I Vish...

Thurday, 10th June, 2010. 8.15 P.M.

My thoughts wandered as I drove my bike towards the airport. “When was it that I had last been outside to see the sunset on a weekday?” I thought. By the time I reached, I realised I could not recollect that fateful day and blamed it on being a software professional.

I was here, yet again, to send off a friend. I called him to know where he was and found out that it was going to be a long wait. I looked around and my eyes fell on a board that read “Work in progress, inconvenience regretted”. I wondered when the supposed renovation was scheduled to get over and slowly started to take in my surroundings. Within seconds, I was confused. I was not sure if I was at the international departure terminal of the Chennai airport, its railway station, or worse still, its market. The buzz of human activity silenced the drone of the construction work. People were everywhere. Men going around in lungis, women squatting and serving food to their families as they were waiting, and people lying down on the roads made it almost certain that I had to be at the central station. Alas, it was not to be. A wry smile and then I merged to be a part of them.

Left with no choice, I stood cross-legged in a corner and immersed myself into a book. The next time I raised my head, I was pleasantly surprised. I could make out the silhouette of a prominent figure. I watched from the side as a tall, broad, bespectacled person pulled his trolley along. No securities, no clicking cameras, not even a sign of recognition among the majority of the crowd, and a somewhat protruding belly left me in doubt (it was always the face that I got to see in the televisions and newspapers). I followed my intuition and tailed them (he was with his wife who is his emotional bedrock), ever so tentatively. They came to a halt in the middle of the road, and she made a call (probably to their driver). I knew it was to be now, or never. I walked past his wife and approached him gingerly. The moment I was face-to-face with him, I threw away my caution.

“May I have your autograph?” I asked, and I made sure that there was no trace of hesitation.
“Sure!” he said with a reassuring smile. Maybe I was not that good at hiding my hesitancy.
I rummaged into my bag and got out a notebook. In those fleeting few seconds I also had to decide in which colour I wanted him to sign. I had a choice of black, blue, red and green. I went ahead with green. With my notebook in his left hand and the green pen in his right, he was about to sign when I noticed that the cap had not yet been removed. While he still held the pen in his hand, I offered to remove the cap for him. Once we were done with that, he signed with a flourish and returned my things.
“Thanks!” I murmured, as he collected his baggage, walked towards his car and gave me one more of his reassuring smiles.

I scanned the pages to the one in which he had signed. I could make out a ‘V’ and an ‘A’ which was dragged to the end to form a ‘d’. Vishwanath Anand. The number one in world chess. I was still in awe as I watched the man load his luggage, get inside the car and whoosh past me.

I came back to my senses, sent off my friend and drove back home. All along, there was again one question that was nagging me: “Why is it that he does not receive the same amount of attention as an ordinary cricketer or movie star gets?”