Celebrating Sachinism

Sachin Tendulkar has now completed two decades of representing India. During these 20 years he had mercilessly massacred the bowling attack of every country which confronted him. Each of his hundreds were engraved in public memory and many people like me have a rough indicator of time woven around Sachin's innings. No doubt that he had been raised to a level to which any one had ever risen, be it historical, mythological,spiritual or for that matter any gods mentioned in scriptures. If there is a group of 1000 indians, I am very sure that not more than 40% would be a strong follower of any single god,leader etc, but I am very sure that more than 90% of them would definitely have strongly been following or had followed the curly haired genius. There have been numerous quotes and books written in his must deserved praise and these days newspapers as well as television channels have ensured that the little master gets the celebration of his two decades of shouldering billion hopes, which he deserves. Since a lot has already been written in much better allusions hence the act of reiterating those would be futile. But I have a totally different thing to point at, something which has a deep relation to Indian way of visualising things or it may be human way of visualising thing but in the paucity of knowledge I would not generalise it over to every country.
I was concerned about the short active memory that most of us tend to have and quickly forget the things, the moment we get something else to talk about. If you read newspapers coverages of past one month than it would give you an impression that today Indian team starts and ends at Sachin Tendulkar (something which was present in later half of 1990s). But if you pick up the newspapers or sports news coverage of just last year, you would find that Sachin was portrayed as an important stone in the wall but not the most important one or definitely not the only one. I was recently reading a book called Tipping point, which stressed that every incident is tipped by a single event and then converts into epidemic. I find a similar thing applicable here too. No marks for guessing that in this case it was the heroic knock of 175 at hyderabad by Sachin Tendulkar, which acted as the tipping point. Had it not been there, I am very sure that the present celebration of his two decades would not been as feverish as it is today. Before that knock, whenever tendulkar got out, people used to express their angst and raise question about his temperament , though in hush-hush voice, but now even such utterances have been classified as pure blasphemy , though not by the law but by the social accords which are more powerful than the legal one. Suddenly all those people have been silenced who used to raise their concerns over the match winning potentials of sachin, whether he is better than ponting/steve waugh and his retirement. Now their acumen for sports or whatever had abolished generation of such thoughts. Such were the ramifications of this single knock. I remember similar kind of coverage leveled after India's win against Pakistan in 2003 world cup, where again it was Sachin who made the mightiest trio of pace bowling attack(wasim, shoaib, waqar) repent for the day that they choose bowling as their profession. Then too it was sachin all around and every innings of sachin was bought back to public memory, be it sharjah or the match saving inings in perth when he was a teenager. But during these past 6 years, there were many things written and spoken which hinted that Sachin is no more the force that world reckoned with(as per public perception) . But again things have changed but I am not sure, how much this innings would last in the public memory or the media memory which is the one that essentially manipulates a lot of memories.
I want to end this by saying that though Sachin is the only god whose existence could not be denied but just because he was born as a mortal, he tend not to perform every time like god. So whenever he is having a bad patch it is essentially a test that the god has planned to test our believes in him, and once people start loosing their believe in god, a wonder like the one in hyderabad is produced to reinstate that God do exists and has initials SRT.