A birthday collection - 10 amazing stories about Brian Lara

Brian Charles Lara turns 45 today. The world over, you'd have the choice of picking one of these three as the best of your era - Sachin, Lara and Ponting, and then fight incessantly with the fans of other two legends. That's how childhood was; understanding what made these players genius, and what differentiated them.Sachin and Ponting could make you numb with their statistics and the beauty they exuded on the field through their batting. Lara would frustrate if you witnessed his barren spells, and then when you learned to look at cricket beyond the numbers, you'd discover poetry in his shots. The backlift would provide you expectations - a whole world of them - and then the bat would swiftly come down in an arc, making his body and bat work as one majestic run-making machinery.As Rahul Bhattacharya put it so brilliantly - "Lara's batsmanship was the greatest pleasure I derived out of cricket in the last two decades along with the bowling of Wasim Akram, and I could have watched the game if they alone played it in the field. Lara batted with sensual beauty and gluttonous appetite."I was fortunate to have witnessed Lara do unimaginable things on a cricket field. On his birthday today, here's a collection of 10 interesting stories, not intended to encompass everything in his cricket, but what stand out as snippets of a career that are worth remembering long after he's finished playing the game.

#1 A dream unfulfilled

Lara was the 10th of 11 children in his family. His father Bunty was the bedrock on which his talents grew.

"This person you see today before you accepting this Hall of Fame honour is someone he (Bunty) moulded. He ensured that I had everything I needed to succeed as a cricketer and in life, even in trying times," Lara said in 2012, when he was inducted in the ICC Hall of Fame.

Probably the greatest pain Lara had to endure was Bunty's death due to a heart attack just before he could see the fruition of his son's efforts. Bunty passed away in 1989 before Lara could make his Test debut.