DOES THE 'GOD' DESERVE IT ALL ?

Bharat Ratna is the highest civilian award that can be bestowed upon by the Republic of India. It is awarded for performance of highest order in any field of endeavor. I would like to stress on the word ‘any’, as it is a recent addition so that a sportsperson can receive the award too.

If you look at the past recipients of the award, it makes you wonder, where does Mr.Tendulkar fit on a list that features independent India’s first president, first education minister, chairman of the constitution drafting committee, four nobel laureates (including the likes of Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa), music pioneers like Lata Mangeshkar and Bismillah Khan, JRD Tata, APJ Abdul Kalam, etc. On a first glance, of course he doesn’t!

One might argue that others didn’t contribute in their respective fields as much as SRT did for Indian cricket. But still, it’s just a game and he is just another sportsperson who scaled heights, that others didn’t think was possible. Hell, he achieved things nobody ever thought existed! He might not have been a part of the physicist team that stopped light, but he surely did stop time when he used to bat. A billion hopes used to rise with his bat and fall with his bails. To keep up with expectations of the second most populous nation in the world for the majority of his career is not a task that can be entrusted to mere mortals. On the cricket field he was God, and Gods can’t afford to fail. Fail, he didn't.

Even then it’s just a game and we play games for entertainment, it can’t be compared with something as serious as world peace or independence or science. Well, believe it or not, ours is a time when sports have become a very integral part of society. There was a time when the word ‘genius’ was reserved for people in academic and literary fields, but that time is past. Now we have sports geniuses, in the truest sense of the word genius, in Roger Federer, Sachin Tendulkar, Tiger Woods, Lionel Messi, Michael Schumacher, to name a few. Surely they can’t be compared to the likes of Newton and Einstein and Hawking, but you can’t deny the fact that each one of them has been equally important in their area of expertise.

What a certain individual has done for Indian cricket, no one has or can do. Sure enough someone one day will match his records but they can’t match his stature or aura. No one can ever give hope to Indian hearts as a curly-haired Bjorn Borg-fan from Mumbai did. Giving Sachin Tendulkar a Bharat Ratna isn’t over-doing things, he deserves every bit of it and more.