Oh my God…the sound of the weeping willows!!!

And behind that harsh banality is a nation milking its eyes for those last tear drops of joy…’cause the Master has stepped out into the ring for the last time (officially) and who will author masterpieces after him is a question that no one dares ask just now…

When Shakespeare died, no one asked who would be the next bard…when Tagore went on, the Bengalis didn’t wonder about the next Gitanjali…when we grew up and stopped playing ‘gulli’ cricket with ‘tennis’ balls we didn’t for a moment think that our youth had died…

Then why this hysteria? Of course I excuse all those who will be directly affected by Sachin’s retirement. The chaps he kept busy all these years, collecting trivial facts just as their Icon collected runs. The fellows who studied a subject called Tendulkar because they had failed in Commerce or Engineering or whatever. And for sure those lazy lards who just grew fatter while Sachin went out there and won matches for them…or lost as the case may be.

Come on. The man has been playing with a nation on his shoulders for a few decades now…let’s give him some space. Hello, the amount of time his groin has spent guarded must have given his genitals chronic claustrophobia. Time for him to let his hair down and let his @3@$$ loose.

Now is the time to calculate how much time and money this man has singularly caused the world to lose. The number of people who left everything including their wives just to see this man stroke-playing an opponent into submission. The number of man hours that had to be written off just because he hit a century. Because remember, while he was going collecting accolades and wasting all our time and taking up significant chunks of our built-in RAM he also had a family.

Now how long has it been since he just sat in front of a TV and cuddled up to his wife? Has his son ever had the courage or the liberty to chori-chori take the Ferrari for a spin? How many years since he and that dark friend of his…Vinod Kamblee or something…how many days since they walked out onto Juhu Chowpatty and dug into some typical Pav Bhaji?

Forget it. In the lonely mission of creating records and carving out niches for himself, the man has had to make do with much less than his more humble friends. Now he wants his time off…and he is demanding it. Oh come on, he deserves it.

So let’s leave him be. Let’s just thank the real God that he gave us a chance to see this marvel…and thank Star Sports for making his matches so much more colorful and exciting. And You Tube for giving a whole world a genuine taste of Replays and Rewritten Records.

Let’s just hope there are no more horizons he is set on and that he has reached an end point he had dreamed about…let us hope that he doesn’t become a commentator…because all he would do instead of compering an event is that he would compare his performance with the younger batsman’s…

and that can be a bit of a bore, right?