And the 'Award' goes to....

Prologue –

Time – Sometime in Feb-March 2010,not many days after Ravi Shastri announced from the commentary box at Gwalior- “Sachin, the first man in the planet to score a double hundred in ODIs”…news channels bustling all around ,should Sachin be the next Bharat Ratna??. The ‘?’ was a ‘?’ for the moneymaker media barons, while it was a decent ‘!!’ for the youth culture and the future stronghold of the nation…and a quiet ‘.’ for the millions of common Indians who , for the past 15 years,silently , yet firmly had made Sachin their Bharat Ratna.



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Place- Marine Drive ,200 metres +- Wankhede Stadium,I am standing somewhere in the middle of that 3.5 km long stretch. A place that holds true to the saying that ‘Men are from Mars and women are from South Bombay’ is alive and kicking. Cars all around, with bodies partially out of them,bodies with all the animation,waving flags from their hands and having jubilance in their faces, and faces, with nothing but screams of ‘Indeeeya..India’ from their mouths



India finally “after a generational gap of 28 years”(again in Shastri’s terms) had won the World cup and Marine Drive alongwith the whole of Mumbai and the whole nation was like something never before in the past and would never be at least in the next 4 years.



And these days..as was expected from the night of 2nd April , news channels are galore with ‘Indeeeeya..indiaaa’ spirits, be it Sachin, Dhoni, Sehwag, their mothers, wifes , relatives or sisters, there are all welcome in those supernatural, ‘out of the world’ studios ..and Hence another issue has come out of its burial ground…..Should Sachin be awarded the Bharat Ratna??



As a common man I don’t think my opinion counts but…as an ‘Indian’,I guess I should give one.



Yes…I think Sachin must be awarded this supreme accolade ,although he is already one( the supreme) in the eyes of this great nation. But for me, there is one more and only thing(as I may call it) that should be conferred this honour before Sachin. That thing, that era, that religion, that greatness is cricket.



If I may quote Wikipedia , Bharat Ratna is a civilian award awarded for highrst degree of national service including artistic, literary ,and for public service of the highest order.. if for a few minutes I ( and the people who are reading it ) assume cricket to be a human being , then this man has been doing the above mentioned things for the past 75 years., Be it Mumbai, Chennai , Malihabad, Leh, Be it Abhishek Bachchan, Atal Behari Vajpayee, or a poor farmer, the panorama of this guy over each of them is just the same ,irrespective of the fact that some of these guys own a Bentley, some own this nation, and many, doesen’t even own a rooftop for them.



There must be something in this man that for watching this stud people from jammu to kanyakumari, Rajasthan to charapoonji(I know this is a cliché but still) ‘bleed blue’. No matter if it is ’47 ,’84, 26/11, come this man and the nation is united like never before.



And now lets just convert it into a sport, and we see that it isn’t even our national sport,perhaps it needn’t be, because it is our national pride , our national emotion.. it is something greater than religion, because religion we have to follow, while this, we love to follow.



That last six from Dhoni, on that memorable night was not just a six, a winning shot, it was a moment when 1.2 billion Indians had tears in their eyes, were weak at their knees, and were dancing no matter if majority of them had no food to eat , no houses to live in and no occupation to earn from.



This game deserves something from this country, it deserves a tribute, if possible, a Bharat Ratna and if possible (and if I may have the guts to say) before Sachin.

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Epilogue

- The streets of Mumbai have turned workoholic, Dravid has made statement that Sachin is already a Bharat Ratna, and somewhere a craze ,a madness has started taking birth for the upcoming IPL.