By Aakar Patel
But Tendulkar wasn't able to 'finish', and some think of this as his Achilles heel. Such talk began 10 years ago when he scored a century against Akram's Pakistan in Madras, but fell before victory and then India capitulated.
Sachin remains a hero to us and when his inability to push through to victory is raised, we point to others in the team who failed.
Ian Chappell said of Indians that we were OK if India lost as long as Tendulkar won. That, he said, would never be acceptable in his own Australia. Chappell is a friend of India's, and he knows us well having been here dozens of times. He's quite right. Our hero has his failing and so do we.
The weakness in Achilles was not so much his heel as his jealousy and his vanity, which brings out the rage that Homer opens his great book with.
The real hero of the Iliad isn't Achilles, who sulks and refuses to fight for two-thirds of the book (though when he does strap up to fight, he is peerless). The hero is Hector, prince of Troy, with whose death Homer closes the book, and the reader does not need to be told that Troy will now fall.
Hector is a fine general, a son beloved of his father, a father himself, a lover and a leader: a good man. Achilles is a child in most ways, but perfect as a warrior and that's why he is heroic.
A hero is the man we think best represents what we should be. What does it say of us if we were to consider Bollywood's heroes? The three biggest are the Khans: Shah Rukh, Salman and Aamir. Shah Rukh is called the King of Bollywood, but the star with most appeal is Salman Khan, an utterly unhinged human being. Salman killed a man and crippled others just outside my house, crashing his Landcruiser into a shop after a night of too much drinking. He then ran away, though he was arrested later. The policeman who was Salman's bodyguard was blamed by the Khan family for doing the driving. He was fired from his job and died of tuberculosis. A photograph of him shrivelled to bone and living in a bare room was published days before his death. I wonder if it moved the Khans.
Salman treats women dreadfully. When he was courting her, Aishwarya Rai's terrified father came to a newspaper I worked at one day to reveal that Salman had broken the door to his house the night before after being locked out. But apparently many women like their men rough, and Salman gets more fan mail than Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan, and more perhaps even than the both of them put together.
All three live quite close to where I do and I can testify that the crowd outside Salman's flat (he lives with his parents) is always larger than the one outside Shah Rukh's high-walled bungalow, Mannat.
The other thing about the Salman crowd is that it is drawn from a poorer class than the Shah Rukh crowd. It tends to be made up of younger men, who are more likely to display the signs of their religiosity.
Salman is like Achilles: sullen, possessive, powerful and yet infantile. His fame from acting, like Achilles's fame from soldiery, has given him the shield to turn his failings into things he's admired for.
Shah Rukh Khan is popular with India's middle class and Indians abroad because he looks like a young banker or corporate executive. He's modern and yet traditional, and we love that.
Aamir has no clear personality. Though he positions himself as a liberal, he is actually quite hollow. He took up the matter of Narmada, in which India's tribal poor have been made to surrender their land to a dam that will irrigate the fields of farmers. Aamir took the liberal position: in favour of the tribals. They of course do not have the money, the cinema halls, and possibly even the inclination, to watch his movies. When Aamir announced his support of them, the middle class banned his movies in Gujarat. He discovered then that he had waded into an issue that needed more commitment than a couple of statements. It was hurting his income and so he ran away, now ignoring the matter.
The heroes of Bollywood are actually straw men, but heroism is transmitted through charisma, which is quite easily built through fakery, whether on screen or stage, particularly in a culture that's overly emotional.
Like all primitive societies, many of our heroes are martial, like Bhagat Singh, hanged for terrorism after being defended by Jinnah.
Gujaratis are an exception and their heroes tend to be the commercially successful, like Dhirubhai Ambani and Harshad Mehta.
Mehta was a young stockbroker accused of raising money fraudulently. I met him often after he was out of jail and when billions of public rupees had been lost. I found him an interesting man, quite energetic though not particularly literate. One day, at the stock exchange, he was waiting for the elevator. When one arrived, the others around him, mostly Gujarati brokers, did not enter the lift out of reverence for Mehta. A couple touched his feet, waiting near him till the moment when he was just about to step in.
Why did they respect him when he had been accused of stealing billions? Perhaps because we don't see white-collar crime really as crime. Or perhaps because they wanted to be like him, which is worrying.
The current Gujarati hero is Narendra Modi, and we love him because he has shown Muslims their place. He is also a poet, writing banal verse that is recited in full, fawning houses where he makes much of wanting to get away from his burdens and writing more (he really shouldn't).
Modi is fashioned by his chamchas as 'Chhote Sardar'. Knowing him, I'm quite certain he dislikes the term because of the word 'Chhote'.
The word Sardar is a reference to Vallabhbhai Patel, who is revered because he also is thought to have shown Muslims their place. Actually, as Rafiq Zakaria wrote, he is responsible for inserting two of the most liberal articles into the Indian constitution, guaranteeing Muslims the unfettered right to run religious institutions. But that is not heroism to us.
Some of our heroes are linked to faith.
Muslims consider the companions of the Prophet, the Sahaba, as heroes. In one newspaper I worked at, the chairman was Khalid and the managing director, his son, was Tariq. I wondered if they had both been named, possibly by the grandfather, after Islam's greatest generals, bin Walid and ibn Ziyad, though I didn't ask because a second son was Shariq and I didn't know its origin. Bengalis, both Hindu and Muslim, have Tagore as their hero and that's excellent because he is a good model.
Deserving of the Nobel he got in 1913 for his poetry, he also wrote penetratingly on science, religion, politics and education: a real genius.
Manmohan Singh is a hero to many, but most Indians laugh at his powerlessness, because he's dependent on Sonia Gandhi for his position.
At their first meeting, Obama recognised his quality and praised him as being a good leader, and a decent human being, which Manmohan Singh is.
Obama is himself an intellectual, from Harvard, where he edited the magazine, and then teaching in Chicago before turning to public service.
He is a fine writer in the western intellectual tradition, and after his presidency will author other works that will likely become part of the American canon, next to authors like Whitman and Emerson.
America's liberals have begun to turn against Obama because he has backed away from strong positions he held earlier on torture, his healthcare plan, Israel's continued stealing of Palestinian land and correcting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
All this will change again of course, if his softening now gives him the space to rethink, and approach all these problems again, this time more subtly, less heroically.
Sometimes a man sacrifices his charisma in exchange for performance, and delivery.
And that is the only real kind of hero there is.
The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar @hillroadmedia.com