Bangali dekhai dilo: Saurav Ganguly
Siddhartha Duttagupta
From AR to SG, a new battleground where the anti-chavinists meet the
"high priests of babudom" ;))
Hmm all the good ingredients are here: Saurav is an "upper caste"
"bhadralok" (is he bangal or ghoti? does he have a known political
party affiliation?], so ladies and gentlemen: fire away
regards, siddhartha
Reposted from rec.sport.cricket, thanks to Yusuf Sadiq
SPORTS: SAURAV GANGULY
The Making of a Legend
Short of icons, Bengal sees in the cricketer a
reflection of
its once
considerable glory.
By Rohit Brijnath
We Bengalis are a depressed people today. Our talent
reserve has gone dry and so our demand for icons
exceeds that of any other people.
-- Popular novelist Mani Shankar Mukherjee
Don't make a mistake. Don't look at Saurav Ganguly,
classic century on debut at Lord's last year, and
think he's
a talented cricketer.
Don't fall into the trap. Don't peruse his statistics
that say
his Test batting average has risen from 42.66 to
45.71 in
his last two Tests and say he's improving.
Don't be misled. Don't talk about his five Man of the
Match
awards in his last
eight one-day matches and decide he's India's new
hope.
Don't. Please. Because if you do, you've missed the
point.
Talent, improving,
hope? Forget it, in Bengal they'll sneer at you. This
is much
bigger, this is more
than sport. This is about a fine cricketer turned by
a people
obsessed with
individual achievement into a hero, a semi-icon. If
he was
born anywhere else
in India, Ganguly would not have merited such
genuflection;
but Bengal, short
of heroes, seeing in him a reflection of its once
considerable
glory, looking to
him to restore its receding pride, has elevated him
to being a
literal Prince of
Calcutta.
Take one story. There are days, says Ganguly, when
people come
from
neighbouring localities or towns to see him and his
durwan
says he's not there.
So they touch the gate in reverence, smile and leave
content.
One thing is clear. Fly the globe, ride universal
highways,
sail any waters, and
you won't find anyone who worships heroes like they
do in
Bengal. During
Rabindranath Tagore's funeral procession, tufts of
his beard
were plucked off
as mementos. In 1911, when Mohan Bagan beat a British
regimental team to
become the first Indian team to win soccer's IFA
Shield,
legend has it that
Kanu Ray, the teenage right winger from Presidency
College,
never ate again
in his hostel. He had invitations across town. For
the next
three years.
Times change, invitations cease, worship disappears.
For, so
have icons.
Most of the poets, painters, filmmakers, scientists,
writers
had gone, too many
pedestals lay vacant, so much passion stored in the
closet. In
a larger context,
Bengal, once the heart of India -- politically the
capital,
culturally the centre --
had been banished, some assumed, into insignificance.
Ganguly,
cricket bat in
hand (and nowadays a cricket ball too), mouthing the
words, "I
am
representing India from Bengal", is seen as altering
some of
those assumptions.
The deification of Ganguly is everywhere. Returning
home from
Pakistan on a
Delhi-Calcutta flight, bedlam occurs: handwringing,
autographs
and
passengers who every two minutes tell him: "You have
put
Bengal on the
world map." L.P. Sahi, sports editor, The Telegraph,
Calcutta,
offers another
tale. Last year in Toronto, Ganguly was dropped for a
match
and The
Telegraph carried a back page sports story. By lunch
the
phones are clogged
by infuriated readers saying, "What is this, Bengal
has been
insulted." Next
day, Sahi writes a front page story on the
controversy and now
says, "We
realised that you can't treat him like everyone
else."
Ganguly, to the extravagant Bengali, is perfect. That
his
heroism stems from
cricket is like some divine retribution for the years
Bengal
felt there was a
cricketing conspiracy to deny their players --
Kartick Bose,
Sambaran
Banerjee, Gopal Bose -- a Test cap. He understands
this,
saying: "It feels nice
to show that people from Bengal can also play
cricket." He
also offers to the
world the civilised and vanishing face of the Bengali
bhadralok (gentle folk).
Ask him who the bhadralok are and he says, "dressed
properly,
presentable,
cultured, hospitable". Needless to say, he -- who has
never
been to a disco in
Calcutta and comes from a family where his late
grandfather
said curfew (even
for his parents) was 10 p.m. -- is one. But best of
all, the
way he plays is all
bhadralok too. There is no vulgarity to his batting.
Instead,
true to tradition, his
strokes speak of a sculptor with a bat, a poet on the
pitch.
As Rahul Dravid
says, "I told him, as far as the off side is
concerned, first
there's God then
there's you." Bengal has truly found its man.
India has found something too. Not that he is India's
best
today or Bradman
tomorrow. But that behind the scholarly face lies a
surprising
bravery. Few
men have known contempt better than Ganguly, fewer
have paid
more dearly
for failure. One bad match in Australia in 1991 (his
one-day
debut) would
bring ridicule on Calcutta streets and banishment for
five
years. "It hurt but I
kept quiet." Silence and undemonstration is his
style. Ask him
for an analogy
and he says, "Pete Sampras, he doesn't show his
aggression, he
walks with his
head down, he lets his racket talk."
So for half a decade he was the invisible man,
playing
domestic cricket,
learning from an English rugby team sports
psychologist about
handling
pressure and not to get distracted by external
pressures.
Still, for all his
resoluteness, on days the Indian team would be
announced, he
would often
call up newspapers to find if his name was there,
five
disappointed years going
by. Then one day in 1996, just when he was thinking
he "would
quit in a year
or two if not selected", a journalist called: he was
going to
England. "I put the
phone down and sat alone for a while. This was my
chance I
thought." It was.
Navjot Sidhu came home, Sanjay Manjrekar got injured,
Ganguly
took his
opportunity, and five lakh waited for his return.
Now the intangible that drives success has kicked in:
confidence. "You can
see it in him," says Dravid. You can see it in his
scores
since the Asia Cup in
Sri Lanka tour in July: 11, 73, 34, 0, 147, 45, 31,
113, 14,
17, 17, 32, 2, 75,
96, 0, 89, 26. You can see it in his changing one-day
average:
31.21 before
the Asia Cup began, 48.46 in the next 17 games he
played. But
most of all,
you can hear it in what he says: "I should have
converted at
least four of those
scores into centuries." His bowling too has emerged
suddenly,
like a magician
realising his sleeve has another card. But for all
his
bouncing joyously in
Toronto into the ob van to watch replays -- "I love
to watch
myself," he grins
-- he's not quite Kapil Dev.
But hold the champagne, don't doff your cap
completely, stop
the statue
makers. Failure is in the next room waiting, and when
it
sneaks through it
won't be Ganguly so much who will be judged, but
Calcutta.
When he got a
duck against South Africa last year in Eden Gardens,
he was
actually booed.
Heroes in a passionate land are dismantled as fast as
they are
made. Says
Mukherjee: "The same Bengalis are likely to bring him
down if
his
performance wanes after a few matches." The bhadralok
boy is
more
generous. He understands. "You know tickets weren't
selling
for that Calcutta
match because I was injured. Then I passed the
fitness test
and the tickets
were sold in one evening. I understood, people had
come to see
me." When
you've journeyed from being the Wimp of West Bengal
to the
Caliph of
Calcutta, a little booing is just fine.
-------------------------------------------------
Naeem Mohaiemen
Siddhartha Duttagupta wrote:
> From AR to SG, a new battleground where the anti-chavinists meet the
> "high priests of babudom" ;))
> We Bengalis are a depressed people today. Our talent
> reserve has gone dry and so our demand for icons
> exceeds that of any other people.
> -- Popular novelist Mani Shankar Mukherjee
Hoi mia(n)!! "Bangali dekhai dilo" tho amar mis-applied copyrighted
phrase! Thomare sue koyra dimu!!
NDatta
Mr. Naeem Mohaiemen wrote:
>Hoi mia(n)!! "Bangali dekhai dilo" tho amar mis-applied copyrighted
>phrase! Thomare sue koyra dimu!!
Please don't sue. Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.
Hassan Alam
Stanford Marching band proteck game-ey dekhai dai (aka they
moon the audience). Bangal-ra-o aita korte-che?
Naeem Mohaiemen (naeem.m...@homebox.com) wrote:
: Siddhartha Duttagupta wrote:
: > From AR to SG, a new battleground where the anti-chavinists meet the
: > "high priests of babudom" ;))
: > We Bengalis are a depressed people today. Our talent
: > reserve has gone dry and so our demand for icons
: > exceeds that of any other people.
: > -- Popular novelist Mani Shankar Mukherjee
: Hoi mia(n)!! "Bangali dekhai dilo" tho amar mis-applied copyrighted
: phrase! Thomare sue koyra dimu!!
--
Hassan Alam