He never was a God!

Sachin Tendulkar

Note: This is not at all a negative post. Please go through the full text before rating and sending me messages.

I wanted to write this one after the memories had faded a bit, the spirit had sedated if not died and the feelings had settled so that I could take a more objective approach. This one’s not about Sachin, the man, machine or product of times; not about the Sharjah joy or the Sydney love; not about the excruciating expectations or insurmountable statistics. It’s about values – the way we Indians define them and then find ways to circumvent them or reasons to stick to them; it’s about rendering a new meaning to solitude; a belief that defied expectations and the courage and will to outperform himself each passing day.

Sachin is no God by any measure. He has an average in the lower 50′s, a 24 match century-less streak, a below average record against a languid Pedro Collins and more so he was never a game-changer (barring the late 90′s) like his contemporaries Brian Lara and Virender Sehwag. So what makes me write about Tendulkar then? Panegyric eulogies should hail heroes and not average folks who were just plain lucky to have been selected at an age of 16.

How many of us love what we do and how many of us try to love what we have to do? We find ways to be good at whoever we are and whatever we do. We like to set high expectations and then break them. But how many of us actually give our sweat, blood, family and even life to achieve that little perfection. Studies tell us that perfecting any art takes a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice. Great artists breach that level at times but more often than not stay close to it. Let’s look at Sachin:

Career span: 24 years

Average number of ODIs in that duration: 19

Average number of Test matches: 11

Average number of match days each year: 19 + 11×5 = 74

Average number of intense practice days: 85

Average number of practice days: 250

Number of hours of practice before a match day: 4.5 hours

Number of hours of practice daily: 2 hours

Total hours of practice: 38,940

Now, that is four times the required number and that does not count years of practice in the Mumbai circles with Mr. Achrekar. But my real question is this: Even after 38,940 hours of practice Tendulkar could not abandon the temptation of swirling his willow outside the off-stump; every now and then he could be deceived by a leg-spinner’s googly or an off-spinner’s doosra. He was no God, not a perfectionist either, so what makes a billion Indians dance to his tunes; what made us so fragile to cry at a man’s long overdue departure.

Solitude – a term read and understood well but seldom embraced and this is where Tendulkar thrived. While all of us want that inner peace and space but no matter how introvert we are we don’t like the idea of being alone. So, am I inferring that ‘Sachin Tendulkar’, the idol of 100 crore people in India and millions abroad was alone? Yes, in more ways than one. Like Hayden put it, “When in India, it was a frantic appeal of a nation to one man”. He meant so much to so many people, yet he didn’t sacrifice his private space, that simple peace of mind that allowed him to think freely and enjoy the game with a school-boy like enthusiasm. Instead of trying to learn to live in this solitude he embraced it wholeheartedly. Instead of searching for light in this God-forbidden world he made the dark his own, the loneliness his sole friend and his soul-mate. He had friendships, beautiful relationships and a great fan-following but he allowed himself to live in that shell where like all others instead of being the centre stage he was also part of the audience.

Another rather obsolete term that helped shape Tendulkar’s career and more so being loved by a billion odd people around the world was his forthrightness, his belief in values, inculcated at a young age by a poet father and a God-fearing mother. That he never was a part of an alcohol advertisement does not make him a person with sound values. That he didn’t touch alcohol till the last few years of his active career and even after that only had an occasional wine once in a while also doesn’t make a difference but that he was one of the few to have come out unscathed out of a generation of match-fixers does, and that he didn’t advertise alcohol because he knew what he meant to young followers around the globe speaks volumes about his identity as a person. That he stood by a team-mate when he was wrongfully accused of racism (at least we Indians knew what that “Ma-ki” meant) and that he has quietly supported the cause of orphanages and schools to bring about a positive change indicate the spine that that man possessed.

Honesty, hard work, self-belief and an unflinching will to succeed – these are the terms coaches will talk about, rather than purity of technique. The ability to bring joy to a billion faces and still stay as humble as a monk will keep the future media occupied and not the blank statistics; he won’t be a God to the next generation but just a good human being, and that is what mattered to him the most, isn’t it?