An incredible Script...

As they say Pictures speak louder than words. Like the one you see here. In which we see a diminutive figure, which probably looks smaller in front of his score figures in the background, but in reality has actually engulfed the entire scene. And the other figure represents all of us watching him, spontaneously broken into an admiring, animated, full-of-emotions hug.

That he hails from Mumbai is mere poetic. But that he comes from a nation who is fighting hard against the demons isn't. Instead is the befitting reality. Later he said in his speech that Cricket is a lesser thing against what happened just 3 weeks ago. Still in its own way his innings and the victory would help the healing process of the entire nation. And it isn't a coincidence that the national figure beyond any sort of boundaries, for last 20 years spearheaded that healing process.

I'm not even going to attempt listing the stats and records those tumbled that day, Cricinfo has really done a great job of it. Winning in fact has no longer remained an aberration for our 'National sport' anymore. It has become a habit and all signs showing it to be a self-sustaining one. The wins are more and more characterized by a team-effort, with everybody chipping in with useful contributions. Some of which almost go unsung like the 60+ by Gambhir or the consistent performance by ZK. Which in fact, makes the performance by the little champ shine even better.

But it is the overall script if you retrospect on, that amazes me more than anything else. Check it out: Not only was it the sole-national-uniter that scored the winning runs, it were to complete his 41st, that too chasing the largest total on the Indian soil, that too in a match that was all but lost 4 sessions ago, that too at a stadium where when he tried doing this last time and had failed to do so leaving his team to lose by a paltry 13 runs. It also came on the background of the darkest hour for our nation, which needed a morale booster, which needed a story we all can chorus for, a script we all can look up for that will help us wipe our tears. The climaxes and sub-plotss of the script are countless...

In the post game ceremony the way Sachin talked about the Mumbai events and saluted every entity who put their lives at stake in the dangerous situation, echoed that chorus of the nation. It was a befitting epilogue to the emotional turmoil. It grew beyond all the obvious but necessary highlights like the elegantly-careless Sehwag blizzard, Yuvraj taking the mantle of the 'Maharaja', an English team that stood by us like true friends and many more.

The scene only reiterated to me that the 'divine one' always reserves the rights to scribe the most dramatic scripts. In this case for example a script that makes an exaggerative, melodramatic script of Lagaan, look like a pale, realistic story. And I'm left stranded in the confused-land of blurred emotions like overjoy, somberness, genuine disbelief and endless awe.