🇮🇳 Sachin Tendulkar

Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar was born in Bombay on 24 April 1973, the youngest of four children of a Marathi novelist who named him after the family's favourite music director. He grew up in the Sahitya Sahawas housing colony in Bandra East, a building full of writers' families, and his earliest cricket was played in the courtyards with a rubber ball and a wooden plank. The boy was, by every account that survives, hyperkinetic and undisciplined until his elder brother Ajit walked him, at age eleven, into Shivaji Park and presented him to a coach named Ramakant Achrekar. Achrekar's verdict after the trial was famous: 'He'll play for India.' He was not yet five feet tall.

By thirteen he was scoring centuries in Mumbai schools cricket as if they were practice drills. At fourteen, in a Harris Shield semifinal at Azad Maidan, he and a friend named Vinod Kambli put on an unbroken stand of 664. Tendulkar, batting first, made 326 not out. Cricketing India read about it in the morning papers and asked, simultaneously, the same question. Who is this boy? At fifteen he was scoring centuries in the Ranji Trophy. At sixteen he was on a plane to Karachi to face Imran Khan, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, the most fearsome fast-bowling attack in the world. In his second Test, in Faisalabad, Waqar struck him in the face. Blood ran into his mouth, and his shirt. Asked if he wanted to retire hurt, he refused. He went on to make 57.

What made Tendulkar's career singular was not its peaks — every great batsman has peaks — but its duration. For 24 years he batted at the top of India's order in conditions that ranged from Perth bouncers to Karachi reverse swing to Mumbai turners, against bowlers who ranged from Wasim Akram and Curtly Ambrose to Shane Warne and Dale Steyn, while a billion people watched and the country's mood rose and fell with each innings. The phrase 'Tendulkar is batting' was, for an entire generation of Indians, equivalent to 'do not move.' Restaurants emptied. Surgeries were postponed. Traffic thinned. He did not always score runs. But the country watched anyway because the alternative — missing a Tendulkar century — was unthinkable.

His most famous innings are recited like scripture. The 114 at Perth in 1992, against a four-pronged Australian pace attack on a pitch that broke ribs, made at 18, with no other Indian batsman crossing 30. The 134 at Sharjah against Australia in 1998 in a desert sandstorm that paused play for 25 minutes; he resumed and went past Tony Greig's running commentary into shock. The 98 at Centurion against Pakistan in the 2003 World Cup, his first ball to Shoaib Akhtar pulled for six over third man. The 200 not out at Gwalior in 2010, the first ODI double century in the game's history. The 241 not out at Sydney in 2004, where he refused to play a single cover drive for ten hours because that was the shot getting him out. The discipline of that decision, made before lunch and held through tea, is the part of Tendulkar that statistics do not capture.

He won the World Cup, finally, in 2011 in his sixth attempt and his home city of Mumbai. He had carried Indian cricket for two decades; in the final, against Sri Lanka, his teammates carried him on their shoulders around the Wankhede outfield while Virat Kohli, then 22, said the line that became the tournament's epitaph: 'He has carried Indian cricket for 21 years. It is fitting we carry him today.' Tendulkar wept openly. So did most of India.

He retired in 2013 after his 200th Test. The match was played at the Wankhede; the Indian government, under unprecedented pressure, broke its own protocols and awarded him the Bharat Ratna — India's highest civilian honour — within hours of his last innings. He was the first sportsperson ever to receive it. He was 40 years old, had played international cricket since the age of 16, and had scored more runs across formats than any human being who has ever lived. He addressed the crowd in a halting speech, with both his coach Achrekar and his mother in the stands, and thanked, by name, the bowlers who had got him out across 24 years. India listened, and wept, and went home, and got on, somehow, with the rest of life.