Re: U.S. Media Compares Sachin Tendulkar's Exit To Mahatma Gandhi's De
Here is the boot licking Indian's article
Where the Gods Live On ... and On
Sachin Tendulkar Finally Retires From Cricket
By TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Published: November 13, 2013
A POPULAR Indian historian once remarked to me that India is a country where men don't age well, and of no one is this observation truer than of Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, a man who is, at 40 years and some 200 days, the oldest member of India's cricket team.
But let me first be complimentary. Mr. Tendulkar, whom everyone calls Sachin, is the most revered cricketer in India; in fact,
it would be entirely accurate to describe him as the most revered contemporary Indian, or even, with only a pinch of hyperbole, the most revered Indian since Mahatma Gandhi held the nation in thrall. Suspend your disbelief and think of him as a cross between Babe Ruth and Martin Luther King.
Sachin currently dominates India's imagination even more than usual: Today, in his native Mumbai, he will begin playing his 200th test match (as the five-day version of cricket is called), when India takes on the West Indies, a once-mighty team now fallen on hard times. It will also be his last test match, for he will retire from competitive cricket after the game.
As the moment of his departure looms, the country is in the fevered throes of one last, mammoth celebration, but also on the un-self-conscious brink of mourning. As Nehru said on Gandhi's death, so India will say on the day Sachin hangs up his white cricket flannels: "The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere." (India mourns in purple prose.)
At the same time, there is also, remarkably, an unsentimental view of Sachin, which is that he should have retired two years ago (or more), that he has stayed at the wicket much too long.
There is no Indian tradition of graceful retirement. The inherent human vanity of an authority reluctant to cede the public stage is reinforced by a culture of adulation, of shrieking, ululating crowds, of an uncritical elevation of heroes to godlike status by devotees who will not let go. In politics, in cinema, even in corporate business houses, old Indian men do not fade into the sunset. They hobble on and on. And when they die, they are "kept alive" by heirs who succeed them: sons, daughters, wives. Sport, by its very nature, is different: there is no elegant case for heirs on a cricket team, and the body imposes its own laws of retirement.
Yet Sachin and his fans have tried their best to defy those natural laws. After all, idolatry is an Indian art form.
Some Indian gods have three heads, or 10 arms. Others have serpents coiled around their torsos, or rivers streaming from their heads. And one, Sachin, wields a sacred cricket bat, heavy, sweet, made of the finest willow.
In a land of chronic inefficiency, he was remorselessly efficient; in a land with a global inferiority complex, he was the best in the world; in a land where public figures are strutting peacocks, he was often a picture of painful humility; in a land that thirsts for self-respect, Sachin spelled pride.
When he first played for India — in 1989, at age 16, against the old enemy, Pakistan — the country was adrift economically. National morale hit a nadir in 1991, with India pawning gold reserves to stay afloat. Sachin's blossoming coincided with the economic liberalization that followed, and his cricketing splendor tracked a healthy, sometimes rollicking, growth rate. In his success, he embodied a new Indian self-image. Other heroes have since emerged: younger, brasher, like the New India itself, but Sachin's heroism reminds the country of a more vulnerable time, and he is loved the more for that.
In purely sporting terms, however, he is but a shadow of his old self, in which he shone as one of the three or four finest players cricket has produced in its long, languorous history. He is now merely a "good" or "better than average" player. Had he been only 24 and this proficient, he'd be an honest contender for a place on the national team. But he is now so much less good than he once was that, when he plays, the more dispassionate among us can see only an ugly gulf between Sachin's apogee and his plateau.
There is more: For a man who built his reputation not just on supreme batsmanship but also on his unwavering modesty, impeccable manners and an evident pleasure in being part of (and never greater than) the team on which he played,
there has been an unlovely whiff of selfishness in his reluctance to give way to younger players, in his limpetlike clinging to his place, and in his relentless pursuit of milestones. No cricketer has ever played 200 test matches before. No other cricketer will. Sachin managed the feat only because he has batted on for 24 years.
But we shouldn't blame Sachin. In any other land, he would have aged, recognized the limitations brought on by age ... and moved on. India has not let him do so. It is India, by its corrosive love, that has betrayed Sachin Tendulkar.
Tunku Varadarajan is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/opinion/tendulkar-finally-retires-from-cricket.html?_r=0
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Note his style of writing.
It reminds me of those Indians who just have enough time to dip their toes in the Hudson River and become more American than Americans themselves.
There is no end of such pseudo around.
He may kiss the ground on which Tendulkar may have walked thinking their will be oil beneath it, but it does not mean he represents India or a country that is
un-self-conscious brink of mourning or
a land of chronic inefficiency, he was remorselessly efficient; in a land with a global inferiority complex,
It is these Jonny come Lately Green Card aspirants who out American Americans and suffer a huge inferiority complex themselves!]
It is these type of skunks who let India down abroad and are the worst specimen of India unfortunately released abroad like unbridled virus, feeding and proliferating on the gullibility of the foreigners who enjoy the 'stupidlity' presented by such to fit their stereotype image of countries of the mystic Orient!
