dna edit: The cricketing monk

In 1989, a 16-year-old wunderkind took guard against a young Waqar Younis on a greentop in Sialkot. He took a blow to his face for his trouble, bled, batted on and scored a match-saving half-century. It’s a well-known story, one of the earliest that makes up the legend — formed of the usual exaggerations and apocrypha of course, but for the most part, of true incidents that need no embellishment to take on a mythic resonance — of Sachin Tendulkar. When he walks out next month to bat in his 200th Test match and bring the curtain down on his career, a great deal will have changed since that match a quarter-century or thereabouts ago. In that time, India has become the sport’s undisputed superpower, the contours and economy of the game have changed and his contemporaries have fallen away one by one until he is the last man standing.But there has been one constant. He may be more measured now, stouter, reflexes slowed a trifle — but when the 40-year-old takes guard, the hermetic focus will be same now as it was then. That lies at the heart of what Tendulkar has achieved — his significance to the sport and the country — and it is the source of both his strengths and flaws.His abiding passion for the game despite the wealth and adulation and his remarkable consistency underscore that focus  — and hint that to maintain it for as long as he has at the highest level, it must, by definition, have been intensely and deliberately narrow, excluding all the static that comes with being Sachin Tendulkar. The supreme talent and glittering performances — the sheer, statistical weight of his achievements — form the foundations of his public appeal in India, of course, but his disengagement from anything that isn’t to do with cricket contributes as much. His career started at a time when pre-liberalised India was stagnating, its economy slipping ever deeper into the doldrums. He came of age as a cricketing superstar when the country was attempting to find its feet in the post-liberalisation era. His evolution to elder statesman — in the company of others like Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman, Anil Kumble and Javagal Srinath — occurred when the sport was attempting to recover from match-fixing. At every stage of his career, he has played in a national environment where there is much to trouble the average citizen, usually compounded by corruption and inefficiency on the part of those in power. Seen against that backdrop, his purity of purpose has provided an essential contrast, an antidote of sorts.It has also, of course, led him to make poor decisions. Doubtless, his influence on the nature of the modern Indian team is massive — but it is behind the scenes, confined to the dressing room. He has rarely taken a stand on issues of cricketing significance or spoken up as some of his illustrious contemporaries have. Likewise, he has occasionally stumbled — the Ferrari duty waiver, his accepting a Rajya Sabha seat — in a manner that hints at a man not well-versed in reading nuances and negotiating the world beyond the cricket pitch.But it is not possible to have one without the other. For well over two decades, Sachin Tendulkar has been the warrior-monk of Indian and world cricket. The magnitude of what he has thereby achieved is staggering. And it will not be truly realised until after he has taken guard for the last time.