From the publishers of THE HINDU Vol. 24 :: No. 39 :: Sep. 29 - Oct. 05, 2001	Home Contents
	COVERSTORY/SACHIN TENDULKAR Make room for genius In sport, it is important that genius is given that little extra room. For, genius has a tendency to suffocate in the absence of freedom, writes NIRMAL SHEKAR. WATCHING the familiar parade of Indian batsmen to and from the wicket - ordered with awesome authority and skills by the game's greatest off-spinner - on a rather friendly opening day pitch in the third Test of the recent series against Sri Lanka at Colombo, a longtime observer of the cricket scene shook his head in dismay and concluded: "There is something missing in this Indian team." If it weren't for the risk of embarrassing - perhaps even hurting - an elderly gentleman, I might have burst out in laughter that afternoon. Something missing? That sounded like the understatement of the new millennium! To be sure, everything was missing. After all, on the international stage, an Indian cricket team without Sachin Tendulkar is like Kaun Banega Crorepati without Amitabh Bachchan. Can you imagine someone stepping into the Bollywood icon's size 12 shoes and sustaining the ratings in his absence? In the event, what was sent out to Sri Lanka was not THE Indian team but, merely, what we hoped was a team. It was a fragile hope, a desperate hope and as with all such hopes, misery followed. Of course, the point is not about how well the Mumbai maestro might have tackled Muttiah Muralitharan. It is not at all about whether India might have reversed the final outcome of the series if the little big man of Indian cricket had been present. After all, we did manage to lose to Zimbabwe even with Tendulkar in the side. As relevant as these things might be at one level, they are largely irrelevant in the context of the point being made in this essay. For, what we are talking about is the aura that Tendulkar brings with him to the field, the intimidation factor that goes missing when he is not there, something much like the screen presence that Bachchan brings to the stage. If Bachchan is a virtuoso conductor of a one-man orchestra, then Tendulkar is a team within a team, so to say, and without the little genius, when the Indians perform, you get the feeling that you are watching Godfather without Marlon Brando or Deewar without Bachchan. Tendulkar is this country's sporting colossus. To find comparisons, you have to cross borders - geographical borders, dividing lines represented by eras, borders between vastly different sports, all sorts of divisions, really. Some day, our little cricketing Samson would reach a mountain top that will take a long, long time - and effort and genius too - to conquer by a champion batsman of a future generation. Most young wizards might actually begin to shake merely looking up at the mighty peak. When you watch Tendulkar play, you are immediately aware that you are in the presence of a talent that is absolutely unique. It is the sort of feeling that an earlier generation of sports fans might have experienced while feasting their eyes on a dancing Muhammad Ali in the ring, an outrageously brilliant Gary Sobers on a cricket field or a Pele in a football match. "Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him?" asked Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra. When the great philosopher asked that rhetorical question of his fellow men over a hundred years ago, the world around him gave him up as an incurable neurotic. Like most men of genius, Nietzsche was misunderstood by his contemporaries. Essentially, what the German genius was trying to wrestle with was the question of evolution. And nowhere is the evolutionary process as clearly established as in the sports arenas where successive generations of world beaters have been doing nothing more than respond to Nietzsche's question - trying to surpass man as that particular generation knew man. As a one-off surpassing genius of his generation, Tendulkar would certainly have realised that it is a lonely business, something that demands tunnel-visioned endeavour, single-mindedness and sacrifices that lesser men would consider impossible. For, season after season after season, the demands made on the game's greatest active batsman by an Indian team that, as a collective entity, cannot even dream of the sort of greatness symbolised by Tendulkar, are nothing short of the unreasonable. When I say unreasonable, it is not based at all on the pedestrian street-level understanding of his central role in Indian cricket, something that makes people want to insist that Indian cricket is Tendulkar and Tendulkar is Indian cricket. On the other hand, the demands are unreasonable simply because the greatest batsman in the history of Indian cricket has, for the most part, been denied the freedom that is essential to a genius if he is to explore the outer limits of excellence. Most great batsmen who did manage to do this - including Viv Richards, the man who this writer considers the greatest to wield a bat after Don Bradman and before the arrival of Tendulkar - were part of great teams. And this helped them operate with a marvellous freedom of spirit at the crease, which is important both from the point of view of the performer enjoying the performance and transferring this sense of enjoyment to the audience as well. It is important that genius is given just that little extra room in sport - and in any other area of activity - not a licence, really, but some liberty. For genius has a tendency to suffocate to death in the absence of freedom. Weighed in by the demands made by teams - in a nation that has been the biggest under-achiever in cricket in the last decade and a half - that were at best average and at worst mediocre, Tendulkar has quite often found the ambience suffocating. In the event, those who know all about the essence of sport and its sublime pleasures will only have this to say: Please leave him alone. And this is especially important now, when the great man comes back after a long break - he played 84 Tests in a row since his debut in Pakistan in 1989-90 before missing the three against Sri Lanka recently because of a fractured big toe - to join the team on the tour of South Africa. In Tendulkar's absence, there were some who even seemed to suspect his "motives" for staying away from Sri Lanka. How mean can people get, really! Surely, there are some people who take a perverse pleasure in taking a swipe at icons. It is indeed a human trait to want to bring immortals down to the level of ordinary mortals. Towering icons - as we found out last fortnight during the terrorist strikes in New York - are always more vulnerable. Then again, in a way, the break might have been just what Tendulkar needed - not so much to recover from the injury physically but, more importantly, to regain the freshness and hunger that are vital to success - and he will be hoping that the second half of his career, at least, will help the world see the Indian cricket team in rather more flattering light than did the first. If he is to do that, if we are to experience the thrills of finding the Indian team at or near the top of the sport, then Tendulkar - and we ourselves - should come out of the mind-set in which he (and we too) has been forced to operate... that he has to perform all the time with abundant caution, always aware of his extraordinary responsibilities as the team's pivot. Even after 84 Tests, even after all that he has accomplished, Tendulkar, believe me, is still a work in progress. As a batsman, he has hardly reached his potential. And if he is to do that, he has to be able to flow. "Poetry," wrote William Wordsworth, "is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." So indeed is great batting. Tendulkar, as capable of coming up with irresistible prose as he is of authoring pure poetry, should be allowed to crash past the mental block of team responsibility for his own sake as well as the team's. In any area of human activity, excellence is its own justification. And, as a performer of rare merit, what can be expected reasonably of Sachin Tendulkar is that he would realise the limits of his own potential, that he would reach for the outer limits of excellence. If he does that, the biggest beneficiary would be the Indian team itself. Yet, for Tendulkar to be able to do that, he has to forget all about the so-called responsibilities once he is out in the middle. It's a Catch-22 situation. But the little genius has it in him to handle it and come out a winner. 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