The time for sentimental attachment to the seniors in Team India is over. A couple of the all-time greats of Indian batting may already have been informed of the selection committee's view by the chairman at whose son's wedding reception in Chennai at least one of the galacticos was present.

The big push for youth has begun already and the Indian team to play England in the next home series will sport a couple of newcomers in the middle order.

The elders will go of their own volition and pretty soon too, leaving only the timing of their announcement to be tended to.

They don't have to be pushed. This is not to belittle the magnificent contribution to Indian cricket by its loyal servants like Rahul Dravid and V.V.S. Laxman, both of whom may have appeared for the last time in the Test arena.

They will remain champions in our thinking, their batting vignettes always stamped in the mind's eye and their achievements fondly remembered. What they suffered recently was from the law of diminishing returns that catches up with everyone and everything.

There is no knowing if the next generation of batsmen will show the sense of commitment that these great players brought to bear on their game skills and so enhancing the latter.

Their kind of diligence is getting rarer and rarer in an age of instant gratification and its pet incarnation of T20 cricket.

Also, it is a moot point whether Test cricket itself will survive in its present elaborate form for so long as to devote to it as much attention as players of previous generations used to.

Let us not even for a minute forget Dravid's enormous contribution to India's ODI performances. Just how many batsmen are there in cricket to have done the double of 10,000 runs in the two formats? And when he wore the wicket-keeping gloves one morning in Taunton in the World Cup of 1999 he brought a whole new perspective to an all-round role in ODIs as well as lending a balance to the team through yet another sacrifice.

It's another matter that even such a technically adaptable batsman like Dravid should find himself swimming against the tide in Australia where the conditions of bounce and seam movement were different from the damp and swing conditions of England.

That Laxman was fast losing his reflexes, much like the signs seen in Sourav Ganguly when he became such an obvious candidate for the first of the Fab Four to be delinked from a famous middle order.

It is, however, clear the time is here already for GenNext to be given the spurs. Going by Virat Kohli's example, there is a promise that with opportunities provided consistently the young will not only perform but also be competitive as a combination in the toughest theatre of Test cricket also.

It may take them a while though to forge their techniques in the more demanding format, particularly when it comes to batting on varying surfaces rather than the somewhat uniform ODI pitches.

In this regard, it was mighty surprising that Rohit Sharma was not given a chance at least in the fourth Test. Given the form of the previous seven Tests, almost everyone was expendable.

This was the tour committee's biggest failure of vision. The committee had not exactly covered itself in glory on the England tour on which they failed to give Varun Aaron a game despite the lack of success of all the fancy fast bowlers resurrected to play a bit role in an ever unfolding injury drama.

So, it's not as if the selection committee alone is to blame for all the ills. Such a collective failure on and off the field has not been featured in Indian cricket for quite some time now.