Hero: A Biography of Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar is the story of an extraordinary cricketer and the first sportsperson to be conferred the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honour. This book showcases the evolution of an incredibly talented teenager from a middle-class household of Mumbai into a world champion and a legend. Starting off with his childhood and early days as a cricketer, the book takes the reader through the pulls and pressures and the moments of ecstasy and agony that one of the greatest sportspersons of all time experienced and surmounted in the course of a glorious career.
The book takes the oft-repeated adage, ‘Cricket is a religion in India’, very seriously. It goes on to divide Sachin Tendulkar’s remarkable life into three sections and details his growth from a ‘Prodigy’ to a ‘Preceptor’.
While Tendulkar remains the principal subject, the book has interesting snippets about his seniors, role models, colleagues, protégés and adversaries and goes on to detail the hero’s impact on his profession and the nation. Replete with blow-by-blow accounts of his greatest performances and interspersed with exclusive photos and quotes, Hero is a veritable history of Indian cricket in the 1990s and the new millennium—an age of transition, trauma, and, eventually, triumph.