It has been a peculiar month. I would use the word difficult, but under the current circumstances, it may not belong to me. So I’ll stick with a synonym for unusual because we are all dealing with change. This period of restricted mobility and social contact has come with its mental challenges.
In between watching mornings melt into afternoons and afternoons into evenings from our windowpanes and balconies, we’ve learnt to lean on the internet as our sole friend, bartender, and therapist. I have often found sanctuary shuttling between different corners of YouTube. During one such rabbit hole dig, I found my answer to the question everyone has been asked by someone else over the last month — “What do you miss the most?”.
Short answer — I miss sport. In many shapes and forms, sport has been the big leitmotif to my life. Growing up, it was pretty much my singular focus, the centre of all my recreational interests. If I wasn’t playing, I would be in front of my television, shuffling between the handful of sport channels that our cable operator could provide. Much of that time was spent watching Sachin Tendulkar. So much so, that I could tell the story of my entire childhood and adolescence through him.
For my generation, Tendulkar was ours, in a way that Sunny, Viv, and Marshall belonged to our parents; except we got to see him all the time. He was everywhere — on our televisions, on the posters in our bedrooms, on the covers of our sticker notebooks and wrappers of cola bottles — and yet, we couldn’t have enough of him.
He was the face of cricket in an era when the sport really took off, at least in our country. We had grown up on stories of an Indian team that was a fair distance behind cricketing royalty. The achievements of ’71, ’83 and ’85 were outliers on an honestly middling map. To a post-liberalisation India that was just opening its eyes to greater reward for merit, Sachin was the sign of change. Sachin Tendulkar’s India was one that dreamt of reaching the front tables.
At Sharjah, he told us we could win against the best; at Chennai the next year, we felt heartbreak for the first time. As we grew into hormonal teenagers, we saw him struggling with a medical condition that threatened to take him away, before he came back and capped our teens off with the most glorious final act. We grew in and out of love with cricket, but we never stopped loving Sachin — purely because he never stopped playing for us. For 24 years, he played every kind of innings, wrestled every kind of demon — internal and external — and yet, displayed a purity of craft that was endearing and inspiring at once. Between Wanderers and Wankhede, most of us can spend days waxing eloquent on the different batting (or bowling) exhibitions he often dished out, but to put it succinctly, and in keeping with the times — no one had that range.
Contrary to a thought that has almost become fashionable, statistics and centuries never defined Sachin — at least for the fans. 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. To quote what the indomitable CLR James wrote in his book Beyond The Boundary — “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.”
Sport is art too, but unpredictable. That is why it rewards those who succeed with any semblance of predictability, and that is why it makes for great stories. Today, with the power of the internet, we can easily find videos and scorecards from years gone by. What we wouldn’t be able to replicate is the venture into the unknown and the elation on the reveal — of watching Shoaib Akhtar steaming to the crease in a crunch World Cup match and seeing the ball sail into the stands beyond the third-man boundary.
I miss sport in a way that I have missed watching Sachin Tendulkar bat all these years. It was joyful to indulge and invest all my emotions without knowing what would come out of it. On some days, life would be like that day in Durban when Donald sent his middle stump cartwheeling. On some others, it would be like the cool, windy evening in Jaipur, when he creamed Sohail Tanvir for six boundaries and got out for a pristine, joyous 30.
For now and the next few weeks, robelinda’s YouTube videos will have to suffice. Happy Birthday, Sachin. To many more!