Get over it. Sachin Tendulkar never asked for it, okay. You want to give him the Bharat Ratna knock yourself out. But don't drag the guy through the mud. Stop comparing him to Bhagat Singh and Rabindranath Tagore, Homi Bhaba and a thousand other deserving Indians. That is gross. Not his fault.

The government showed haste. Not his fault.

The government wanted to score brownie points with the 1 billion Indians the government think tanks believe have two digit IQs, be my guest. Not his fault.

It was an election stunt the PM staggering up to the mike to announce the award 150 minutes after the post match revelry, not Sachin’s problem. Was it a dense and gratuitous move? Of course it was? It stank. Not his fault. Give it to Leander...still not his fault.

In a country where it has never been given to the Unknown Soldier and by that I mean all the men and women in the armed forces and the police who cheerfully have given up their todays for our tomorrows obviously it is obscene to compare hitting a ball with a bat. Off the top of my head have we ever honoured the Keelor brothers who took on Sabres with second generation Gnats and won the air battle? The cops who gave up their lives in the Mumbai hostage crisis. That’ll be the day.

That is apples and oranges, you don’t compare. The thousands of broken promises to the next of kin of our forces could fill more volumes than Paradise Lost...and paradise has been lost for a long time.

Tendulkar did what he could do and he did it with panache. Fine. If cricket and dying for your country for an enemy’s bullets or writing great poetry or being the quintessential freedom fighter or guiding India into the atomic age are all in the same park then Tendulkar is no less in his success ratio.

It is these clowns in government who messed up with their unholy haste. Sachin could have been given the award next year instead of now – it was so populist and uncharitable to be so charitable in minutes from when he left the field.

Now, in some crazy way he has to stand on this sticky wicket and defend an assault masquerading as an award. It is not fair to put him on the spot.

He did nothing to become a pawn in this grotesque chessboard but there he is on it stuck between this bunch of creeps who think they are smart.

Let me tell you something...Indians do not have two digit IQs and it is insulting to conclude they do. With one digit IQ in government decided to rain on Sachin’s parade by suggesting this would be the right time.