Sachin@50: What Tendulkar’s milestone means to generations of Indians

Fifty years ago, the Tendulkar family in suburban Mumbai’s literary Sahitya Sahawas welcomed the arrival of its fourth child. They decided to call him Sachin.

This was India in the early 1970s – a still-young nation in the grips of the Licence Raj; where slogans of “garibi hatao” and “unity in diversity” rang out, two years before the imposition of Emergency, and a decade before the Indian team would be the toast of the cricket-playing world at Lord’s.

The country, unaware of the coming of a future icon, slowly began learning about Sachin in the latter half of the following decade. First, when, as a 14-year-old, he started getting noticed in the Mumbai maidans for his voracious appetite for runs; then when he broke into the Indian team at the cusp of 16, after wowing the stalwarts of the time at a specially organised nets session; and eventually in 1989, when he danced down the track to a gyrating Abdul Qadir in Peshawar, and brushed aside a bloody nose to stand up to Waqar Younis in Sialkot.

For 1990s India, freshly opened up to the world, Sachin became the face of a generation waiting to exhale. A generation that he may have been a product of, but also one that he would define. So, over the next 20 years, as the country got new services, facilities, beverages, automobiles, communications networks and TV channels, and was battered by communal violence and political instability, Sachin was the one constant. His legend grew and endured in such a manner that the personal histories of an entire population got seamlessly intertwined with his milestones.

We remember where we were when he first walked onto the field in an India jersey as a curly-haired boy. Just as we remember what we were doing when he first opened the innings in a one-day match on a chilly morning in Auckland in 1994. When he dismantled Australia at the Sharjah “Desert Storm” in 1998. When he waged a lonely battle against Pakistan in Chennai and fell just short. When he amassed 241, all on the on-side, in Sydney in 2004. When he pushed the boundaries of the one-day format with a double century in Gwalior 21 years into his career. When he was carried on their shoulders by delirious teammates after India won the 2011 World Cup, at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. And when he, now 40 years old, wept in his home ground, in front of a stand named after him, as he bade farewell to a sport he’d transformed in his own image.

For people across large swathes of India who were children in the ’80s, young adults in the ’90s, young careerists in the 2000s, and managers in the 2010s, there was a Tendulkar memory enmeshed with our own highs and lows, romances and heartbreaks, promotions and passovers.

Over the past decade, it’s been hard to imagine Sachin without cricket, harder to imagine cricket without Sachin, but perhaps the hardest has been resign to how our own dry, dour lives are no longer enlivened by his genius.

As a cricket writer for the first half of my journalism career, I had some rare opportunities to get a glimpse into Sachin’s mind and personality. In 2002, for example, Sachin, eyes twinkling, pulled me aside at the Barbados airport to point out that the right way to greet people in the Caribbean was with a fist on the heart. In Lahore, on the 2004 Pakistan tour, Sachin was trailing 19-16 to me in a table-tennis doubles game; and just as I was plotting my next serve, my ambidextrous opponent moved the paddle from his right hand to his left, ended proceedings with five furious smashes, and flashed a naughty smile. On a flight between Tests, Sachin, playing Snake on his Nokia phone two seats away, suddenly tugged on my shirt and handed me his handset – the screen was all black, the snake had nothing left to eat.

These were moments that offered some insight into an otherwise closeted personality’s love for people and customs, his innate mischievous streak, and his competitive hunger.

Sachin, the cricketer, was a phenom, but he was not perfect – and nor can anyone ever be. He had failings and follies, as any human being does. It could be said that he didn’t always speak up for the collective good of players in the face of conflicts with the Indian board or within the team. That his love for milestones, particularly centuries, was sometimes so all-consuming that a statistical aside was created just for him by combining two different formats of cricket – and the quest for this anomaly, the 100th international hundred, consumed his batting between the springs of 2011 and 2012. That he did not always handle the endgame as effortlessly as his colleagues VVS Laxman, MS Dhoni, Virat Kohli, and now Rishabh Pant. Unlike the omnipotent cricketing God we like to remember him as, Sachin usually succeeded and sometimes failed.

But these relative fallibilities added an important layer to what Sachin meant to an Indian generation that so passionately identified with him, rather than take anything away from it.

Which is why, as Sachin turns 50, the question is not what the milestone means to him, but what it means to us. For starters, it tells us that we’ve all grown older – the hair at the temples is thinning, the sideburns greying. That the world filled with countless possibilities we once inhabited is now behind us. And that we, the products of that shared time and space, may be divided along class, caste, ideology or politics, but there will always be one thing that binds us – a cricketer whose bat striking the ball was the soundtrack to our coming of age.