Author: Vedam Jaishankar
“One night after dinner when they headed for the orange juice, Rahul intensely studied another youngster awaiting his turn to get a glass of juice. The boy had a mop of curly hair on his head and looked sort of funny. Rahul drew Fazal’s attention to the boy and said, ‘Fuzz, in two to three years, that boy will play for India.’

“‘I looked at the boy who had this funny hair and then at Rahul and asked, ‘Are you joking or what,’ revealed Fazal. ‘I had seen that West Zone boy bat. Yes, he played well but I could not see anything extraordinary that at 4 years of age somebody could predict he would play for India soon,’ said Fazal.

“‘Next day, when we pored through the newspapers, we found the boy had scored a big hundred for West Zone. ‘Mark my words,’ Rahul said again. I just laughed.

“In fact in less than two years that boy played for India. And the same day he was selected to the Indian team Rahul reminded me of what he had said that distant day in Nagpur,’ recalled Fazal.
“The boy, incidentally, was Sachin Tendulkar.”

We think: Full of these small little incidents, like this one where a calm, unruffled Rahul takes constructive criticism from two guys yelling abuses at him while they watched him at a field practice, the book is interesting mostly because of the subject. Having said that, there is no excuse, in this day and age, for the book’s ‘text book’ appearance.