Sachin and Me

My first memories of cricket are of a pesky game that meant that I didn’t get to watch those one hour of cartoons on Sunday that came on DD, because DD would show cricket if India was playing. And so I hated cricket for that.

But I remember the day that it all changed, 24 years ago. I was at the home of an acquaintance of my parents, and I was in their backyard with their son, who was 7-8 years older than me. It was dusk and there wasn’t any electricity and his son was explaining to me how cricket actually is a lot of fun. I wasn’t convinced, but then he mentioned this teenager who was just 16 and had started playing for India. For some reason, this drew my interest and I asked him more about this player. That was the first time I heard the words “Sachin Tendulkar”. Over the next few months, I still didn’t watch cricke, but I would find out how much this name that I had memorized made, and I began to notice a pattern of him consistently succeeding. To me at that time, the success of a boy a few years older than me, even in something I didn’t like, was fascinating and it started to draw me in. And further and further in. Within a year, I had become a cricket fan like everybody else around me and had even started playing street cricket. Thus it is with Sachin that my journey with cricket began.

Over the next twenty four years, cricket still meant Sachin for me. I was allowed certain number of hours of TV every week and if there were an Indian game that week, I would keep all my hours saved up to watch Sachin bat. By that time, my most earnest wish had become that Sachin come and play in my city and I go watch him live.  That finally happened on 7^th April, 1998 when India played Australia in an ODI in Kanpur and I had been able to persuade my parents to let me go watch it. All I wanted was a Sachin hundred and this is what I got. A 89 ball 100 with 7 sixes in 1998 – it felt like Sachin played that innings for me.

There were many instances over the years where I went to seemingly unreasonable lengths to see Sachin’s milestones. For example, there was the time where I went and hid away from the boarding gate at an airport and found a TV that I didn’t leave till Tendulkar completed the first ODI 200. My name was repeatedly announced on the airport PA system and the airlines finally had to send a separate bus to get just me to the plane, but to me, it was totally worth it.

And finally, it has all ended. I am in India only for 5 days and I made sure that they are the 5 days of the Tendulkar test.  Cricket for me started with Sachin and I think this is where it ends as well. And I got to see Sachin one final time and I got to see that on-drive, that sweep and that push through the covers.

I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

Thank you, Sachin.