Sachin Tendulkar invaded my consciousness with three stunning blows when I was 21 and he was a lot younger than that, and he has ruled it ever since. It wasn't even an international fixture – the one-day match between India and Pakistan had been abandoned because of rain and the teams were playing a friendly to repay the crowd which had borne the bad weather with good humour – and India's asking rate was over 16 when Tendulkar came in to bat at No. 6. He quickly smote Mushtaq Ahmed's legspin for a couple of sixes which prompted the senior leggie, Abdul Qadir, to dare Tendulkar to try the same with him. The crowd got into the act and in a moment, the stadium was charged. The match still didn't count, but now there was a contest. Between a battle-hardened, wily master and a young pretender.

Qadir took time to set his field, pushing midwicket back but keeping mid-on in. Tendulkar managed a four off the second ball and offered a dead bat to the third, which Qadir met with a glare and a few taunting words. Tendulkar is a quiet man now, but he was completely tongue-tied then. So he responded in the only manner known to him. Not with a hint of a slog, and with the crowd cheering him wildly, he sent the next three balls sailing over the boundary, disregarding the long-on who had been posted after the first six.

India lost the match by four runs, but Tendulkar ended up with 53 off 18 balls, and the crowd reaction to him would have fooled you into believing that the match was being played at Mumbai, not Peshawar.

Tendulkar was only 16 then, yet it was already clear that he inspired awe and adulation that knew no geographical and national boundaries. Like millions of Indians, I became an instant devotee and remained one.

Two years later I watched him score a sizzling century on a lightning-fast Perth pitch against Craig McDermott, Merv Hughes and Mike Whitney. He scored 114 with 16 fours off 166 balls in an Indian total of 272. Australia scored three centuries in the match, David Boon in the first innings and Dean Jones and Tom Moody in the second. I remember a commentator asking Richie Benaud to compare Moody's innings to Tendulkar's. Don't ask me to compare, Benaud said, Moody's was good, but Tendulkar's was special.

I saw the Wisden 100 list at an early stage. My eyes raced down page with eager expectancy. The Perth hundred would be there, I was sure. It had to be. To say I was disappointed not to find it would be putting it mildly. I was outraged.

I remonstrated bitterly with Ananth Narayan, who had worked for more than eight months with Wisden Online editors finalising the listing. I quarrelled ferociously and threatened to dissociate myself from the ratings when Ananth calmed me with one sentence. "Stop thinking with your heart," he said. "Use your head instead."

Over the next few weeks, we dissected the system again and again, with me relentlessly seeking to find a flaw, a small opening to sneak in and validate my personal belief. It wasn't a fruitless exercise; it helped sharpen the parameters and fine-tune the system. In the end, we were all satisfied that the system was as flawless as we could get.

But the Perth innings was still not in the top 100 and neither was any other Tendulkar performance. I carried on grumbling, but I had lost my right to argue.

A couple of days after Wisden 100 was officially released, I spoke to my mother. She is not a lady easily moved by earthly matters, but she was indignant. "How could you leave out Tendulkar?" she challenged me. I had been confronted with this a few hundred times already. I was getting used to putting the case against the Perth innings. I don't know if she was entirely convinced, but she forgave me. I was her son after all.

Friends, neighbours and acquaintances have been difficult to convince. I have struggled to reason with them that this is only an innings rating and is no reflection on Tendulkar's greatness as a batsman; that it is an intelligent statistical analysis based on a comprehensive set of parameters; that it does not, and cannot, take in to account the quality of strokeplay, the age factor and historical perspective. Let's first debate the system, I have urged in vain, before we question the outcome.

At the press conference where the Wisden 100 was announced, I was sitting next to the commentator Harsha Bhogle. His was one of the saner voices in the Tendulkar-obsessed inquisition that followed. He too wondered how Kapil Dev's 129 against South Africa had been given precedence over a couple of Tendulkar centuries. But he left with these words: "There is no doubting Tendulkar's greatness, but this analysis makes us wonder whether we have assigned him a greater greatness than he merits."

I can understand the collective indignation and anguish that the Wisden 100 had caused. But I also know, from personal experience, how blind devotion can blight reason and judgment.

Sambit Bal is Wisden Online's India Editor. His Indian View will appear every Monday.

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd