Picking up the pearls from Tendulkar's sack

Bal Thackeray missed a trick. It was an opportunity tailor-made for him. He should have bristled and roared: "How can a man from Jharkhand - part of the lot that desecrates Mumbai Mon Amour - show disrespect to a true Marathi Manoos?" He did not.

Nor did Raj Thackeray, the man who made sure that if you call a mobile phone in Maharashtra and the phone is not available for some reason, you would not immediately know the reason unless you know Marathi, which is the language in which the first recorded message would come.

Is this what gruelling municipal elections do to the guardians of Maratha pride? Or, is this because Tendulkar once said he was first an Indian and then a Mumbaikar? Or, is this what Mahendra Singh Dhoni has been able to achieve with his candour?

Remember Kapil Dev's omission from the Kolkata test against England in 1984? The sack, resulting in the only Test Dev missed in his career, came because he was seen to have played an irresponsible shot in the previous Test in Delhi, which India lost. When the team went to Kolkata for the next Test, pro-Dev protesters ran amok and booed captain Sunil Gavaskar (I also have a hazy recollection of someone throwing a tomato or an egg at his wife). Gavaskar swore never to play at the Eden Gardens. Reports cropped up about deeper divisions between Gavaskar and Kapil, including one that involved division of money from an exhibition game. Neither of the two came clean on the matter and now blame the media for creating the rift.

Sachin Tendulkar may or may not be a greater cricketer than Dev; he is certainly not a better bowler, nor has he ever taken a catch over his shoulder while running with his back to the ball, like the one Dev took to dismiss Vivian Richards in the 1983 World Cup final. But Tendulkar is certainly the better batsman of the two and, more important, the bigger icon, an inevitable outcome of the communication revolution. Yet, everyone has been quiet about Tendulkar's sacking.

Do not be fooled by talk of 'rotation' and 'resting'; in not playing Tendulkar in a match in the ODI tri-series in Australia, Dhoni has done nothing but 'dropped' him. And all Tendulkar fans - theoretically every Indian is one - swallowed it.

And that may have something to do with Dhoni. The man speaks his mind and speaks it without suggesting a cloak and a dagger lurking in the background. So he said he could not afford all three of Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir and Tendulkar in the eleven because they were slow movers and leaked runs in the field. On other aspects, too, he speaks, or at least seems to speak, with candour. When he got Gambhir run out in a match when Gambhir was close to a century, he came to the post-match conference and admitted his mistake. The gathering controversy, which drew fuel from the fact that Gambhir had questioned why Dhoni had to take the previous match into the last over, was immediately nipped in the bud.

This is not to suggest that you can get away with anything merely by talking straight. Nor that you can get away with anything at any time. After all, Dhoni dropped Tendulkar when the ageing maestro has been in the middle of a poor run of scores and India has been losing.