Rationalising Dada

This is something I wanted to write on for a long time…and then a rare not-so-busy day in office gave me an opportunity to do so......

I, like many other cricket loving kids in Bengal, i grew up watching, admiring and copying the style of Saurav Ganguly. We Bengalis, emotional as we are, built castles around his persona and one day when the castle was ransacked, we burst out in discontent. This shall be my attempt at rationalizing the entire aura and the madness around Saurav Ganguly, the cricketer.

Bengalis are, without an iota of doubt, the most political and the most argumentative of the Indian people. This spirit was clearly visible in the struggle for independence, the partition and more recently, during the Naxal Andolan. While on one hand we had hordes of ideologically driven student-intelligentsia fighting for an agrarian revolution, on the other hand we had the state machinery, under the then Congress CM, Siddartha Shankar Roy, leaving no stone unturned to suppress it. And it was suppressed, and along with it was suppressed the voice of young Bengal. It was the blow from which Bengal never recovered. The backbone was shattered beyond reconstruction.....

Art flourished nonetheless.... Bengal kept producing writers, poets, painters and economists par excellence. Some of them like Mother Teresa and Amartys sen went on to recieve the Nobel prize....but the writers and the poets and the economists remained restricted within the educated middle class of the towns - the bourgeoisie. Nobody among them had an unanimous appeal..and then there was the historic test match at Lord's...

He broke through the class structure...(Aye, that thing exists, much to the discomfort of our communist friends running the government) and rose above politics and dialectical materialism.
Suddenly, there was someone who the youth could relate to - attitude, aggression, style et all. It was as if he was the expression that resonated around this part of the country.

The definition of the game had changed for us. And let me make a confession here: the moment he got out, the whole match lost its meaning...such were the emotions… farmer suicides suddenly lost all relevance, lack of micro credit seemed trivial, and politics, mundane. The "Face of Bengal" was not any of the comrades but a cricketer, Saurav Ganguly.

This is for the man who taught us how to dream and dream big..........an olive branch to you, Dada!!

P.S: skeptics and Aravind, stay off!!