The Tendulkar blood book: it is surely the cricket freak story of the year. The impresarios behind Tendulkar’s forthcoming autobiography, Tendulkar Opus, have commissioned an extra-limited limited edition of ten into which drops of the great man’s blood will be mixed on the signature page. The other pages of the 37kg tome will be trimmed in gold leaf too, but it’s the corpuscles and platelets that will be the selling point of the volumes priced at $US75,000 each and … oh, hang on, sorry, they’ve already been sold, sight unseen.
‘Only in America,’ people used to groan at one of those news stories about some Bible Belt ecstatic who’d seen the face of Christ in a tortilla, or some millionaire eccentric who’d had the head of their favourite dog cryogenically frozen. ‘Only in India,’ is the modern-day cricket equivalent, the country being a byword for an ecstatic cricket rapture that makes the enthusiasm of other countries look mild – all effigy burnings, crazy television, eye-bugging bling, and Bollywood glamour.
Yet how often it is, even in the era of ‘Captain Cool’ Dhoni and/or ‘See Ball, Hit Ball’ Sehwag, that the Tendulkar stories trump them all, like the teenager who committed suicide a few years back when Tendulkar’s back injury threatened to end his career, or the plot to kidnap him hatched by Pakistani terrorists? ‘The key thing here is that Sachin Tendulkar to millions of people is a religious icon,’ said the mastermind of the Tendulkar blood book. ‘And we thought how, in a publishing form, can you get as close to your god as possible?’ Dhoni, Sehwag, Ganguly, Kumble – superstars all, but earthbound. Of only Tendulkar can you speak in terms of God and religion, and even then you might still be guilty of understatement. Perhaps the reason that the BCCI has been so reluctant to sign up to the WADA code is the probability of a black market in vials of Tendulkar’s other secretions.
The most intriguing aspect of the Tendulkar Opus is not the ten copies that almost nobody will ever see but the thousands they will. At 852 pages, it will bulk larger even than Steve Waugh’s personal apologia: another big record for the Little Master. What will it reveal? Easier to imagine what it will not. Lovechild? Lifelong battle with depression? Daily telephone banter with Shobhan Mehta? There’d be bloodshed then, and it wouldn’t be the profitable kind. Actually, it’s hard to conceive of what the book can disclose without causing the kind of controversy which to Tendulkar is anathema. Let’s be frank: expect lots of respectful hat-tipping to famous rivals, reverent and touching glimpses of family, maybe the odd behind-the-scenes story of Team India, but with an overall impression as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s smile.
Nobody will feel genuinely let down either, for Tendulkar has so conditioned us. ‘I have taken stands before, but often whatever I say gets misinterpreted and meanings are attached to it,’ he has complained. ‘If you know that whatever you say will become a controversy, why get into it unnecessarily?’ The best cricketer of his generation, in fact, has been among the least scandalous, keeping his head while all about him have not just been losing theirs but throwing them high in the air. Not for him the talk-show couch, or the newspaper pulpit; while he is no longer the stilted youth of his first few television advertisements, cameras still seem to embarrass him slightly, and one would no sooner expect a cheesy product placement from him than a casual doosra.
India has been transformed in his cricket lifetime, from a supplicant at the IMF to its modern tiger economy. So has the country’s media, once staid and dowdy, now served by 125 24-hour television news services and more than 1100 TV channels, ravening for content and contention. Tendulkar’s phlegmatism is sometimes contrasted to the flamboyance of his contemporary and boyhood companion Vinod Kambli, a batsman extravagantly gifted whose head was turned by adulation and celebrity. Kambli, it is averred, had talent to burn, and did; Tendulkar kept his nose not only clean, but to the grindstone. The comparison is flawed: Kambli was never that good; Tendulkar never that reticent. But they aren’t the worst antitypes. When it has counted, Tendulkar has been preternaturally focused, a cricketer of Gandhian self-denial and Anandian self-containment.
Not that he has been altogether Sphinx-like. Look back in the annals and you will find that Tendulkar grants interviews quite regularly, or as regularly as one could reasonably expect in the absence of any great economic incentive for his doing so. In some of these interviews, he even goes into detail, at least about his batting, exhibiting a flair for succinct expression. Take this for example: ‘The mind always wants to be in the past or the future; it rarely wants to be in the present. My best batting comes when my mind is in the present, but it doesn’t happen naturally. You have to take yourself there.’ Or this: ‘The older I get the more I realise how important your breathing is to good batting. By that I mean, if you focus on breathing and relaxing, you can force yourself into a comfortable place to bat.’ Not hugely original, but mature and reflective. Tendulkar on batting: it’s not quite as good as Tendulkar batting, but there’s substance to it, and an intelligence behind it.
As far as his fans are concerned, too, Tendulkar has been consistently generous. He is a quiet supporter of charitable and philanthropic causes, including Apnalaya, a Mumbai-based NGO assisting underprivileged children associated with his mother-in-law, Annabel Mehta. This year he even harnessed the internet as a means of scattering his blessings and benedictions, acquiring 88,000 followers within a day of his joining Twitter; that number now exceeds half a million. It is difficult to imagine that he personally sits there all day attending individually to his well-wishers – ‘Thanx. Good luck to u n ur family. I wish u all the best in life’; ‘Wish u good luck in life. Keep smiling’; ‘Thanx a lot. I m humbled. Wish u n ur family all the good health n happiness in life’, etc. – but easy to imagine how such apparently personal confirmations are individually received. The Tendulkar tweet is to India as the Bradman autograph is to Australia: they abound, but somehow each one is special.
Of Tendulkar’s views on other subjects, however, we know little or nothing – which may not, of course, be any great loss. A story is told, probably apocryphal, about an interview in the 1980s in which pop idol Kylie Minogue was asked her opinion of South Africa, possibly with the intent of extracting an undertaking she would not play Sun City. ‘I think they should stop shooting the rhinos,’ La Minogue is reputed to have replied, on the basis of some half-remembered wildlife documentary. From fame cannot be inferred a natural flair for entering into public debate; indeed, the contrary may be true, that fame entails such concentration on the self as to preclude profound interest in most other matters.
But Tendulkar has never ‘spoken out’ as he might have in cricket contexts, in the issues-rich environments of the nineties and noughties, when the game has been menaced by match-fixing, sledging, ball-tampering, illegal actions, administrative incompetence, greed, connivance and corruption. Did he not share with fans the pangs of hurt, of disappointment, of disgruntlement at cricket’s travails? Did he not feel incited to a calming, diplomatic word, or even an expression of some sort of moral code?
One reason he perhaps did not is the fastidiousness with which he has quarantined his cricket life from that time he devotes to wife Anjali, and children Sara and Anjun. ‘When I cross the boundary line, it’s not cricket, it’s family,’ he has explained. ‘And when I think about cricket, it’s only cricket.’ Given Tendulkar’s single-mindedness at the crease, one can imagine the cordon sanitaire around his sport. He famously does not consume news media about his own performances; it would be a departure from type were he to consume news media concerning other issues.
Chances are, too, that he may not be particularly interested. The cricketer of Tendulkar’s time has needed to cultivate a high tolerance for boredom: nets, hotels, departure lounges, airliners. Another hundred throwdowns? Suppose I’d better. Another hundred catches? Might help. It’s not an environment conducive to broad perspectives or piercing visions, but to highly selective and heavily concentrated effort. If Tendulkar has kept his eye on his own particular ball, it may be because those other balls do not directly aid him in his superordinate goals of making runs and winning matches.
The predominant reason, however, is that hinted earlier: because it has simply never been worth it. Here is a man who cannot go shopping or dine in restaurants because of the inevitability of public interruption. Here is a man who experiences freedom most while driving around Mumbai at 25mph in the wee hours of the morning. Here is a man who in public must adopt disguises and false beards lest the discovery of his presence cause a riot – one a few years ago, which involved 10,000 people in Bangalore, required 200 police to control it. When such unswerving intensity of attention is a fact of life, who would not wish to avert it at every opportunity? Balzac once ruminated of his fame that he wished it permitted him ‘to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing’. Tendulkar breaking wind in society today would hit India like a monsoon.
Every hero says something about their times, and perhaps this is one of the silent commentaries Tendulkar passes on his era, that the media and public are so conditioned to a climate of constant controversy, exaggeration and misrepresentation that participation is hardly worth the candle. Your view can be thoughtful, nuanced, lightly held, tentatively expressed, but after simplification and amplification by the various modern apparatus it will sound like a combination of abuse, insult and battlecry. If it is not in Tendulkar’s nature to initiate such a process, then perhaps he is saner than the rest of us.
Perhaps, in fact, it is partly the ridiculousness of his world that has kept Tendulkar going so long: the pleasure, relief and solace with which cricket provides him in his splendid isolation. For here is the paradox of his extraordinariness – his making light of challenges on the cricket field that would daunt even very good international cricketers, while shrinking from the everyday experiences that seem simplest. Murali on a turning wicket, Steyn on bouncy one? Bring them on. One hundred to win in the last 10 overs of an ODI? He can feel his sap rise.
Cricket? He has done it before, and never seems to tire of the idea of repeating himself. But driving round the block? Walking down the street? Taking his children to the park or the beach? No way; not now; maybe never. And given the value imputed to his bodily fluids by Opus, Tendulkar cutting himself shaving should almost be covered in the business pages. Hang on again … I shouldn’t make jokes like that, because it’s perfectly possible that one day it will.