Running between the Wickets: Defining Self by Sports in Sachin Tendulkar’s Playing It My Way

Abstract

Autobiography usually incorporates the inner self of the individual, and presents the mirror image of the self rarely known to others besides all the public exposure one has earned. But in contrast,Tendulkar’s autobiography,Playing it My Way,isno more than a reiterationof all his accolades and glory he has earned as a cricketer. Grounded with all the textual evidence, the photos he has included, the accolades he has mentioned, and all those not-so-beautiful behind the scenes missed out;this research paperclaims that this autobiography is nothing more than the appraisal of Tendulkar’s self, an aggrandizement of the self.For this purpose, this research paper mainly brings the ideas of Linda Anderson, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson and Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler to analyze the text. Linda Anderson in her Autobiography raises the issues of credibility, authorship, selfhood, representation, identity, language, etc in an autobiography. She questions in the pervasiveness and slipperiness of autobiography. Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler in "The Glorified Self: The Aggrandizement and the Constriction of Self" write how a person changes his/her self or glorifies it when he/she becomes a celebrity. And Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson in Reading Autobiography:A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives introduce autobiography comprehensively and critically. Key Words: Self, Aggrandizement,Confession,Narrating 'I', Identity