Feature

Sachin, this is your 15th year in the game. For many that's an entire career. How much do you think cricket has changed in your lifetime?
Definitely, the game has changed. I would say one-day cricket has changed more than Tests. When I started playing in 1989, 260 used to be a winning score, now it is just an average score. When we played in Pakistan this year, the first four innings in the ODIs had scores of above 300; it was amazing. There were near-300 scores in the last two matches too.

Players know that you have to set a big target, and that has probably changed the way Test cricket is played because the same approach has spread.

The idea of opening the innings has changed. Matthew Hayden, Virender Sehwag, Chris Gayle, Herschelle Gibbs, they all defy convention.
Yes, you can say it is a different sort of batting technique. Earlier you saw off the new ball and then let bowlers watch you for the rest of the day. But now batsmen are prepared to take more risks and they feel that if you can unsettle the bowler in the second over, then why not?

Of all the emotions evoked by spectator sport, there is one that, for me, supersedes all others. Aware as I have been from an early age that my own sporting prowess was negligible, I have often been touched, when gazing at top-flight competitors, by a sensation of awe. There is so much they do with ease that the rest of us can never hope to accomplish even with the most prolonged, dedicated and scientific preparation.

But the great thing here is that this awe does not leave us feeling belittled or inadequate. On the contrary, the wonder and marvel at what one of our fellow human beings can do is life-enhancing: the intricate coordination of mind and matter, strength and speed, the welding together of eyes, feet and hands in the heat of the moment, all driven by a single competitive purpose, yet somehow making a thing of beauty beyond that single purpose. At their best, great sporting geniuses challenge and extend our notion of what is humanly possible. Normally when this happens outside the sporting realm, it is experienced as disturbing or threatening, but somehow, within that redemptively trivial domain, it is irresistibly seductive.

The words that I remember the most from my first major interview with Sachin Tendulkar three years ago, when we had talked about subjects as diverse as sleepwalking in search of bats and his love for cars are: "I'm still obsessed". This was, after all, the same individual who used to arrive at Shivaji Park at dawn and ask if the malis could be instructed to erect nets right away, failing which he could do it himself.

The next time we had a chat, a year later, he spoke of the prodigy's burden - "I could say that I didn't get to do all those things that a normal teenager would do, but then again, not many people get the opportunity to do what I do" - and of the satisfaction gained from an epic innings of 241 in Steve Waugh's farewell Test at the SCG.

Two seasons on, the man I meet is at a crossroads, with injury and inconsistency having dogged his every step. Some fair-weather fans, such as those that booed him at the Wankhede Stadium in March, have even gone to the extent of questioning his place in the side - almost blasphemous given the status he has enjoyed since those first tussles against Wasim and Waqar a week after the Berlin Wall came down.