The PMO sent the file for Bharat Ratna to the President on Friday night, and on Saturday afternoon, the President sent back with his concurrence, at exactly the same time when Tendulkar took off his boots.
Now let's have a look at the 43 eminent persons awarded the Bharat Ratna till date:
C Rajagopalachari, S Radhakrishnan, C V Raman (all in 1954), Seth Bhagwan Dass, Jawaharlal Nehru and M. Visvesvaraya (all in 1955), G B Pant (1957), D K Karve (1958), Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, Purushottam Das Tandon (both in 1961), Dr Rajendra Prasad (1962), Zakir Hussain and P V Kane (both in 1963), Lal Bahadur Shastri (1966), Indira Gandhi (1971), V V Giri (1975), K. Kamraj (1976), Mother Teresa (1980), Acharya Vinoba Bhave (1983), Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1987), M G Ramachandran (1988), Dr B R Ambedkar and Nelson Mandela (1990), Rajiv Gandhi, Morarji Desai and Vallabhbhai Patel (all in 1991), Maulana Azad, J R D Tata and Satyajit Ray (all in 1992), Gulzarilal Nanda, Aruna Asaf Ali and APJ Abdul Kalam (all in 1997), M S Subbulakshmi and C. Subramaniam (both in 1998), Gopinath Bordoloi, Jayaprakash Narayan, Pandit Ravi Shankar and Amartya Sen (all in 1999), Lata Mangeshkhar and Ustad Bismillah Khan (2001), Pandit Bhimsen Joshi (2009), Sachin Tendulkar and CNR Rao (2013).
