Chetan Bhagat’s ‘3 mistakes of my life’ may be a best seller but if Maria Sharapova decides to write something on the ‘mistake’ committed by her and names the book as ‘the only mistake of my life’, I don’t think it will have any takers in India! As the ‘mistake’ she has supposedly made is that of upsetting those ‘select set’ of cricket fans/followers/fanatics who expect the entire world to know Cricket despite knowing themselves that it is only played by a handful of countries. One may argue here that ‘not knowing cricket is okay but how can you not know Sachin Tendulkar?! And a simple reply here would be that if someone does not follow any particular sport one bit and especially someone in whose country that sport is not as popular, chances are that he may not know about its best players.
Recent episode involving Maria Sharapova who did not recognize Sachin Tendular drew irk from hundreds on social networking sites and in few cases the comments and reactions did cross the limits of decency. And the reason why I describe them as ‘select set’ of cricket fans is because they form a very miniscule percentage of the total cricket fans in India but they have managed to disrepute an average cricket fan like most of us. I am sure most of these so called cricket followers cannot name top 5 players of our Hockey team which is our national sport, forget about naming the Kabaddi team’s captain. Despite being ignorant about other sports in India themselves, they expect outsiders to know Cricket.
But if you think over this entire situation a little bit, you will realize this is not surprising as this ‘select set’ of fans will not spare even their favorites when they fail to perform. They will burn their effigies; throw stones at their houses etc. I fail to fathom as to why we go to such extremes? Making fun of someone online is fine as long as it is done in good humor but why make it personal and nasty? My only request to these ‘fans’: please don’t embarrass Sachin Tendulkar. If we actually think of him as the ‘God of Cricket’ (which the whole of India actually does and rightly so) then please understand that Sachin Tendulkar like God is beyond reach of most of the sports personalities, beyond criticism from any human being and certainly requires no certificate of recognition from commoners like you, me or Maria Sharapova for that matter! And coming back to my earlier point about writing a book on Maria Sharapova’s mistake, how about naming it “Maria yeh tune kya kiya?!”
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