My Sachin Tendulkar moment

The year is 2006. April. Times Now, the news channel has just been launched and in need of interns to assist its skeleton crew at the Sports desk for the Football World Cup, one with the Zidane headbutt fame or infamy. 

Three people in our batch of 27 journalism students are interested in sports. I am one of them. It sounds fun, doesn't it? Journalism and more specifically sports journalism. It is and would have been more fun if it paid better. 

Anyhow, I am there. Bombay. Local trains come, and leave the platform. More importantly it leaves me behind. I am so lost in watching the spectacle of people giving it their all just to get inside a train that I forget that I too should've been inside it. Another train comes. I take a step back and observe if there's any strategy involved. There's seems to be one. Give in. Let go. And the train takes you in. Welcome to Bombay, don't expect a welcome. Another train comes, and I lose myself in the waiting crowd. Sure enough, this time I am inside the train. It's a sauna in here, and to breathe you have to use your toes. 

I like the local trains. Inside it I watch the Mumbaikar; stoic and immersed in the morning tabloid, dignified; never straying too far from purpose. There, he makes more room for himself than what was offered to him. The great solace in entering the local train is that you know you'll get out of it.

I enter the office of Times Now and am struck by how pretty the receptionist is. News anchors, look more blemished without make up, and with make up look like pantomime artistes. People behind the camera are less attractive and more peaceful.

My boss is a Goan, whose voice you may have heard on TV. He speaks -- if he speaks -- in monosyllables. The only time his sentences get long is when expletives are needed to convey the gravity of the matter spoken. The first few weeks are maddening. To fake activity, I run aimlessly and go to the toilet or the canteen. Deciphering TV news lingo is nerve racking. The first few words that Hector spoke were "EDVI katwao." I ran, not too the toilet but to the editor's bay asking anyone who'd care to listen, what on earth was an EDVI. "Edited Visuals," someone said, I don't know who. And the farce, that back then was sorrow continued.

Then one day Hector: "Ghosh, expletive... don't expletive around (no context provided). You need to go to Sachin's place," he said. 

"You don't mean Tendulkar," I thought. 

Hector: "It's his birthday and our reporter has been there since 6 am and that expletive has yet not shown his face, You need to go there and come back only after we've got his byte for the day" 

Inside me, I did a mean dance step somewhere.

I reached at 1 pm to Sachin's flat and already there was a swarm of reporters there. It was amusing to note that none of the reporters present at assignments I was sent to ever appeared on TV. I felt like an equal, not to be taken lightly.

It was a summer day and an afternoon. Hot and sweaty. We waited, and waited. Big bouquets, the likes I had never seen before came and the guard allowed them in. "Was it Aishwarya Rai who sent them, was it Shahrukh Khan?” In the absence of anything else, cameramen filmed those bouquets. All I wanted was Sachin to come down, possibly even laugh or say "good question" to something that I asked him. And later invite me for dinner with him and his family. 

And we waited. At 5.30 in the evening, one of the journalists who had assumed leadership, in case no one else wanted it said that he had ordered a cake for Sachin. Yes, a cake.

I don’t know if it was for the cake but the liaison manager finally did say that Sachin would be coming down. I personally thought of a few questions, the answer to which would potentially be, “good question.” TV crews with bulky equipment and pen-totting print journalists made a dash lest Sachin eats the whole cake on his own.

Finally, the man they call God descended. Dressed in black; looking serene and acting gracefully. I gave him a long hard look, wondering if this is the man and what was special about him. Journalists wrestled with one another to light the candles on his cake while Sachin mumbled words to no one in particular. All my award winning questions were now a blur. I just looked on how he conducted himself. 

Some journalists wanted to seem more chummy than the rest. “I am surprised how much more consistent you guys are when remembering my birthday, and how much I need to learn from you regarding consistency in my field,” he said. “Ask Abhishek, ask,” a voice inside me said. “Not on his birthday, I don’t want to spoil it for him by another inane question,” the first voice of reason in my head. I went to his home once more, and this time inside his living room to give him a gift. His cook took it on his behalf.

When I returned to Times Now, Hector asked me in all seriousness why I didn’t light the candles on his cake. I wanted to tell him, “well coz I was hoping he’d call me for dinner you see.”