What can one say about Sachin Tendulkar that hasn’t already been said over the last couple of decades?  So, instead of gilding the lily, I want to talk about his autobiography that came out couple of weeks ago.  Now I have followed the career of the master batsman right from his first day in international cricket in November 1989 to his last in November 2013, in fact, I have lived and died through his batting, over the years, he exercised a strange hold on my mood depending on how he batted and I don’t think any other sportsperson has received as much mass adoration in India as he has.  If ever there was a case of somebody being both Moses and Beatles rolled into one, he would come pretty close.

In light of the above mentioned, you would think that when the man himself has come out with the story of his life, I would be dying to lay my hands on it.  But that is far from the case.  Even though I yield to no one in my admiration for Sachin, I don’t believe that he can do or even he’s done justice to the art of writing an autobiography.  As a fan and a follower his exploits with the bat have been a matter of records and he’s had such a long and phenomenal career that for the statistically minded, he is a goldmine.  But I think when you are telling the story of your life; you need to come up with a lot more than giving us a lowdown of your deeds with the bat for us to be really hooked.  I don’t care about the generalities like you were disappointed when this or that happened or you felt emotional when something else happened.

Let’s face it.  Sachin, when he was in his playing days, never showed any inclination to speak up or speak out on any controversial issues surrounding the game.  He would always go about his business quietly and without any fuss.  By nature he is politically correct, even boringly so.  In my view, people like him don’t come up with a tell all, a kind of no-holds-barred memoir.   Do we get to know his unfiltered view on betting and match fixing that so much bedeviled Indian cricket? No.  Do we get to know what he thinks of the way sports in general and cricket in particular has been run in this country?  No.  His rise as a cricketing God has coincided with India’s emergence from an insular, plodding and mediocre economy to one of the fastest growing economy around the world.  But does Tendulkar dovetails the larger narrative of his country to his phenomenal career as a cricketer?  The answer unfortunately is a resounding NO. 

George Orwell once said that an autobiography is not to be trusted unless it reveals something disgraceful about the man.  Surely, it would be unfair to hold Sachin to that exacting standard.  But he could have done a lot better than sticking to tired clichés and politically correct posturing.  Maybe, it will need somebody other than the man himself to tell the definitive story of a phenomenon called SACHIN RAMESH TENDULKAR, because this one is too tepid for my liking.