Hyderabad: Life is full of ironies. Sports enthusiasts in India spend years and decades pining for that single standout event or landmark they can tell their grandchildren about.
Then, all of a sudden, there are not one but two poignant, melancholic and memorable moments in the same month, practically on the same day. Two great men, two unlikely gladiators, perhaps the two greatest sportsmen in India’s history, walk into the sunset at about the same time.
The reference is to November 2013, which saw Sachin Tendulkar play his final Test and Vishwanathan Anand lose his world chess title to a young challenger.
Of course, Anand has not retired. He’s just turned 44 and thinks he could well be playing competitive chess till the age of 50. Nevertheless he cannot possibly recapture his peak. He will never again be world champion for six years, as he was from 2007 to 2013. Gradually, slowly, his art is telling him its time, just as Tendulkar’s reflexes slowed that wee bit in his closing hours.
Tendulkar and Anand are comparable in more ways than is imagined. For a start, they are obvious contemporaries. Anand made a name for himself by winning the world junior chess championship in 1987 and later in the year becoming India’s first grandmaster.
In 1989, Tendulkar made his international debut. In the 1990s, their careers ran in parallel but in some senses the top prize eluded them. In 1995, Anand famously took on Garry Kasparov for the world chess title, playing on the observation deck of the World Trade Centre, no less. Despite taking the lead, Anand lost. Tendulkar was in astounding form in the 1996 World Cup, hosted by the sub-continent.
His team let him down though, and India lost in the semi-final. For teenage prodigies, both Anand and Tendulkar had to wait till their thirties for substantive and lasting accolades to come their way. In 2000, Anand won the first of his many world championships.
In 2007, he began a six-year reign at the top. In 2001, India finally put together the cricket team and the work ethic that Tendulkar deserved. A dazzling decade resulted. It began with victory in Kolkata against the Australians and culminated with the World Cup final in Mumbai in 2011.
Those years, ending when Tendulkar was 38, were much more meaningful than the first half of the Mumbai master’s career — in terms of victories against quality opposition, making India a first-rate team abroad and reaching two World Cup finals.
Recognition came to both men but perhaps it came earlier to Anand. He beat Tendulkar to the Padma Shri and the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award — India’s leading prize for a sportsperson — by several years.
In the evening of their careers, the cricketer caught up. In 2007, Anand became the first sportsperson to be given the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian honour. In 2013, Tendulkar beat him to the Bharat Ratna, becoming the first sportsperson to be named for India’s top honour.
It would have been appropriate if Anand had been given the Bharat Ratna as well; he did not deserve this supersession. Perhaps a new and more enlightened government will make amends in 2014.
Yet prizes and awards, statistical achievements and sheer longevity are not all that separate Tendulkar and Anand from others and put them in a league of their own. Frankly, no other Indians have so dominated and left such an impact on their individual sports in recent memory — not even Sunil Gavaskar or Kapil Dev, Prakash Padukone or Geet Sethi.
To seek similarities, we will have to go back to the Indian hockey teams of between 1928 and 1964, when Dhyan Chand and K.D. Singh “Babu” and Balbir Singh set the golden standard.
No previous Indian cricketer left an imprint on the game, its artistry and its cultural ecosystem in the manner that Tendulkar did. Maybe one could go back to Ranji and the late 19th century to draw analogies, but that framework was very different. Cricket is a much bigger enterprise — by every definition of that word — than it was in the Victorian age, and India is central to the sport as never before.
Tendulkar was the first Indian superstar in this moment of transition, this inflection point, this power shift in cricket. True, there could well be others, but Tendulkar will always be the first: the Colossus across 22 yards.
Tendulkar represented the apogee of an Indian cricket tradition. In contrast, Anand had to invent a tradition; he had very little of a modern Indian chess heritage to inherit. Cricket had produced oriental wizards in the past, but chess had none to match, save perhaps Mir Sultan Khan, the working-class Punjabi who enthralled European chess connoisseurs in the 1930s, taking on and beating the best in tournaments in Britain.
Mir Sultan Khan stopped playing in the mid-1930s and lived and died in Pakistan after 1947. Between him and Anand, India produced no truly iconic chess players, only some journeymen. After Anand, there has been a deluge of talent. Of course none has matched his prowess, not yet at least.
From Mushtaq Ali to Vijay Amritraj, India’s treasured sportspersons have been nice guys who finished second. The genial, well-mannered Indian, he of the supple wrists and quick eye; the smiling, sporting loser: this is a reputation we have embraced.
It is often said that to succeed Indians have to develop that abstract quality called “killer instinct”. Nobody knows what it means, but most guess it includes brashness, occasional boorishness, overt aggression and a foul tongue. It is the way of winners, we console ourselves, but not the Indian way.
This takes us to the strongest thread linking Anand and Tendulkar — that of demeanour and temperament. No serial eccentricity like Vassily Ivanchuk, no over-the-top outbursts like Kasparov, no bar-room brawling like Ricky Ponting, no scandal sheets like Shane Warne; little sledging and even less abuse: Tendulkar and Anand showed us it was possible to retain something of the honourable schoolboy and still be the best in the world. India will miss them.
(The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com)
