiring like the flow of a river that makes fertile all the land that comes in its way. I had always rebuked telepathy as something of having a metaphysical nature, something outrageous to human intelligence. And yet, I feel that inspiration is such a telepathy that crosses millions of brains in a fraction of second. How would one otherwise justify a person having no nearness to a certain sport (at least in the present) getting inspired with a thought of living a moment of pure obsession, and him getting all bliss, whatsoever is his share, juggling through the analysis of a certain Match.
In my country, we never mix professionalism with vocation. The former is either considered a sacrilege of certain traditional values or something only to a group of highly privileged individuals. You changed its definition, you made it a part of sports; a domain that badly required it. Today India’s greatness in not counted in terms of its prosperity, and it’s awful, it’s counted in terms of culture that this country brings into the global scene. A sport, mainly cricket, has become a part of the popular imagination. Sachin has played his role. A country that is terminally sick and badly needs a surgery and where every professional success is required to pass through personnel whims, a high level of perfection still exists, it’s impeccable and hence beyond the reach of any personnel bias. Cricket and, up to a certain extent, Bollywood have guided India through what could be considered as a self inflicted poverty. These two domains have had a far superior ideological reach than any popular ideology itself. And yet, they required a certain catalyst to be considered as religions (in the sense that Opium held for Marx). Bollywood, however saw many a demi-gods, Cricket never saw it till the arrival of Tendulkar.
Recently, a cricketer made a comment that Tendulkar was born to play cricket. This notion was to my mind highly reducing, he was born to live like any other mortal sole, and then die. The choice that he made was certainly complicated as he not being a part of generation that had played cricket: in India, dynasty means a lot. So, the choice was not only a difficult one, but it also would have complicated the otherwise smooth ideology of a middle class family; take birth, work and then rest. The expression becomes self explanatory when Tendulkar says that he would make his bat work in a certain way.
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