An Open Letter to Maria Sharapova
Dear Maria,
At the outset, commiserations on your fourth-round loss to Angelique Kerber at Wimbledon a few days ago. As always, you fought brave and hard even when the chips were against you, which is more than what many of us do in our everyday jobs. Also, congratulations on Grigor reaching his first Grand Slam semi-final. Hoping he goes further this weekend. I am sure your experience and support at this level would be invaluable to him at this stage of his career.
Now on to the main reason for my writing to you. I am sure you would have been surprised to wake up on Thursday morning and find your name trending worldwide on social media, a full two days after your loss. Well, it seems an innocuous response during your Saturday press conference at the All England Club on your familiarity, or rather lack of, with a certain Mr. Sachin Tendulkar, has created a storm in my country.
For starters, let me acquaint you with Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, just in case his name comes up in any future media interactions. Sachin Tendulkar is a 41-year-old from Mumbai who plays the sport of cricket, the other gentleman’s game that originated in 16th century England. Sachin is widely regarded as the greatest batsman in the history of cricket (cricket has batsmen and bowlers – kinda like baseball’s strikers and pitchers) along with Don Bradman, who played in the 1930s (sort of like Roger Federer and Rod Leaver in tennis). Sachin made his debut for India at the precocious age of 16 and is the only player to have scored 100 international centuries, the first batsman to score a double century in a One-Day International, and the only player to complete more than 30,000 runs in international cricket. Sachin was also part of the Indian squad that won the 2011 World Cup (like football, cricket’s World Cup also comes around once in four years), and in 2013, he became the youngest recipient of the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honour just hours after he played his final cricket match.
As a sport, cricket has yet to achieve Olympic recognition – a clear conspiracy against India’s efforts to win an Olympic gold medal. After all, cricket is played in as many as FOURTEEN countries as per the ICC rankings.
Now that I have given you a brief introduction with Mr. Tendulkar and cricket, let me try and explain why your ignorance of him is such a big deal to us Indians. You see, for us Indians, Sachin is a hero to the old and young and everyone in between – who provided hope every time he walked onto the pitch to bat for the country. One of the few humble hard-working world-class sportsmen our nation of 1.2 billion has produced.. a national treasure.. a religion!! And fight for our religion, we do!!
We Indians may not care much about protecting our national monuments, our national culture, our environment or for that matter, even our women. We may not care enough to always cast a vote in our elections. We may not care enough to tackle corruption. And we may not even care that the cricket matches we so feverishly follow may be fixed. But feign ignorance of Sachin and be warned!! We will care!!
It won’t then matter that you have won 5 Grand Slam singles titles and been one of only six women in the Open Era to achieve a career Grand Slam. It won’t matter that you have earned more than $30 million in prize money, and created a personal fortune that is worth more than $150 million. It won’t matter that you came back from a career-threatening shoulder injury that required surgery to climb the pinnacle of your sport once again. It won’t matter that you left your country at the age of 8 to train in a foreign country where you did not understand the language in order to achieve your sporting dreams. And it definitely won’t matter that you have continued to work hard and stay humble through trying times when you could very well have chucked it all aside and concentrated on being just another pretty young thing. Feign ignorance of Sachin and we will not respect you!!!
And if you’re still unable to make sense of this controversy, just talk to Sania Mirza. The poor thing has done more for Indian sports than any woman before her, but still finds it hard to earn our respect.
Anyways, I think I have rambled on enough. I hope we can put this incident behind us. Wishing you all the very best for the second half of the tennis calendar. And yes, do come visit us in India. We might trash you for a few more days or weeks. But our memories tend to be rather short. Tomorrow is going to be a brand new day.. There’s going to be another famous person to trash… another public figure to bring down!!
Yours Respectfully,
Haresh!!