What I’ve achieved today is India’s achievement: Sachin

" If stones are thrown at you, you convert them into milestones..." - Sachin Tendulkar

It was a shade under 19 years ago that a curly-haired and reticent teenager made his maiden Test appearance, at the National Stadium in Karachi. Women in the zenana stands teased him as “India ka bachcha” and the Javed Miandads felt they had an easy prey. By the end of that tour, though, Sachin Tendulkar was no more a bachcha.

On Friday afternoon, after what he described as a “fantastic journey,” Sachin became the highest run-getter in Tests. Having made an awesome statement over the 22 yards in neighbouring Mohali, it was time to make a few points off the field. That the “stones” thrown along the way had actually been converted into “milestones”.

He didn’t have to prove anything to anybody and, as important, just didn’t have to answer critics. Didn’t have to lose sleep over “opinions” too. The first to 10,000 runs in ODIs and the first to 12,000 in Tests... Add 39 Test hundreds and 42 in ODIs and, well, you have a CV which would make anybody envious.

Records are destined to be re-written and Sachin accepted that with humility which is such a characteristic of his. Sachin isn’t new to doomsayers; he isn’t new to scattering them either. And it isn’t the pressbox pundits alone who’ve piled the pressure; it’s been his fans as much, expecting of a 35-year-old, the promises he made at 16.

He may have fulfilled more than he ever guaranteed, but there is never an end to greed and seeking; Sachin goes three innings without a hundred and they start declaring betrayal and, worse, death. Tendulkar quickly becomes Endulkar. It’s been upon him to fight off dark blame and dire prophecy.

Magically, he’s done that time and time over, against the run of life’s extraordinary costs exacted on someone still so young — knees eroded out of a quarter of a century of scampering, a back corroded by bending at the crease and crouching at the slips, elbows torn from flexing and falling.

Where he has defeated all of those ravages is in that one faculty he has zealously protected from external depredation: his head.

And here is where and how sport extends beyond itself and becomes one of life’s great metaphors -- Sachin’s is a feat of the will to endure, of tenacity against the tide; he is about the doggedness of seeing off a rough patch, not running away from it, he is about grafting when his gifts have deserted him. He wouldn’t have gone past Brian Lara today if he hadn’t had the gut to go past those sorry scores all season and still think he had it in him.

It’s been a tough season and it hasn’t been the first such one. But it takes a tough man to see them through. Welcome, little master; you’ve probably shown us we’ll get there, even if we mostly count in ones.

Hope you will lead India to crown another World Cup.