Little Master Sachin Tendulkar a Work Of Timeless Art

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GREAT players have a habit of setting records. Only very, very special ones actually invent them. Nobody dreamed of one hundred first-class centuries becoming a landmark until W. G. Grace made it conceivable. Likewise the milestone of one hundred international centuries- that is, until Sachin Tendulkar.


As Tendulkar set to scaling that summit, it seemed to shrink a little in proportion. That's another quality of the very, very special.


They recalibrate the world by their capabilities. Tendulkar is known colloquially as "The Little Master", but he is also a master of littling, of scaling achievements down so that they grow thinkable, permissible and achievable.


Combining five-day and one-day hundreds contains inevitably an inexactitude: it is like adding apples to oranges to obtain a count of fruit. But the century remains batting's most incorruptible unit of currency, with a lasting historic and cultural utility, and a century of centuries at the game's elite level has an undilutable whole-ness, like a round-the-world journey or a perfect smile: complete in itself, theoretically repeatable but essentially unimprovable.




You must factor in the distance travelled since the first, at Old Trafford in August 1990, when he looked so slight and tiny that a puff of wind might have blown him away even though England's attack could not.


You must contemplate how the world has changed since. When first Tendulkar toured this country 20 years ago, there were only seven Test nations (South Africa was excluded at that time), only two umpires per Test, and only home viewers saw replays.


Australia hosting India in a Test series, too, was considered an act of antipodean philanthropy, rather than an opportunity to line the vaults of Jolimont with gold bars as it is now.


So much has changed, and so little, because Tendulkar's game, for all its variations and iterations as years have passed, has remained instantly recognisable in its adherence to cricket's first principles and his unaltering sureness of touch.


You could stop a Tendulkar career showreel at any time and it would look like the acme of batting. Above all, contemplate the scale and intensity of the hopes that have accumulated around Tendulkar in the course of his career, greater than those heaped on any other cricketer in history.


Balzac once said he hankered for a fame that would permit 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.


It is one thing to become famous; quite another to stay famous, in a world more conducive to the perishable quality of celebrity. It is one thing to succeed; it is another to continually stave off failure and maintain a baseline excellence.


Here, then, is an epic of expertise and endurance, like the Mahabharata and Ramayana rolled into one. Tendulkar has become an exceedingly wealthy man between times, but in a sense because he has had to be - because that is the way aspirational, materialistic societies reward their heroes.


He has continued to understand value in a world obsessed with price, taking nothing not insistently offered, and in the totality of his career he will come out comfortably as a giver who is certain that cricket will be perennially in his debt. What comes after him will not be of the same character. In so altering the financial stakes of his game, in fact, Tendulkar has inadvertently insured it.


In their book The Business of Cricket (2010), Shyam Balasubramanian and Vijay Santhanam cite a table prepared by TAM Sports delineating "the Sachin Factor": that Tests and one-day internationals with Tendulkar playing outrate those in which he does not by a huge degree in 2010, by three to one. They also present a graphic they call "The Tendulkar Ecosystem", in the centre of which sits Sachin, sluicing value, financial and psychic, between Team India, fans, sponsors, media houses and state associations.


It looks, at first glance, exceedingly complex, but its essence is simple - because without one small man who enters his 40th year next April, it cannot work.


Want really to grasp Tendulkar's importance to the modern game? Try to imagine it without him.


The record on the brink of which he stands is in a sense an artefact already. Tendulkar came into his majority as the calendar was being glutted by forms of the game of a duration conducive to the compilation of hundreds.


It is virtually impossible to imagine his heirs and successors emulating him in playing on for approaching a quarter of a century, let alone facing international opponents in more than 600


games of at least a day in length.


Thanks to the ascendant of the Indian Premier League and Champions League, the next generation of cricketers are likely to play far more T20 for "clubs" and less international cricket for their countries.


The shortening of our pleasures has entailed a contraction in cricket's scope. It was always a possibility that there would never be another Tendulkar, but perhaps now there cannot be. He has constructed a career along the lines of one of Europe's great gothic cathedrals, built to last, guaranteed to serve future generations, full of splendour, grandeur, romance. And all cricket can now think of doing is surrounding that cathedral with lookalike apartments and trying to sell them at a huge mark-up.


In writing of the immediate post-Bradman era, Ray Robinson described Australian cricket as like a man bumping around a darkened room. Something similar looms today. Tendulkar is sui generis. To imagine another Tendulkar ranks in audacity with imagining him in the first place.


The effect of the end of Tendulkar's career will be particularly pronounced in cricket's richest and most populous market. Sixty-five per cent of India's population is younger than 35. They can recall no cricket without the Little Master.


When he retires, it will be for them not just the loss of a sporting hero but an intimation of mortality. That is as profound and expressive an idea as any record he may set, even the most remarkable