Of the many constituents of greatness, longevity is the first to be cast aside. The connoisseurs will talk of grace and beauty and finesse; the fans will talk of numbers, Test runs, majors, grand slams, Olympic medals; the storytellers will regale you with legendary battles won and the romantics might slip in a word for brave efforts that just fell short.
Sachin has scored the highest number of centuries in both Test and ODI cricket.
But longevity? That's for machines, isn't it? Surely you can't say Sachin Tendulkar is great because he played for 20 years, can you? How boring!
And yet that is my thesis. That longevity assumes all the qualities that everyone else finds dear. If you are good enough to play at the highest level for 20 years you must possess virtually every quality in a sportsman.
So you can look back at all of Tendulkar's great innings, you can recall all the snapshots you have stored in your mind, you can trawl through his statistics but the fact that he has put body and mind together and existed as one of the brightest in our pantheon for 20 years is, quite simply, staggering.
Of the many constituents of greatness, longevity is the first to be cast aside. The connoisseurs will talk of grace and beauty and finesse; the fans will talk of numbers, Test runs, majors, grand slams, Olympic medals; the storytellers will regale you with legendary battles won and the romantics might slip in a word for brave efforts that just fell short.
Sachin has scored the highest number of centuries in both Test and ODI cricket.
But longevity? That's for machines, isn't it? Surely you can't say Sachin Tendulkar is great because he played for 20 years, can you? How boring!
And yet that is my thesis. That longevity assumes all the qualities that everyone else finds dear. If you are good enough to play at the highest level for 20 years you must possess virtually every quality in a sportsman.
So you can look back at all of Tendulkar's great innings, you can recall all the snapshots you have stored in your mind, you can trawl through his statistics but the fact that he has put body and mind together and existed as one of the brightest in our pantheon for 20 years is, quite simply, staggering.
It means he has competed against the best in the world across different eras; against grizzly pros when he was a kid and brash, irreverent young men now; he has played on feverishly seaming pitches and on raging turners, on cold, cloudy days and blazingly hot ones; at home surrounded by family and fans and away amidst loneliness; when the body is obeying all commands and when pain and fatigue bring you to your knees.
And he hasn't just survived, he's left his imprint on every situation. It is a colossal achievement. On his first tour of England he batted against Eddie Hemmings who had made his first class debut seven years before Tendulkar was born. He now shares a dressing room with kids who were having their umbilical cord cut when he was scoring his first century.
Along the way he has had to live with irrational expectations; with people who could find no faults in him to others going round with a magnifying glass searching for them. He has walked out to bat amidst deafening cheers and yet had to learn not to hear them. He has had people offering him everything under the sun; wealth, reverence, gratitude but all he has ever wanted is to play cricket for that to him was the destination, not the rewards that lay beyond.
In that, he is like Sir Garfield Sobers, the only other man to play international cricket for 20 years. Sobers too played the game for the thrill it afforded him. Is that the secret of longevity then? To enjoy the ride? Every morning?
Beneath the child-like enthusiasm though lies a man who knows his game better than almost anybody else. Tendulkar thinks very deeply about the game, his mind simplifying its nuances so astonishingly as to enable him to walk out to bat with his mind absolutely calm and ready; so that he faces neither the bowler, nor the conditions but merely the ball on its way to him. Tendulkar is very much an instinct player but it is an instinct that has been sharpened by intense preparation.
And on days when the mind is calm and free of all thought, he enters a zone that bowlers around the world would instantly recognise. "It's just a level of concentration when you forget everything else," he says in the interview in this issue. In fact he has often talked about a cluttered mind giving him, or indeed any batsman, less time to play shots.
"Against the same bowler, under the same conditions, at the same pace, when your mind is free you have time to play your shots; when you have too many thoughts in your mind, you are late." It is something all great sportsmen have talked about; the quality of the mind influencing the quality of the stroke. His ability to stay focussed has often separated him from the rest.
Maybe that is why he has rarely lost his composure on a cricket ground. He has shown disappointment, but rarely anger. I have often marvelled at this ability to stay calm amidst extreme provocation. Maybe that is the secret of his ability and indeed, of his longevity, for a calm cricketer is a more dangerous cricketer with the mind uncluttered by thoughts of vengeance and anger. Maybe that is what separates him from Brian Lara, the other genuinely great cricketer of his era.
Lara was an astonishingly skilled sportsman and like Tendulkar took on the opposition and vanquished it with extraordinary strokeplay. But occasionally Lara's mind would wander away into a dangerous zone and he could be his own enemy. In the art of batsmanship, they were equals; indeed Lara sometimes took the art to more sublime levels, but it was Tendulkar's composure that gave him greater consistency.
Only once in the years that I have known him have I sensed a weariness, have I seen Tendulkar contemplating life outside cricket. Plagued by one injury after another he was very keen to play in the IPL but a persistent groin injury kept troubling him. The recovery was painful but just as agonising was the fact that he was around the game but unable to play it.
Constant injury meant mind and body weren't walking in step, that he was fighting on two fronts. "I'm sick of this rehab," he suddenly announced, and in doing so allowed those around him a rare exposure to the frustrations that were dogging him.
But he fought injury, did his rehab routine diligently and when he returned he was like a gleaming new automobile. "At last I am injury free," he said when I met him. He was back to fighting on one front, back to playing the kind of shots only he can.
Indeed, it is his strokeplay that makes him the bridge between two generations of Indian cricketers. One, that subjugated natural desires and played a conservative game in keeping with the times; and the other that bats like there is no tomorrow.
In between something remarkable happened to India. As we emerged from the economic backwaters, we grew into a proud nation that learnt to stand up for itself, that cast aside the shadow of pessimism. Tendulkar was the hero that symbolised this transition.
A nation that had its roots in non-violence had produced an aggressor in keeping with the times. A generation found its style in Tendulkar and rejoiced in adding up the numbers he produced for it was like adding their own.
Inevitably the captaincy would come to him; not once but twice and even a third had he so willed. It remains a strange aberration in his career, crystal in a crown of diamonds. Unlike everything else in the game, even leg break bowling, captaincy never seemed to sit lightly on him.
Maybe it was about the lack of control, the inability to come to terms with the fact that he didn't hold all the cards. Maybe it was about having to understand people who didn't think like him; maybe it was about getting into the minds of people who tried hard but had to live with insecurity.
Maybe, just maybe, he understood cricket better than he did cricketers. If so, he wasn't the first and he certainly won't be the last. It is a fate that tends to befall those that nature gives in grand measure.
Yet, he has been the finest cricketer of his era. You cannot say more and comparisons across eras are at best academic and inevitably futile. It can be said of very few that they have achieved what was ordained of them!
And one day the time will come when he will bid goodbye to cricket. Will he then retire to a world of children, food and cars? Will he still, on his travels around the world, charm chefs into giving him their recipes for use in his fine restaurant?
Will he have the space to drive his Ferrari? I don't know. I suspect, like his many fans around the world, I don't want to know.
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