And he said goodbye

He braved the bounce and pace at Perth in 1992, clobbered virtually every team during the 1996 World Cup. Tendulkar played the Desert Storm innings at Sharjah, made Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Shoaib Akhtar look helpless during the 2003 World Cup and he had shed tears of joy when India won the World Cup in 2011. All this and many more have now become precious memories to hold on to.

Ninety-nine per cent of the people had tears in their eyes after hearing Sachin’s retirement speech and the remaining one per cent were hiding their tears.

The chants of ‘Sachin…Sachin’ grew in decibel level with each passing moment; the crowd erupted with joy at the slightest involvement of the master. All this, perhaps for the last time in cricket.

For the past 24 years, the world’s political power-centres changed, the Indian economy rose from bad depression to glorious inflation and a succession of Prime Ministers took charge. . While the world around us kept changing, Tendulkar was aconstant.

nostalgia

The separation brought tears as he was paraded around his home ground. Even those in the stadium who had saved their voices to cheer as loudly as possible, couldn’t. Voices had choked, there were lumps of sadness in the throat. There was pride, there was happiness, and there was joy. It was a cocktail of pure emotions.

His farewell speech was perhaps the longest he had ever given in his career. Rarely has the man spoken of himself — the frustrations inside, the arguments over his game, the pain he goes through being away from his family.

There was a loud cheer every time he touched a chord with his message of gratitude; he knew the reason and the role each one of them played in his growth as a cricketer. The cheers were a token of gratitude from the fans.

I wondered how Tendulkar would break the emotional connect; he couldn’t simply walk away. He came back, bent down and touched the pitch. Yes it was meant to be simple and humble and there it was, the most dreaded moment. And it’s already a part of history.

It's hard to imagine life without playing cricket because it's all I've ever done since I was 11, said the little master. This just explained what cricket meant to him and the silence explained what he meant to the nation.

(The writer is a student of Stella Maris College, Chennai.)

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