Sachin Tendulkar and Me.

I just read in Cricinfo that Sachin Tendulkar is now the highest run scorer in history of Test cricket.

I wanted to talk about what that means to childhood me who grew up idolizing him. Sachin started his test career in 1989 when I was still in primary school and had just started watching cricket religiously mainly due to the influence of my father (who was a huge cricket fan since his college days in India). Sachin was all the hype and everybody thought he was already the best cricketer in the world. He probably was, but for me that was not the main attraction. It was the fact that he seemed to carry the hopes and dreams of a billion people (and not only India) that fascinated me. I grew up discussing his batting averages, and ODI and Test hundreds, and his successes in the Australian tours etc. It was as if memorizing his accomplishments somehow made me feel like I was part of his success. I still remember reading every single magazine article I could find written about him and about his ever growing number of hundreds. I even ended up spending 2o rupees for a weekly Sportstar magazine to read about him (which btw was a decent sum of money for a teenager with no job). In 1998, when he was scoring his 9 ODI hundreds in a single calendar year, I remember reading every single mention of him in the magazines and newspapers I could get hold of (Sportstar, Hindu, Kathmandu Post...). By the end of the year he had scored 21 ODI hundreds in his career and sky seemed to be the limit. He did slow down in the later years especially after the year 2000, but for me Tendulkar still remains that player who scored back to back centuries in Sharjah to win his team the title against Pakistan.

So, after all these years and after I have stopped following cricket, reading about his latest accomplishment still brought back strong memories from the past. Now, he apparently holds the record for most ODI runs, most ODI hundreds, and most Test cricket runs ever scored in history and maybe many other records that I can not recall.

After all these years in the US (with no Cricket coverage in TV), I had kind of assumed that I stopped caring about cricket, but it seems Tendulkar still brings up that nostalgic kid in me. So from the long ago child in me, I just want to say to Tendulkar: Congratulations and dude you rock!!

NOTE: As my first post here, I know this is kind of lame but hopefully will do better in the future posts.