Kolkata’s cricket cognoscenti will not agree anymore but Bengal hasn’t really produced any player who walks into an all-time-best Indian Test team, inclusive of the 12th man. Time was when we knew it too. The popular ones weren’t so high that, looking up at them, you got a crick in the neck. Celebrity platform heels ~ 24×7 visibility ~ caught on much later. You had to go all the way to the city’s northern part, to just across the narrow road from Kumartuli ground, past Metro Railway rubble and choking inside ramshackle buses, to talk to Pankaj Roy, the regional hero who preceded Sourav Ganguly, and you were lucky if you didn’t have to dodge an old-timer in a hitched-up dhoti who claimed kinship with the erstwhile opening batsman with a world record (long since bettered). 

A visitor, especially if he was from the Press, was condescendingly looked at and lectured on his illustrious relative’s plus as well as minus points. Roy shrugged it all off, and proudly recalled how he’d been spoken glowingly of in what had been Bombay, with its concentration of stalwarts, in an age when the western metropolis was Indian crick- et’s nerve centre. Roy’s brother, Ambar, and son, Pranab, got only briefly into Test cricket later, and Bengal until Ganguly happened, and despite Dilip Doshi’s extended run at the top level, was convinced that it was only a vicious conspiracy which precluded the state’s representation in the national team. That Russi Jeejeebhoy made it for the victorious tour of the West Indies allegedly because Vijay Merchant was the chairman of selectors was deemed okay though. 

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So, when Ganguly rose, Bengal stopped well short of asking itself whether he would have made it without Jagmohan Dalmiya leading the Indian board. Bengal also bristled at references to Ganguly’s obvious technical limitations and took it out on India when he found himself ousted by Greg Chappell, whom he’d got into the team himself. Even Somnath Chatterjee spoke to Sharad Pawar for Ganguly’s reinstatement then and hell’s foundations quivered until the return was made possible and the drums pounded. So, Kolkata wasn’t up to anything atypical of it when, earlier this week, Ganguly posted a tweet to the effect that he would soon attempt something new in the interests of the people, having long relished their loyalty. 

For the rest of the day, all that the perpetually chinwagging city blabbered about was the possibility of Ganguly joining politics. An ad gimmick had reduced perfectly sane specimens of humanity to hyper-curious information-seekers who for some time knew little else, though no one was to pocket a paisa no matter what Ganguly did, or didn’t. You understood why there were lots of people around us who said they’d stopped watching cricket since “Dada” stopped playing. They’d never filled up Eden Gardens for the game; Ganguly had been the magnet. And they stress Bengal’s cerebral superiority while being contradicted by evidence.