An Opus is a mammoth work and a mammoth work can only come without mammoth content and inspiration. The latest work - the Sachin Tendulkar Opus.

An international career spanning 20 years, and counting...innumerable memories and images that no cricket fan will forget. Those images have now found their way into a mammoth coffee table book. It's called the Tendulkar Opus.

The London's Opus Store houses opuses, or what the company calls luxurious publications, on the biggest and best-known personalities of the world, from Michael Jackson and Walt Disney to Manchester United and Ferrari, and very soon the Sachin Tendulkar Opus will be a part of it.

"First picture of mine in a newspaper was out when I was 12 or 13 and I had scored 100 for my school. I saw picture and said it was exciting and I want more of this," said Sachin Tendulkar.

Well Sachin has now certainly got plenty more! 30 kg, close to 800 pages and more than 30,000 photographs to be precise. The Tendulkar Opus took almost three years to complete and it's got a little something else that sets it apart.

"One of the key differences is that every copy will have small little drop of Sachin's blood in the signature page, it's never been done before," said Karl Fowler, CEO, Opus.

But this isn't a bloodthirsty exercise in publicity. Sachin's DNA profile is actually meant to help trace his genealogy. It's just on the first ten copies though, each of which is expected to fetch about a crore in a charity auction.

But the public release of the book only happens much later, some time after the 2011 World Cup. The publishers hope to have even more content for the Tendulkar Opus by then.

"One of the things that we're looking at now is using a very small camera in his batting helmet that will be operated by our photographer off the pitch, such that when he's at the crease, we will be able to get images and angles of him in action that even the TV cameras with their pixellisation couldn't get," added Fowler.

Sachin is only the second individual sportsperson after Diego Maradona, to have an Opus on him. So if there is still something Tendulkar fans don't know about him, they only need this definitive work. It's Sachin's story in his own words.

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