Penned Thoughts

Here’s a man standing on the third man boundary in the last over of a World Cup match. The bowler just has to bowl sensibly to win this game. What the man at the boundary sees is four rank balls bowled without any sense of focus or planning. India loses yet again in circumstances where he has done just about everything right.

He does not cry. He does not show any emotion. He keeps his head down and leaves the field. He has been standing witness to these failures for 22 years now. The whole world has seen these failures. It is impossible for us to even imagine what goes on in the mind of this man.

That’s why I would never want to be Sachin.

He has single-handedly lifted the moods of this entire nation an umpteen number of times. He has been an inspiration for us to rise above our mediocrity. Nobody who has ever lifted the willow even comes close to this man’s genius. His dedication and mental strength is unparalleled.

Think about the man himself. He is 37 years of age. He has been playing almost non stop for 22 years. The way he was running and diving around the field that night would have put 22-year-olds to shame. The way he played some of the best opening quickies in the world was breathtaking. He just keeps getting better, which is, by the way, humanly impossible. It’s not for nothing that people call him god.

But I still don’t want to be in those shoes. We struggle to keep our relatively simple lives straight, lives which affect a limited number of people. Imagine the magnitude of the inner struggle for him, pain both mental and physical, tears that have frozen with time, knees and ankles and every other joint in the body that is either bandaged or needs to be attended to every night, eyes that don’t sleep before a big game, bats that have scored 99 international tons and still see expectations from a billion people. 

And he just converts those expectations into reality. We watch in awe and feel privileged.

I think it’s time that his team realised that enough is enough. They have an obligation, not only towards their country but towards Sachin. They need to win this one for him. Stay assured that he himself will still deliver and leave no stone unturned to make sure India wins this Cup.

This is not just a game and he is not just a sportsman. It’s much more than this. Words fail here.

—Nipun Dixit, in a letter to the Indian Express

Postscript: This article is being widely misrepresented in the Indian circles on Facebook and elsewhere as having been penned by Harsha Bhogle, but that is not the case. I took the liberty of pruning parts of the essay that I thought added little value to it and editing it to remove some grammatical errors. I hope my contributions have only added to it rather than take away from it.