Tendulkar debuts on Twitter

India’s most secretive celebrity has finally joined the Twitter brigade. Sachin Tendulkar, who guards his privacy as zealously as he guards his wicket, debuted on the microblogging network on Tuesday night and, within hours, had more than 30,000 followers. His tweets are unlikely to be as gregarious as Shane Warne’s or laconic as Chris Gayle’s, or even as revelatory as Phil Hughes’ have been, but they will be rare unprompted thoughts from a man whose every public utterance so far has been tightly controlled. His first tweet could set the tone – "Finally the original SRT is on twitter", it said, in a gentle swipe at all the imposters, before wishing the Indian team the best for the current World Twenty20.

There has been a bit of news – the stitches on his hand have been removed – and the revelation, via a twitpic, that he sleeps in an Adidas vest. Or that he sleeps, period, and has dinner with friends like the rest of us. It’s manna for his followers, who refer to him as God. Cue jokes – his Twitter handle should have had an “overscore” instead of an underscore – and the expectation that he would soon be Trendulkar. And a word of advice for Steve Jobs – he can start work on his next product, the iFollow.