Let Sachin Tendulkar play it his way

Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography, Playing It My Way, has caused a flutter with his references to former India coach Greg Chappell and his "ringmaster" approach towards the Indian team and other issues that occurred during the batting maestro’s 24-year long international career.

While cricket fans are savouring the extracts being published from the book, critics are a bit disappointed as they wanted the living legend to speak about many other issues and topics, both good and bad, like his opinion about his contemporaries and opponents, the dark days of match (or spot) fixing and other incidents that occurred during the start of the 2000s decade. In the interviews that he gave during the book launch, Tendulkar clarified that he spoke about (or revealed) only those issues he was 100 per cent sure of and could back them with evidence. One does believe this is a fair approach because Tendulkar is no Sarfraz Nawaz whose credibility was always under a cloud.

Having known Tendulkar since 1986-87, one can safely say that he is a man of few words and would never set the cat among the pigeons merely to create hype. From the start of his career, even before he played first-class cricket, Tendulkar was always reserved with the media and kept his opinions to himself. In many conversations that one had with him in those days, he insisted that his bat should to do the talking.

Many believe that over the years Tendulkar should have spoken about various issues, not necessarily contentious, in public forums. His inherent personality was always about trying to solve an issue without upsetting the applecart. The "delay" in revealing Guru Greg’s "indecent proposal" is a case in point.

In an interview, Tendulkar said that he felt like talking but preferred to keep quiet, focus on his game and not get into the tangle of one article following another. Those of us who have seen him grow from a prodigious schoolboy to an international champion know how hard he has worked to achieve what he did. Hours of dedicated daily practice, fobbing off a luscious but unproductive lifestyle with a complete focus on his art has made him what he is today.

Tendulkar worked like a monk in a silo, staying detached from the high pressure while fulfilling unreasonable expectations from an ever growing mass of followers.

For someone who has never ever spoken about issues that confronted him, Tendulkar’s disclosures about many issues concerning Chappell, Mike Denness and Monkeygate are welcome. His revelations about his first meeting with his wife, Anjali, must have been the most difficult chapter for him to speak about. Tendulkar was furious when a leading newspaper printed Anjali’s photograph days after their engagement in 1994. When one reasoned with him that the media worked on scoops and he should take it in his stride, he said: "Would the editor like to see his own wife’s photograph on the front page?"

With critics feeling let down on not finding many scoops in Tendulkar’s book, one harks back to the late 70s when another Bharat Ratna, Lata Mangeshkar, launched an album My Favourites, a compilation of the best songs she had rendered. A noted music critic wrote an opinion piece on what songs should have been included or dropped from the album. When asked to comment on the opinion piece Lata calmly said: "They are my favourite songs, not his!"