Sachin Tendulkar interview: 'Still don’t feel like I’m 50, a 25-year-old with 25 years of experience sounds better'

Ahead of his 50th birthday, Tendulkar caught up with Network18 Group Sports Editor K Shriniwas Rao for an exclusive interview in which he opened up on the years that have passed by since his retirement. I was in the dressing room, and I said you know if we have a press conference on the sixth morning so a five-day Test match then we finish this function and we had organized a press conference on the sixth morning, it is the sixth day by then you know, two days would have passed, right now people would want to know my views and all that and I should speak so when the Star TV guy came to me and said the program is, the losing captain would be called there, the man of the series, the man of the match and all that, then they will call you and then the winning captain and then you guys, once the winning captain’s interview is done, then you guys do a group photograph with a trophy. In the first half of my career, I used to come back home from long tours with multiple video cassettes, and both me and my brother Ajit, would sit together and go through each and every ball played on that tour and then the areas where I did well were also marked and the areas where I needed to make certain changes, those things were discussed so and that’s why, you know, I would kind of remember what has happened. These days, I was, in fact telling a few colleagues as I was preparing for this interview and you know, we were discussing in the office, how these days we get press releases of brand endorsements in today’s modern day, you know, kind of celebrities and then I keep going back to that maybe a simple soft drink commercial that you must have done in the 90s, the charm of those videos, and that young Sachin that stuck in the minds of not people who identified with you as a batter or as a cricketer on the field. Now from the outsider, as somebody chronicling this in hindsight, is that also the time when brand ‘Sachin’ also moved on to become brand ‘SRT’, or you know, because this renewed.