It's just not the little things that make Gavaskar and Tendulkar similar.

On the face of it, you got two little masters. Beyond that, you have a Guru-Shishya relationship, maybe even that of an uncle and his favourite nephew – and because of the nuances of this indefinable relationship, you have something special, far smoother than the whiskey by the same name.

Early days, weren’t Sachin and Kambli both prolific? And weren’t both of them from the same masti ki patshalla – one found Sunny Bhai, the other trouble. One kid’s career spanned three decades, the other, do you even remember?

While Sunny took Sachin under his wing, and nurtured him from an early cricketing age –you cannot discount Rohin Gavaskar’s contribution (by default).

Arguably, SMG has been India’s most competitive cricketer. He also has a very good cricketing eye – in Rohan, he would have at a very early age known that Jr. will not scale those dizzy SMG heights, far from it. In Sachin, he saw his successor. In a way, it’s just a quirk of fate that Sachin is Tendulkar, and not a Gavaskar.

It doesn’t take the curator from the Louvre to tell you, that in Sunny and Sachin you have two very similar pieces of art. While Sunny was the first, a classical masterpiece, Sachin is modern art. But if there was no Sunny, there would have been no Sachin. They are both made from the same mould.

Crucially, Sachin imbibes Sunny’s hunger. And if you flip back, it was SMG who once said that he would personally spank Sachin if he didn’t score a hundred tons. I won’t be surprised if this is what spurs Sachin on.