Birthdays are great. All day people say nice things to you. Some even tell the world. A friend you haven’t spoken to in five years leaves a text; one you thought of meeting last month calls. The food’s great, hopefully the company even better. Maybe a drink here or there. Lots of laughter on top. A hug or two as the calendar flips over.
It was my Grandmum’s birthday last month. Almost to the day. Her body won’t be able to handle a lavish dinner or even a tablespoon of cake, but she looks forward to her birthday. For the last seven years, I have been living in a different city from her, but always in the same room as March 26th rolls in. This year, for a mix of reasons, I couldn’t. So a phone call had to suffice. After the initial pleasantries and asking for plans, even though I knew it would involve little more than shuffling between her bed and the plastic chair kept five steps away, I asked how her last year went. She wished her body would give her less agony. I didn’t have much of an answer, so I made my smile audible. After a second’s pause, she asked me how I spend mine.
I had an answer ready for that because I had thought about it. I like my birthdays to be quiet, around my favourite people and some good food. Until I had to move cities, my birthdays at home were similar too. Food was a central theme. Grandmum cooked my favourite dishes; my family would be around.
She was glad I called. Her birthday is an important day on the calendar for me. It prompted me to think about other such days. April 24th is one.
It is a day I realise I have to share with a country of a billion. This year, even more so. Sachin Tendulkar turns fifty. In 1998, he set the gold standard for what a birthday party should look like. A big final, the floodlights of Sharjah, and Australia in their unique, fierce shade of green and gold. Tendulkar was coming off a belligerent century just two days before to get India tickets for the final. Australia were amongst the best teams in the world, but that year, India beat them often. Every time down to one man. Even on April 24th, 1998, all Indian hopes rested on his brownish bat with an MRF logo running along its torso.
If I could, I’d bottle the three and a bit hours and carry it wherever I go. A party like no other. By the end of the night, Sachin Tendulkar had not just won India a tournament, but come of age as the closest thing to batting perfection our generation had seen. That night cemented a permanent place in our hearts for someone we were already deeply in love with. It wasn’t a fleeting, flaming romance, just a pure and tender adoration.
He was a temporal yardstick for me and many of my age. His international career mirrored our lives. By a neat coincidence, he was less than a year old in Indian colours, and still a teen, when I was born. As I grew from a toddler to a primary schooler, the teen sensation became a boy genius. That name had a recall value in my almond-sized brain even before I had met him. Born into a sports-mad family, it would only be a matter of time before they introduced him.
I can’t quite remember the exact day -- well, I was five -- but India were playing New Zealand. It was a time when both formats of cricket felt long and arduous. Batting in one-day internationals was still executed from the handbook used in Test cricket, where safety was given greater weight than opportunity. Only a handful of batters across the globe were willing to live on the edge. Sachin walked in to bat -- diminutive, collars up, with a face that looked as young as mine. He played cricket that didn’t fit his surroundings, the white clothing, or the dour commentary. It was love at first cover-drive.
For my generation, Sachin was ours, like Gavaskar, Viv, and Marshall were our parents’. Our advantage was access. We got to see him all the time. He was on our televisions, posters in bedroom cupboards, covers of our notebooks, and wrappers of cola bottles. And yet, we couldn’t have enough.
By the turn of the century, cricket had realised the potential of India’s demography, and handed over one set of keys of the sport to the BCCI. The men in blue played all year long. They were hot property wherever they went, propelled by the most marketable face in the sport. I have a theory about why Sachin’s calm persona appealed to an Indian populace that worships subservience and obeisance, but I’ll leave it for another day. As a kid, I couldn’t care less about cultural tendencies. Sachin was whacking Glenn McGrath to all corners of Nairobi’s Gymkhana Cricket Ground, and I was jumping in my drawing room. Most probably spilling some orange juice on myself. Worth it.
The Sachin Show, which aired regularly between 1995 and 2003, was the most addictive habit a cricket-loving kid could develop. We could indulge without ever feeling guilty, and the family was in on it too. What else could we ask for?
I turned thirteen in 2003. Teenage years were supposed to be fun and games, but I wasn’t prepared for the uncontrolled wave pool of emotions waiting for me to turn up. Some of my best friends changed schools, in time I had to move too, and I was left bouncing between a crowd much older than me or much younger. Classrooms looked more like military dormitories with every passing year. I turned to sports for respite. Every time Sachin came out to bat, I wanted him to hit the bowler extra hard, as if to make up for my pent-up anxieties. There were streams of tears shed when he couldn’t find runs.
Slowly, the tears stopped because there was an alarming drought of runs. For the first time, the invincible seemed fallible. Sachin wasn’t batting with the same elegance either. News came out that he had developed an injury called tennis elbow. What a funny name. How can a cricketer get an injury clearly meant for tennis players? I knew Sachin played and watched a lot of tennis, but this was a bit much.
Apparently, one can. Sachin batted with a padded contraption under his elbow. Thick armguards followed soon, and the fluency that was his skin had deserted him entirely by then. His batting felt laborious -- an adjective I had never thought I’d use for him.
The drudgery, in my mind and his runs, went on for a while longer before we could turn towards the highway. Sachin’s return to true form came midway in 2007. I was sixteen, soon to be seventeen, and had moved past the slippery years of adolescence. A slight bit of confidence, a thicker skin. Sachin seemed like a different batter too. He retained all his artistry, but had curbed in the electricity. He was more judicious with his shots, a beacon of stability in a team of explosive, young talents. Not one of them could bat like him though. And he showed it with aplomb. Over the next four years, Tendulkar found a plane of consistency that was a rare occurrence even at his peak. The best batter in the world, all over again.
By the time Sachin retired, on a teary-eyed November afternoon in 2013, I was working as an engineer with an ambitious startup. It was a period when I was beginning to realise the impact of a consistent salary on someone who desperately searched for comfort in their own skin. The paycheque was a way of finding self-worth, silly as it feels a decade later. That November afternoon, I tuned into the official stream from work, shed a few tears, and bid goodbye to the most significant unattached compass of my childhood and teens. It didn’t feel like a painful parting, though. The end had been near, both for his career and a stage of my life that I was keen to jump higher from.
Through all these years, every time I searched for a word to describe Sachin, I’d often land at pure. His technique, or his hunger for runs, had this inexplicable purity. On good pitches and bad, against the world’s best or dentists turning up for Namibia, he didn’t score ugly runs. It was all very compact, like a recorded masterclass on how good batting looks.
Contrary to an idea that has become fashionable, statistics and centuries never defined Sachin. If you as much as watched one good Tendulkar innings, you will know that no number on his Cricinfo profile will ever convey what a cover drive off Glenn McGrath did.
“Appreciation of cricket has little to do with the end, and less still with what are called ‘the finer points’, of the game. What matters in cricket, as in all the arts, is not finer points but what everyone with some knowledge of the elements can see and feel.” - CLR James, Beyond a Boundary
The other day, he was on my television again, now a little broader, cheeks puffed up, but with a face that still held excitement for the game. He was many yards away from the pitch. Sitting at the back of the dugout, clenched, as his son ran in to bowl the last over in a tense IPL match.
It feels odd to think that he’s fifty. That it has been twenty-five years since that night in Sharjah. A while since one log of willow dictated my mood for the day. So, today felt like a good time to reflect. Watching Sachin play was one of the most joyous things I ever did without doing anything. Sport is a regular supply of wonder if one looks hard enough. But I don’t know if I’ll ever find anything as pure and stripped off measuring tapes and life’s cynicisms as watching Sachin Tendulkar take apart the best bowling attacks in the world, with a tall glass of orange juice in my hand. Possibly mixed by Grandmum. Good times.
Growing up with Sachin couldn’t be more apt for me. I was leaving my grandmum’s place for Lucknow when Sachin got into his own and told a certain Pakistani veteran where he can shove his experience. Of course the match didn’t count but the batting did and look what happened next?
Growing up with Sachin was easy. He was my clutch. He was trying to do things in a world dominated by old uncles. Nothing wrong with getting old, just that those old uncles had too many wisecracks about Sachin, just like uncles around us had a lot of things to say about us. The ‘shut your mouth and rock them with brilliant brutality’ part made a lot of us feel like we are Sachin. Of course no one can be Sachin. God’s wish they could he him.
Long winded way of telling you that my parents still tease me about the solemn silence that I would don the minute Sachin would get out. I would, allegedly, shed a tear, remember that I have homework to do and then retire to the room where my elder brother would tease me and we will end up fighting (read - i would get my ass whooped). That ass whooping numbed the pain.
The long follow up after a glorious cover drive
The definitive affirmative nod (that I allegedly still copy)
The AD adjust
The ‘fuck off’ to Saqlqin mustaq after getting Saqlain LBW (Saqlain fell) at Sharjah
The mouthing off to Glen Mcckie
The kiss of death to Henry Olanga
The ‘Sasheen TendulKaar’ call of Tony Greig
The ‘ooh ravi ooh ravi, ravi ravi, nearly nearly’ song of Geoff Boycott on a turned down appeal against Sachin (Eden gardens, against SL in world cup semis)
The contract with WorldTel Mark Mascarenas
These are all my bookmarks for life. Sachin is life. On the ground he is still God. There is noone like Sachin. There cannot be. Topic is wover.
Thank you for writing this. It felt boring because I was having a hard time recollecting when did I start writing on your substack? This is all personal. This is all our shared history. This is Sach. Sach is life.
Lovely piece, Sarthak. I'm of the same age and some of my strongest childhood memories are of Sachin doing well. Although i don't watch cricket much now, i still like reliving those memories by watching highlights of his innings on YouTube so this really resonated with me.