So I’m sitting in the Garware Pavilion at the Wankhede Stadium waiting for Sachin Tendulkar to appear. The furore and the fanaticism is seriously deafening. There probably hasn’t been this much ‘fanfare’ since the British gave us independence. The gleam in people’s eyes has a mania that is at once sparkling and spooky. The expectation of the great man to score a winning century is more vital than P Chidambaram to deliver a winning budget.

Most of our Gods are in heaven. But there’s one who’s in the dressing room ready to emerge. The 26,000 people present and the one billion other Indians glued to their television sets, aren’t mere spectators awaiting a master player, they are devotees expecting their Messiah.