Published: Dec 26, 2012, 05:55 PM (IST)
Edited: Aug 26, 2016, 06:21 PM (IST)
Sachin Tendulkar announced retirement from ODI cricket on last Sunday © Getty Images
Please note: This is a humorous piece – pure fiction.
Sanjay, a die-hard Sachin critic, who had been keeping himself busy over the last 18 months by pining for Sachin Tendulkar’s retirement, suddenly finds himself out of work. Tendulkar’s retirement from One-Day Internationals came as a shock to Sanjay. He is believed to have confessed to the Editor-in-Chief of a leading Indian news channel over a bottle of Old Monk, “Sachin has decided to leave the shorter form of the game and it is just a matter of time before he leaves Tests too. How could he do this to me? What will I do now?”
Sanjay felt the withdrawal symptoms for the first time when he was about to update his status before the India-Pakistan series as “Too bad the selectors didn’t drop Sachin. Now the Pakis will drop his catches in the field.”
However, he suddenly realised that Tendulkar won’t be playing the Pakistanis, and straightaway went into depression.
Sanjay’s messages on the social media after various events in 2012. One can notice that his arguments became less and less Sachin-related as the year wore on.
Sources close to Sanjay said that he had been fighting random people on Twitter and Rediff comments section over Tendulkar’s retirement. In his initial days, he could not handle the abuses that were hurled at him, and was advised by close aides to stop taking on veteran Tendulkar fans. But with an unmatched resolve, he stated “mein likhega” and came back with vengeance at his detractors.
Sanjay, whose full name is Sanjay Manjrekar – not to be confused with the former Indian cricketer – would collect statistics from various sources showing Sachin’s lack of form or how his being in form jinxed the outcome.
He would convert these stats into pictures before uploading them on Facebook and Twitter.
His friends recall, “He was so excited when he made a ‘Other Rajya Sabha MPs walk out, Sachin bowled out’ joke. He further commented that his status had got more likes than the runs scored by Sachin in 2012, which again had got more likes. We had never seen him happier.”
There were claims that he would update his Google Plus account also with anti-Tendulkar remarks, but there was no way to verify the authenticity of the claim.
Sanjay’s last words to his wife were, “I had dreamt that one day I would call for Sachin’s retirement partnering with my son, but alas, Sachin ruined it“. This had greatly surprised his wife because they do not have a son yet.
No one is sure as to what Sanjay will do now. Speculations that he will join the protests in Delhi appear unlikely to come true after the Prime Minister has assured the nation that things were ‘theek hai’.
(The above post has been sourced with permission from www.fakingnews.com. Rahul Saraf is a big-time cricket fan who likes to see himself as one who was born exactly 4500 days after Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar was. And unlike Tendulkar, he was gifted a cricket bat even before his 4th birthday – it’s just that Tendulkar learnt to make better use of it! Rahul’s blogs can be read at http://rahul-saraf.blogspot.com. His tweets at http://twitter.com/saraf_rahul)
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