World Cup gives Kolkata an excuse to indulge in its favourite pastime – dissect, debate, daydream, without actually doing much.
Yesterday a message popped up on my phone.
‘A unique food festival in Kolkata! Please do attend an urgent press conference at 3:00 pm to know more about the unique concept – Flavour of Football.’
Alas, I couldn’t make it to the press conference. So, I will probably never know what the ‘Flavour of Football’ tastes like. But I could, if I wanted, try the Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi sandesh along with the life-size all-kheer World Cup trophy.
“There’s a unique connection between sweets and football in Bengal. We are crazy about both,” a customer at the sweetshop with edible replicas of the football stars tells India Today. Ronaldo will probably not be too flattered. His sandesh version looks pretty much the same as Messi, just with a different hairstyle and jersey.
But World Cup fever clearly hits Kolkata’s sweet spot.
During the 2014 World Cup, I remember the Spanish Tikitaka, Brazilian Samba and Italian Defence sandesh – all gooey with milk chocolate, butterscotch and choco-rice. This time they have not done the World Cup specials, but the man in the sweet shop told me conspiratorially that they have pretty much the same sweets just without their tacked-on World Cup aliases.
The joke goes that while India never qualifies for the cup, Bengal always has two teams in the game – Brazil and Argentina. This year both have exited the Cup, but the festivities carry on in Kolkata.
Almost every other neighbourhood in Kolkata is festooned with fluttering flags. Aside from the two sentimental favourites, there’s Spain, Germany, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy and England. It’s like a roll call of airlines that no longer land at Kolkata’s international airport. The Bengali commentary is florid and alliterative. Every time a team loses, we are told it is their ‘swapner salil samadhi’ or the edifice of drowned dreams.
In a city that’s very serious about its festivals, the World Cup has become yet another Bengali festival; a World Cup Puja just like the Durga Puja, only this one is quadrennial. Like during Durga Puja, it’s the local neighbourhood clubs that get into action, decorating the neighbourhood, putting up the posters, hanging the flags. My local fishmonger has a garlanded Messi hanging right next to his pictures of Shiva and Kali, watching over his piles of prawns, rohu and hilsa. Stretches of roads have been painted with Lionel Messi’s face.
Some of it is about football. But some of it is clearly about living up to the hype of a football-mad city. Media wants to find the craziest fan story. For example, Shib Shankar Patra who runs a tea stall saved up Rs 60,000 to go watch Argentina play live in Russia. When his travel agent told him that the money was not enough, he painted his three-storey building in Argentina’s colours. “I don’t smoke or drink. I have only one addiction and that is Lionel Messi and Argentina,” he told PTI. His Argentinar Chayer Dokan (Argentina Tea Shop) serves free tea and samosas on all Argentina match days.
And there’s the sentimental media favourite – elderly Kolkata couple Pannalal Chatterjee and Chaitali Chatterjee, who are attending their 10th and possibly the last World Cup because by the time Qatar rolls out the carpet, Pannalal will be turning 90. They give up their favourite fish to save money for their World Cup fund and write to FIFA for tickets.
The greatest story for Kolkata football has been the 1911 match when Kolkata’s Mohun Bagan Club beat the ‘sahib’ team East Yorkshire Regiment to lift the IFA Shield for the first time. In his book Nation at Play, Ronojoy Sen writes that local newspaper The Nayak gushed that the match filled “every Indian with pride and joy to know that rice-eating, malaria-ridden, barefooted Bengalis have got the better of beef-eating, Herculean, booted John Bull in the peculiarly English sport”. It almost made up for the indignity of the capital shifting to Delhi that very same year.
The city has always loved its football and held on doggedly to its passion for East Bengal and Mohun Bagan through thick and thin. Now the tea shop regulars share their “when Messi came to Kolkata” and “when Maradona came to Kolkata” stories and the old-timers trot out their “when Pele came to Kolkata in 1977” tall tales. Advocate Shahid Imam, member of the Calcutta High Court football team, tells The Hindu, the Latin American players have a huge following here because their dribbling style is “heavily mimicked”. At least, in this case, no one can accuse Kolkata’s babus of being slavishly Anglophile.
The passion is infectious yet sometimes it feels like this too is a part of a city living out someone else’s dream. Our Messi and our Maradona were never ours really even if they graced the city a few times with friendly visits. The Maradona statue Kolkata lovingly erected looks more like someone’s grandmother than the football legend. The World Cup gives Kolkata the excuse to indulge in its favourite pastime – dissect, debate, daydream, but without needing to actually do much.
In the bustling Sonagachi red light district in north Kolkata, a woman in a turquoise sari stands at the doorway fanning herself next to a blackboard with the scores of Uruguay vs France and Brazil vs Belgium written on it. There’s a smell of milky cardamom tea in the air. The Pallibasi Club has strung flags of all the World Cup nations across the street and an Indian one for good measure.
Smarajit Jana, founder and chief advisor at Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, a sex workers’ collective, says the women end up paying for much of it, just as they have to give money for all the umpteen pujas celebrated in the neighbourhood. Durbar hopes to piggyback off the World Cup for the club’s own football league, which is being held since 2012 with participation from the children of sex workers.
The club has set up a residential training school outside Kolkata with seven students. It wants to have at least 15. But it needs better coaches, better equipment, better training. “You should see the fields these children play in. It’s like a muddy paddy field,” he says. But he’s seen how football can transform attitudes in small towns. So strong was the stigma of their mothers’ work, he says, that “sons of sex workers would have never dared to touch a ball”. Now, they play in mixed teams.
But his real dream is to have a girls’ team. That has not worked out in Kolkata because their mothers are afraid their daughters will get too muscular or rupture their hymens. As he looks at the World Cup pageantry, I ask if he sometimes wonders what it would mean if the money that’s spent on World Cup Puja was spent on the young struggling footballers here.
“That would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?” he says. “The World Cup comes once every four years. But we are here every year trying to teach them how to dream.”
Sandip Roy is a journalist, commentator and author.
lol, rubbish by a fame thirsty woman about a living legend Imran Khan, new low set for humanity, shame on u cunning Reham Khan!