The simpleton
Vaibhav Sharma

KNOCK-OUT EFFECT: The smile is back on Sehwag’s face

Virender Sehwag was the third of four children. His family basically dealt in farm seeds — wheat and rice. And, that was what Virender was supposed to do after finishing college. His father didn’t have any other plans for him.

It was only after he was selected to the U-19 Indian team that his father realised that his son might have a career in cricket. Two years later he was selected for the Indian team and their life changed, forever. Sehwag became the face of India’s batting prowess and started drawing comparisons with Sachin Tendulkar. He struck terror in the hearts of bowlers, and then, rather predictably, became a commercial asset. He was once asked about the major difference between him and his idol Tendulkar, and he had said it was their bank balance.

His father, during an interview, once quipped that before his son started playing for India, everyone knew him as Krishan Sehwag, but afterwards, he was just a ‘Sehwag’.

The ‘Sehwag ki Maa’ ad aside, his family has been constantly in the public eye. They are interviewed every time Viru thunders on the pitch, definitely making them feel like celebrities. It’s not about making money or earning more than you can spend, but rather, how, because of one man an entire family caught the country’s imagination.

His family didn’t pin high hopes of him and his grandmother used to call him ‘bholi’, as he was believed to be a simpleton, not very ambitious or serious about making it big.

But cricket changed things and that too quite drastically. He now owns his own eating joint (a la Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Zaheer Khan) and aptly calls it Sehwag Favourites. Some time back when he was invited into the cockpit of a jumbo jet on his flight from Delhi to Bombay, Sehwag gazed at the gleaming dials and the skyline of Bombay coming into view and whispered: "If I wasn’t a cricketer, I would never have been able to see this."