Welcome back Master Blaster!

This post might be 2-3 weeks too late, but as they say, better late than never. Was a bit caught up with work and travel, so didn't have a chance to get to blogger. Before this post, millions of reams of news-print, a billion journalist hours, a trillion television-hours have been invested by the world press and viewers in general - In this age of internet and blogging, I contribute to nothing more than a drop in the Ocean to this topic! - However, that by no means diminishes the importance of the topic of this post: after a 6-month injury lay-off, a warm welcome back to Sachin Tendulkar.

A marathon 141 not out of 148 deliveries, batting out the entire 50 overs, 5 sixes, 13 fours, ran just as hard as he did 17 years ago - I could go on and on praising Sachin's innings, but to sum it up, Master Blaster is back with a bang.

It might not have been the best innings that Tendulkar has played, but to me, it was probably the most important. He has virtually lost out at a year of cricket - starting from the black days of Tennis Elbow, sprinkled with indifferent form and then the long lay-off resulting from the shoulder operation. As he has accepted in his recent interviews, this was probably the toughest phase of his career - a slump in form due to injuries, commentators and experts in India sketching the end of his career (Endulkar is the term they used to grab media attention), injuries making himself unsure of the career ahead, etc, etc.

I am an ardent follower of Tendulkar - I keep a track of not just his scores, but almost anything that I can get hold to through secondary research. I have been doing this for a couple of years now - almost on a daily basis and sometimes on the hour, every hour - I end up with the following sequence of involuntary steps:

Double Click on internet explorer --> www.google.com --> type Sachin Tendulkar --> Click search --> Click news --> Click Sort by date!

What has been rather surprising over the last one year is that there are singificantly more news articles published when Tendulkar is injured than when it is "business-as-usual" for him i.e. when he is on the field and scoring runs. I could find news articles almost every half an hour on this topic - might just be someone's opinion on his elbow or shoulder injury, but so what, it was enough to help me get a picture of when would Tendulkar get back on field.

We all know Tendulkar the genius, the run-scoring machine, those 25,000 plus international runs, the consistent performer, the aggressive thinker and much of what he does serves as an inspiration, not just for us (a billion Indians), but many more around the world. However, there is much more to Sachin Tendulkar than just his cricketing skills and performance that makes him among the greatest that this world has seen. Let me highlight what in my view are three most important things that we can try to learn from Tendulkar:

1. The obvious: Sachin the performer - it's not just his hand-eye-coordination (a natural gift), but it's the effort he puts in - at 33, with all success behind him, he is still found spending more time at nets than younger players. At most times, Sachin has a very clear game plan based on his mental homework - bowlers to go after, when to play a subdued innings, working on his own game, etc. These are very important factors behind his success and surprisingly, it's much the same for rest of us in compeltely different careers.
2. The basics: When you look at Tendulkar's life on and off the field, there has hardly been any controversy that he has ever ended up with. All through the match fixing scandal, I was very sure that Sachin would never have been a part of that 'gang' in the dressing room. Crtitics have positioned his lack-of-willingness to pay tax on a gifted car in the wrong light, but to me, Sachin has a very clear filter in his mind - no compromises on ethics and basics at any cost. Add to that, he is extremely modest and clearly has his head just an inch above the shoulders - just where it should be. Again, we all can draw a leaf from it.
3. Communication: Getting back to the professional angle, I think, Sachin is a genius when it comes to communication. He might sound a bit diplomatic at times, but he never comes up with any provoking or loose statements. (as opposed to Warne, McGrath and likes) Infact, he often responds to criticism with 'no-negative-reaction' and instead lets his bat do the talking. I am not a 100% sure of this, but as much as I know from my secondary research, Sania Mirza and Narain Karthikeyan have had sessions with Tendulkar on two topics: 1) How to handle success? 2) How to manage media and communication? Most of us would probably never need to balance the media part, but we can probably learn a bit from the balanced well-thought way of communicating.

Phew! This has been a long post. But then, I really can't help it. Sachin probably has been the greatest influence on my life, outside the range of obvious circle. I didn't have much of sense for the first 9 years of my life. Ever since then, life has been simple - a good day is when Sachin scores a ton, rest of the days are just about average - and I have been fortunate enough to see 75 good days and hopefully there will be many more in the next few years... But, Sachin would retire one day... well, I haven't thought about my life after that!