The Pickle Post

by Prayaag Akbar on 18 Sep 2009

I was talking with a friend of this and that when the conversation turned to Sachin Tendulkar, as most conversations between Indian males of our age tend to. There is something that unifies all of us who were boys of ten and twelve and thirteen and growing up in India during the early nineties; we all remain in awe of Sachin Tendulkar.

Whether businessman, artist, banker or poet, talking Tendulkar takes each of us back to a time when our mothers made us grow into every item of clothing we owned and sandwiches only tasted good when the crusts were cut off. He is at it even now, scoring a century yesterday in the final of a one-day series. Tendulkar has now been in the game for more than 20 years and is closing on 37. As is common knowledge, 37 years is the official age for men to start looking for a twenty-something girlfriend so they can prove to the world they are still young. But such high jinks are not for Sachin. Not when there are sixes to be hit.

The great man shone brightest when all us boys were at our most impressionable, and you must remember, it was a particularly barren time for Indian sport while we were growing up. The only other person doing anything of note was Viswanathan Anand but –maybe it was the sport, maybe it was the man –his achievements generated such faint, isolated waves of excitement that the only sponsor he managed was a computer-training institute. It’s pretty hard to make a computer-training institute glamorous at the best of times, and lets face it, a man who seems to have borrowed his spectacles, shirt and pants from an IIT student will hardly have the girls swooning and the boys envious.

It thus fell to Tendulkar’s broad shoulders to carry not only the rest of India’s batting but also the hopes of all of us boys across the country. Our batting line-up at the time alternated between incompetents and match fixers, so no one else was too bothered about scoring anything above the minimum that kept you in the team. You would find Tendulkar, oblivious to it all, accumulating run after run with only the wicketkeeper for support. Sometimes his partner would be our “pinch hitter” Javagal Srinath, who could neither hit nor pinch, but who our team management insisted on sending up the order, as if crunch time of an important match was the right time to learn how to use a bat.

In those innocent days, if word reached us that Sachin was scoring, there would be pandemonium in our school. When he failed,our Sanskrit teacher would suspiciously demand to know why everyone was suddenly paying attention. It was the kind of popularity few national figures enjoyed at the time. In our class at school perhaps the only other national figure who controlled the average boy’s emotional highs and lows to such an extent was Raveena Tandon, particularly when she would step out for a quick dance in the rain and wind, coyly wrapped in half a chiffon sari. But hers was another kind of figure altogether, and she was the font of quite another kind of happiness.

The friend I was talking with had an interesting thought: ‘Sachin Tendulkar, one day, will be the President of India.’

The more I considered this, the more I had to agree. It makes so much sense. Wheneverit is that this incredibly bionic athlete finishes his career, it seems unlikely that a man of his energies will fade quietly into retirement. Political parties and politicians will of course be anxious, desperate even, to utilise the goodwill and capital he generates, but one imagines Sachin, somewhat like the Mahatma, to be above petty considerations like party politics. No, the only position in Government that would fit a man of his achievement and stature is Head of State. And once he turns fifty or so, the clamour will begin to make him the youngest ever President of India, just as once he was the youngest cricketer with the cojones to talk back to Javed Mian on a cricket ground in Lahore. One can imagine him on a state visit now, thirty years in the future, visiting Buckingham Palace for the coronation of King William of England.

King William: ‘President Tendulkar, I once saw you hit our spin wizard Phil Tufnell for a dozen sixes in one session.’ And our curly-haired President will reply, ‘Yes, Your Highness, but in truth it was nothing. It is my experience that a good English spinner is like a unicorn or an elf or a politician who tells you what he’s really thinking. Myths of the most frivolous sort.’

The dangers of elevating national heroes to positions of great authority are plentiful. Sometimes they are just not suited to the task. Yet you will often read of a sporting icon who is thrust into a role on the back of popular opinion. He will be handed a position with real responsibility, real power, a job that requires tremendous thought and application, on which the hopes and dreams of a million people rest. And nine times out of ten, Mr. Sporting Icon will balls it up completely. Currently incumbent on the great Diego Maradona is the relatively simple job of getting Argentina’s wonderfully talented national team to the football World Cup in 2010. Maradona was the greatest footballer we have seen, but handing him the keys to the fastest car in the world is probably best avoided.

It is not just that Maradona has never managed at a significant level before. It is also, if news reports are to be believed, that the man has spent the fifteen years between retirement and today ingesting every drug known to man, whether upper or downer, floater or flier. After enduring the self-discipline and dedication that every top-level footballer’s life demands, Maradona treated retirement from its rigours as an invitation to go on the kind of drugging binge Hunter Thompson would have walked away from in fear and loathing. He was like a kid let loose in a candy shop, or Akshay Kumar on a studio set with the ladies of Khatron Ke Khiladi; the operating motto: too much is not nearly enough. Why the Argentina Football Federation imagined a steady diet of Colombian cocaine, booze, steak and cigars (with the occasional stomach-stapling surgery thrown in) was preparation for the perilous road to World Cup qualification is a question all of Argentina seems to be asking itself.

Luckily, as President of India, Tendulkar would not be able to do any real damage. There isn’t much really for our Presidents to do, apart from travel to various parts of the globe and shake hands with important people in funny hats. Sometimes, if they’re lucky, they get to dissolve a State Legislative Assembly or two, but that’s about as exciting as life gets when you’re President. Rest assured, if the males of this country continue to be the ones with all the corporate and political power, you can be sure when our generation is making the decisions we will make Sachin Tendulkar the President of India. That is, if Raveena Tandon is busy.