Mumbai teen's favourite cricketer is not Tendulkar

Investigators in Mumbai are believed to have chanced upon a young man whose favourite cricketer of all time is not Sachin Tendulkar.

The 13-year-old, whose name has not been released, to protect him and his family, is alleged to have said that while he quite liked Tendulkar, his all-time favourite player was probably Vivian Richards. "It keeps changing," he said.

While it is too early to speculate on the reasons for the boy's aberrant behavior, theories have been put forth that his parents are partly to blame, beginning with their failure to name their son Sachin, though he was born in 1998, the year Tendulkar was at the peak of his powers.

"We did not realise what a monumental blunder we were making," the boy's mother said recently. She added that she should have known something was wrong years ago, when her son, six at the time, didn't produce an entry saying "Go east, go west, Sachin is d best", like all his classmates, in a school banner-making competition.

The drastic breach of convention was brought to the notice of the apex government agency in charge of investigating instances of anti-national behaviour by an alert schoolteacher, who noticed there was not a single mention of Tendulkar in an essay titled "My idea of God", submitted by the boy a few months ago.

"He is otherwise a good student, but he must be punished," the teacher told this website.

A security guard at the residential complex the teenager lives in with his parents told television channels he saw it coming in 2007, when he noticed the boy, then 10, did not tug at his crotch before settling into his stance during games of backyard cricket in the compound. "That made me suspicious," the guard said.

"I also noticed that same year this fellow was very happy - from June to December especially," he added, pointing out that Tendulkar was out six times in the 90s in ODIs in that period. The offender was alleged to have watched the Naked Gun movies repeatedly in those months, in flagrant disregard for the national mood of mourning.

"And that time when Sachin saab had that elbow problem, this boy played a lot of tennis. It was like he was mocking him," the guard added.

In addition to their poor judgement in the matter of naming their son, the parents are also believed to be to blame in other ways. They did not take the boy to Shivaji Park frequently enough to derive inspiration by kissing the pitch favoured by Tendulkar in his pre-teen years. This though the family lives in Virar, only 50-odd kilometres away from Shivaji Park.

"We used to leave at 5.30am every Saturday with our son," one of the family's neighbours said, "but they never came, even though I invited them once or twice.

"They have brought shame on the entire colony," he added.

It is reported the parents also neglected to purchase a Mumbai Indians replica t-shirt with Tendulkar's name on the back for their son till earlier this year, though the IPL has been around since 2008 and replica t-shirts have been available since then.

The investigators have been making rapid strides in building a watertight case for the prosecution. One of the officers, who did not wish to be named, said, "I asked him a simple question - how many nights had Sachin not slept before the match with Pakistan in the 2003 World Cup - and he did not know the answer."

"I ask pardon from the nation on behalf of my son," the boy's father said in a statement, while eating a vada pav in an attempt to display that he was a true Mumbaikar.

The quotes and "facts" in this piece are all made up, but you already knew that, didn't you?