Kolkata musings: Tendulkar's career has been a gift from the Gods

The day after Diwali the streets of Kolkata are awash with trucks full of revellers taking idols of Kali mata to the Hoogly river to be immersed. There is dancing and singing aboard these trunks but when one of those trucks passed the Eden Gardens yesterday evening, some of the people stop to take photos while others chant “Sa-chin, Sa-chin”. The front façade of India’s largest cricket stadium has been adorned with life-size cutouts of Tendulkar, with two of them guarding the entrance. A platoon of policeman are also in attendance, making sure the crowd of about 100 people that have gathered to try and catch a glimpse of Sachin (or any of the players) does not get out of hand. Unfortunately for them, the Indian team left a long time ago and the best they can do is to catch a glimpse of the West Indies team boarding their bus and heading back to their hotel. On Wednesday, Tendulkar will turn out to play his 199th and penultimate Test match for India and Eden Gardens is busy getting ready for its biggest party in years. A travelling tableau of Tendulkar moments has already been set loose on the city, accompanied by Bengali and Hindi songs written for and about Tendulkar. His face adorns the match tickets and there are posters and hoardings scattered around the city. A collection of 100 photographs celebrating “every stage of the maestro’s life and career” is on exhibition at the ground and a life-size wax replica was presented to him when he arrived for practice on Monday. [caption id=“attachment_1210483” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Kolkata’s going crazy for Tendulkar. PTI[/caption] There’s more too. The coin for the toss will have Tendulkar’s image on one side (Eden Gardens on the other) and the Cricket Association of Bengal will present him with a silver Banyan tree. The CAB also intends to hand out a Tendulkar face mask to every one of the 60,000-plus spectators but the most dramatic and ambitious effort is the plan to have three aircraft fly over the stadium on the fifth day to drop 199 kilos of rose petals on the man. “There is a big craze in Calcutta for Sachin,” says Satyajit Roy, who was part of the crowd waiting outside the stadium. This will be Roy’s first time watching a Test match live. The 23-year-old managed to get a ticket for the match by turning up at 5:30 am when the counters only opened around 8:30 am. Still, he says “there was a big line in front of me.” He has heard about some of the CAB’s plans for the game and is looking forward to getting his Sachin mask. He is hoping for a free t-shirt too. Rajib Guptaa, a friend of Roy’s, will be going to see Tendulkar play in the flesh for the second time, but says he is a Sourav Ganguly fan first. He also thinks the hype around the Test is somewhat overblown. “There is a hawa [wind]. When you ride the wind, you are will fly up.” It is here that the CAB’s attitude to the match and those of the public appear to diverge. Where the CAB is being dreaming up memorabilia, neither Guptaa nor Roy plan on buying any merchandise to commemorate the match. “We will see later,” Guptaa says. The pair’s attitude towards merchandise is reflected in the views of Rakesh Sethi, the owner of Sethi Sports & Games, a retail store selling sports equipment in New Market, an old-fashioned sprawl of over 2000 shops and stalls that sell everything from clothing to electronics to foods like cheeses and chocolates that is located a short drive from the stadium on Lindsay Street. “There has been no effect of Sachin Tendulkar or India winning the Australia series on sales,” he said. Sethi has been in the sports retail business for roughly 35 years – his father started the business over 50 years ago - and says when India won the World Cup in 1983, cricket bats sales shot through the roof. “We were selling a hundred bats a week,” he said. The match-fixing scandal that broke in 1999 ended the craze, and now he sells about seven bats a week on average. The days of customers coming and asking for bats with their favourite players’ names on it have also passed into the mist of history. “Nobody has come and asked me can you give me a bat with the name of Sachin Tendulkar on it. People are more concerned with the brand, like Puma or Adidas. “The boom will not come back in my life time.” These days he sells cricket equipment mostly to foreign tourists, especially from Bangladesh, “where cricket is a growing game”. He says Indian customers mostly want badminton rackets, while basketball and football are also popular. A quick walk around the area, which is teeming with people selling clothes both in shops and on the roads, turns up few signs of cricket-themed clothing. Sethi’s analysis of the market is anecdotally reinforced by Mohammad Sagir, a 20-year selling sporty clothing from a cart on the sidewalk right outside mostly empty Nike, Reebok and Adidas stores on the main road in front of New Market. He has shirts branded with the Liverpool and Manchester United logos but says there has been “no demand in the last one week” for India or Tendulkar shirts. “This is not his last match. In which city he will play his last game, there you will the see the demand.” Sagir is a Tendulkar fan though and has managed tickets for the fourth day’s play through a relative who works with CAB. He repeats Roy’s line about the craze for Tendulkar in Kolkata and points out Tendulkar has been playing international cricket for longer than Sagir has been alive. “It is very sad [he is retiring]. His career has been a gift from the Gods. It is impossible to imagine cricket without Tendulkar. And when I say impossible, I mean impossible.”