I actually met Sanju Samson the first time when he was 14 years old and he was playing for a club in Trivandrum and people on the net seemed impressed. I kept an eye on him, I followed his early career, I met him and his father when he was still in high school. So I've really seen and followed his career from the very beginning and I remain hugely, hugely a fan of his. I really think he has exceptional talent.

So for all of these reasons, it's more than just the pride that every Keralite shares in him. It also helps that I am his MP and therefore he is my constituent and I have an extra pride that somebody from my constituency has done well enough to play for India from the under-19 days. He has excelled for Kerala in all three formats. He just has not had the luck that he deserves. I mean he got a century in an ODI, got left out of the next ODI, you know that kind of thing.

He's never really been given a long enough chance to prove his talent and his worth, but I do think that on the whole, and in many ways, the experiences he's had have led him finally to this very sublime innings. I've seen his centuries on television of course, I don't often have the time to go and see the matches live. But, this one, I thought was exceptional because there was no sense of doubt, no risk taking - it was a chanceless innings. There was an extraordinary stillness about him that I noticed from the first ball which wasn't there in some of his earlier knocks.

This is a young man who's had his confidence battered by various things - being pushed down the order early on to accommodate guild and being pushed up again, then being judged by some failures. You could sense a tentativeness in some of his batting in some of the earlier matches but somehow he seemed to have overcome all that yesterday. Even on screen you could sense there was a complete mental and physical stillness to the guy.

He anchored in his core and played with a truly impressive confidence. So I really think that we have seen the best of Sanju in that innings. I was obviously hoping he would get to the 100 mark. I kept calculating: when there were 100 runs needed to win, he had 50 more to make but somehow he never quite got there. Still, I think this 97* is right up there amongst not only his finest innings but one of the finest innings we have seen an Indian player play in a T20I.

The thing about Sanju is that there has always been this incredible talent. You often feel that some of the strokes are absolutely sublime, really elegant, almost poetic to watch and some of the strokes are incredible, I mean improbable. A backfoot cover drive off a really fast delivery going straight into the fence before a fielder can even stir. You saw some of those yesterday and yet there was no sense of the slightest risk being taken.

Very often with Sanju you catch your breath saying 'great shot' but my god, the next time he tries that he might be caught... that kind of thing. You never had that feeling yesterday. That's what I meant by stillness. Not only was it chanceless, but there was simply nothing excessively flamboyant or dangerous or risky or chancy about a single stroke. There was something almost perfect about that innings which I think more serious analysts can go with a video and reconstruct it or deconstruct it.

I think they will agree with me that when I watched it I was truly struck by how incredibly composed that innings was. As the innings evolved, even before he got to 50, I had the sense that this was going to be a monumental knock. I know that sounds very easy to say after it happened but I didn't want to state before for fear of jinxing. But I had this feeling all along and it's true. It just came through that way and after a while I stopped worrying. With Sanju there's always a little bit of a worry for a person like me who feels emotionally invested in his success.

I sometimes worry that just when things are going well, some shot will happen that was unnecessary or risky, or careless, or suddenly tentative or whatever and then his luck would run out. But this time there was no such fear after a while. It just became very clear that this was somebody who was not only at his peak but heading for something monumental. I think if this innings had not had to terminate at the end of 196, he could have gone on forever. There was this extraordinary quality to it.

It's very odd to draw parallel with this effort. But when it comes to the concentration, the sort of calmness, the stillness, the composure. it would be not with another T20 innings. It would be a parallel with [Sunil] Gavaskar's phenomenal 90-odd [96] in what turned out to be his final Test match in Bangalore in 1987. It was just an extraordinary sense that the man had marshalled every single inch and ounce of concentration available to him to focus on the task at hand. You know like the whole thing about Arjuna being only able to see the eye of the target. Gavaskar and Samson could only see the ball. In the case of Samson he also saw the spaces where the ball should go. In the case of Gavaskar in the Test match you could truthfully say that it looked as if he was only seeing the ball. But anyway it really was remarkable.

This came on a winning cause but I would say also that in both innings, if at all a victory was going to come, it was going to come from this player's success and nothing else. In the case of Gavaskar that success faltered at the very end. In the case of Sanju it didn't. The other thing I liked about Sanju is even the sort of rules of T20 were strictly adhered to. If I'm not mistaken he had just six or seven dot balls [8] in the entire innings. Every ball where he couldn't hit a boundary, he was taking a single. I think that another impressive thing was that he had mastered the requirements of the game perfectly.

But at the same time when savagery was required it was clinical savagery. I mean there are two of those boundary shots. One was a straight drive more or less and the other bisected the stumps and mid-off - they were literally were blistering shots. At the moment the bat hit the ball, you knew that no fielder had a chance. He did those two and then of course his final two shots in the last over were also classic T20 bludgeoning. But at the same time the rest of the innings could have been played in any format.

I mean what is amazing was that this was something that you felt he could have done in a Test match. He could have done it in an ODI. I remember a couple of square cuts to the fence where you wouldn't have imagined there was a gap but he found that gap unerringly. It really was the kind of innings, that Sanju often says with embarrassment, that he can't understand why people talk about his batting that way. He just plays instinctively, he tells me. But there is something truly magisterial about his precision and something classical, almost poetic about his grace. I know that I'm going to be accused of waxing far too lyrical far too many eloquents. But the truth is that most of the T20 innings that have done well for India, or even those that have yielded far more than 97, though outside a World Cup. have had a sort of flash to them.

I mean I enjoy watching Abhishek Sharma for example but you feel that the guy could get out any ball. I mean literally he's taking extraordinary risks and when he pulls them off it's fabulous to watch. I thoroughly enjoy it, but you never felt that with Sanju's this particular innings. I have felt it before with some innings of risk taking and you know this could go any time. This time, as I said, I was able to settle down calmly watching because his calmness was infectious. I really felt this was not going to go wrong.

I'm afraid I have too busy a life to be able to follow the World Cup much as I would have liked to. In fact, I even missed the match in Kotla because I wasn't in Delhi that day. It's one of those things. I won't be in Ahmedabad for the final or for the semifinal in Mumbai. I will certainly be turning the TV on.

I will say to you that in many many ways I feel very confident about Mumbai, not only because you know, no one can guarantee that Sanju or any other batsman can replicate exactly the same magic in the next match, but I do believe he's arrived at a certain equilibrium which he may well be able to repeat. Remember in all good innings, there's not only a combination of what you bring to it, there is also a circumstance - the bowling, the ground, the fielding, all sorts of things.

Now in the case of Sanju yesterday, none of those would have made a difference. There was no catch dropped, there was no - you know what can I say - there was no particular moment where these other factors could be said to have played an influential role. But the next time there might be; who knows. I'm not saying that we'll always see Sanju batting the way he did this time, but I really feel it was a great moment for me to have been able to find the time to watch this innings from start to finish. It was a superb, superb pleasure.

Where do India go? I can say that right now both England and India are vulnerable. I think that though England has won every match it's played [in the Super Eights], it has not looked at all invincible. In fact, it has had many setbacks and it has had many matches that were closer than they needed to have been because of these vulnerabilities of the England side. India too has had moments of vulnerability, unexpected failures, etc. When you think India's victory run in earlier series before the World Cup, where India truly looked invincible, we have seen none of that invincibility about either side.

So I think it is going to come down to which side is better at proving the vulnerabilities of the other. I mean, if you look at [Jos] Butler's horror run in this World Cup, we can say with pride that every victory we've had a different hero. But at the same time, it also means that in every victory lots of people have failed who we were counting upon. So I think everything will depend on the day. I'm looking forward to the 5th. I'll be watching.

I'm not predicting an easy win for India in the semi-final or an easy win for England either. I would say they have been equally vulnerable and they're equally flawed in this tournament. Neither looks to me like a world beater yet. In fact, of the four sides in the semifinals, the one that looks most impressive is South Africa. I think whoever gets to the final against South Africa is going to have a tough match because I think there's something really strong about this particular South African side. They will take some beating.

So let's see how things go in Mumbai . I think that it's going to be an interesting match, no doubt about it. By then we'll know how well the South Africans have done against New Zealand. I would say the South Africans are a truly remarkably strong side and it should be fascinating to see their performance against New Zealand. But New Zealand have the capability of surprising anybody, so I think we've got two very interesting semifinals coming up.

But for me, the satisfaction is that at least India gave a very good account of itself, and in Sanju's performance I saw really a lot of hope. If Sanju now brings even 80 percent of this confidence, this calmness, this same utter reliability to the crease in the semi-final, it would be a huge advantage for India. Conversely, I really have to keep my fingers crossed for pretty much everybody else.

(Shashi Tharoor is a Lok Sabha member from Thiruvananthapuram. He spoke to Vijay Tagore)