The stories keep doing the rounds on social media, almost always without evidence.

There is no evidence of, for example, Barack Obama claiming a five per cent decline in the USA’s productivity when Sachin Tendulkar batted.

Or of passengers, employees, the driver, everyone agreeing to delay the departure of a train in India because – this was the pre-live-stream era – Tendulkar was approaching a hundred and the fans could find a small television set at a railway station.

However, what is true is that if you Google “God of cricket”, you have to scroll down quite far to get the first non-Tendulkar entry. Step outside the virtual world, and you will find an actual Sachin Tendulkar temple in Bihar.

Tendulkar is, of course, not the first Indian cricketer to be worshipped. Neither will he be the last. There were protests when Mushtaq Ali was dropped from the Test XI. Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev’s world records were nation-stopping events. And the absurd number of social media counts tell merely a part of Virat Kohli’s insane popularity.

But… God?

Different times

Tendulkar was turning heads and hitting the headlines in the late 1980s, in an India very different from its 2025 version. The 1991 policies would open up the Indian market, but until then, it used to be a closed economy.

To add to that, the BCCI had little clue about the fact that they owned the rights to the cricket matches they organised. Money from live cricket – the thing that has made India the leviathan of world cricket – was not there yet.

Television sets were expensive. In most of India, there was only one state-run channel. Since it coincided with the general elections, Indian fans could not see Tendulkar’s Test debut, in Pakistan in late 1989. Neither could they see his first Test hundred, in 1990 – for Test matches played outside Asia were not telecast live back home. The odd ODI would be shown, but that was about it.

Then, in the new decade, several things changed very rapidly in Indian cricket. India were the first country to host South Africa when they returned to the fold. Keen to ensure the fans back home got to watch the series, Ali Bacher offered to pay the BCCI. It was the first time the board realised they could make money out of television rights.

That was in late 1991. Zee TV, the first private television channel in India, was launched in October 1992. When England toured India in early 1993, the BCCI sold the rights to Trans World International. The Indian-state-run Doordarshan had to buy the rights from TWI.

During the Hero Cup of late 1993, Doordarshan took on TWI in a long, ugly battle over rights. Amidst the tussle that ensued, the potential riches of Indian cricket became evident. In 1994, India toured New Zealand for a one-off Test in Hamilton. This was the first time Indian fans watched a Test match outside Asia live.

Justices PB Sawant, BP Jeevan Reddy, and S Mohan passed a historic order in February 1995, as per which any citizen had the “fundamental right to use the best means of imparting and receiving information and as such to have access to telecasting for the purpose”. This virtually ended Doordarshan’s monopoly. The BCCI could now sell the rights of Indian cricket to any channel – state-run or private.

By the time India played their next Test outside Asia, in England in 1996, the economic policy had started to bear fruit. Inexpensive television sets had spread across the Indian market. Thanks to cable operators, satellite television was spreading its wings.

The brands were there, of course. Gavaskar and Kapil (and to some extent, Ravi Shastri) had been the advertiser’s choice over the years. Their retirements left a large void in the industry, which was only compounded by the many foreign brands that arrived once the economy had opened up.

They needed a face. Tendulkar became that face, and one can see why. As a teenager who had already laid a claim to be the best in the world, he covered the entire range.

You could make him drink Boost – a health drink aimed for Indian children – or a global brand like Pepsi. You could make him use Band-Aid or Gillette or Action Shoes on screen, and he would not look out of place.

Tendulkar would smile back to Indian fans from the newspapers, from the billboards, from the television screen during the commercial breaks. He was everywhere.

Quiz: Named after Sachin – can you crack this Tendulkar birthday special?

Right place, right time

Let us return to 1996 now, when the channels were set to telecast Test matches back home and the brands were ready to fill in the between-over slots. When India batted, there was a very high chance of fans getting to watch Tendulkar for six balls and, between overs, an advertisement featuring him.

India’s vast middle-class population spent a substantial part of the second half of the 1990s watching Tendulkar’s solo acts on the lone television set in the household.

Did that guarantee that Brand Tendulkar would last the test of time? Obviously not. For that, we have to turn to the cricket he played.

Top batters, World Cup 1996 – end of 2000/01 season

These are incredible numbers, more so if one takes into account that India did not win a single Test outside Asia in the entire 1990s, and put up forgettable shows at the 1996 and 1999 World Cups.

Tendulkar’s phase of sustained superhuman brilliance was, thus, a string of valiant solo efforts. The many stories of television sets being shut down across India the moment Tendulkar got out, while slightly exaggerated, have their foundation in facts.

Of course, Gavaskar had had a similar stretch before Tendulkar, though not quite across both formats. And there were – are – Gavaskar’s contemporaries who feel Gundappa Viswanath was a batter at least as good as his brother-in-law.

But Tendulkar’s first great peak – he would have another, a decade later – was vastly different. The fans of Gavaskar and Viswanath and of their predecessors, had rarely got to watch their heroes play against great fast bowlers at their den. They had to rely on newspaper reports, shortwave radio, and – if they were lucky – match highlights on Doordarshan.

They could see Tendulkar’s heroics with their own eyes.

India’s glory days in hockey were behind them. Three editions of the Olympics – 1984, 1988, 1992 – had gone by without a medal of any colour, followed by a solitary bronze in 1996 and another in 1999. V Anand was breaking barriers, but chess was not followed by millions real-time before the internet era. Cricket was the one sport where Indians could watch one of their own stake a claim as the best.

The economy had opened up the Indian job market. This new, confident generation of Indian fans needed an icon whose heroics they could follow real-time. “In cricket and in Sachin, they found an accelerant of their growing aspirations, a symbolic assertion of the new confidence with which they felt ready to take on the world,” ad guru Santosh Desai would later explain.

Brand Tendulkar was, thus, as much a product of his immense skills and professionalism as it was of the time and place he peaked for the first time. By the time broadband internet spread its wings across the nation to magnify the brand even more, the God tag had firmly been in place. Even the ads had changed.