A day after Sachin Tendulkar hung his boots, I chanced upon listening to a BBC short documentary on its Radio 4. Though the backdrop was the god of cricket’s retirement, expectedly it devoted its energy in portraying us all as a very timid lot, who reportedly are ever eager to find and worship demigods more for reasons that have to do with materialism than spirituality. The bottom line in that presentation was the average Indian’s (whose mindset is to be taken as the benchmark for that of our society as a whole) compulsive tendency to worship demigods, and that the just retired cricketing legend is being literally deified and worshipped by frenzied people in India due to his cricketing success beyond comparison.
Among the people who the scribe asked if they worshipped Sachin as a god, many were overenthusiastic — slipping in the spontaneity of their shallow, pocket version of spiritual philosophy lacking in any essence — and replied in the affirmative. “Why not?” as one excited Sachin fan with his flawed, but fluent English went ahead to please the interviewer.
Though there was nothing wrong with making a programme on the demigod status of the legend, BBC could be blamed for taking an imperfect, unoriginal phrase in that lovingly given nickname and taking the sobriquet at face value, with a clever pun on the word “god”. The Western media tried to show our weakness for spiritual matters, used the phrase “India’s God of Cricket” instead that told much more than what their news items reported. What point was there for the BBC reporter to visit Shirdi and interview devotees in the same breath about Sachin?
Interestingly, calling someone as the god of something is limiting all future paragons in that field of speciality as “A poor man’s XYZ” because that somebody has already been adjudged as the best and ultimate in the field. Like National Award-winning actor Mithun Chakraborty who was called “poor man’s Amitabh Bachchan” by the media during his successful career as an action hero. Hypothetically though, just imagine, if Virat Kohli were to break every record held by the god of cricket, all doors have been closed on him with respect to getting a godlike, godly or demigod attributes for a befitting sobriquet. What about those who overtake the mundane gods in achievement? A lesser god.
Earlier, physical or mental characteristics of popular or notorious celebrities were taken into consideration while attributing nicknames to them. Like Boom Boom Afridi for Shahid Afridi, known for his aggressive batting. Other popular examples are King of Spin for Warne, Turbanator for Harbhajan Singh, Little Master for Sunil Gavaskar that was later shared by Sachin for obvious reasons, Haryana Hurricane, Rawalpindi Express, Prince of Kolkata, so on and so forth. I think there was a spontaneity to the choice of such nicknames. Those were natural and fond — good for our G K textbooks.