http://www.hindu.com/2006/03/21/stories ... 371800.htm
I wondered what topic it could be. But the way people who booed little master out called and waved the indian flag made me rethink. Some of the excerpts from the article that featured in The Hindu.
MANY a connoisseur of cricket may have come to believe, on Sunday, that the unthinkable has happened when Sachin Tendulkar was booed all the way back to the pavilion at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai by sections of the crowd. But, in truth, it was unimaginable only because we may have failed to scratch the surface of our fast-evolving cricketing culture, only because we have probably failed to see the fast-emerging darkness in the very soul of a once-great culture, which is dumbing down rather alarmingly.
Trashing Tendulkar for an uncharacteristic failure is much like attempting to dismantle the Taj because one of its walls has developed a minor crack over time. It is simply not done. Then again, for many sportslovers, that is precisely the problem today — they have lost the capacity to appreciate history, to look at the larger picture, to go beyond the most recent stimuli and understand events in a historical perspective.
The point is, Tendulkar never promised any of us a masterly century in every innings that he might get to play. We were the ones who set that impossible goal for the little man. That he has failed to meet that unrealistic goal is no sheen off his greatness; it merely throws light on our own foolishness.
At no point in his remarkable career did Tendulkar tell us that he was immortal; we turned him into a sort of superhuman phenomenon — where none exists in the known world — because we were perhaps ashamed of our own all too human limitations and wanted someone not-quite-like-us to look up to.
Sad day indeed for indian cricket and india as a whole.Of course, as passionate followers of the game, we are entitled to our own opinions. If some of us believe that the great man may not deserve a place in the team if he continues to fail, that's fair enough. Nobody owns a place in the Indian cricket team — not even Tendulkar.
But what is not fair — and will never be — is to stoop down to the sort of mindless pettiness that triggered the Mumbai booing on Sunday.
