The Board of Control for Cricket in India could feel embarrassed but the journalist whom it has banned for two years for bullying Wriddhiman Saha was said to have been paid a king’s ransom early in this millennium for writing a book which had one of its former chiefs, Jagmohan Dalmiya, unabashedly praised up to the sky. Reading it, even Clubhouse- insiders were known to be hard put to stifle giggles. Boria Majumdar has also co-authored Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography, besides having always been remarkably close to Indian cricket’s administrative high-ups.
The current power set-up in the BCCI, if anything, is said to be more easily accessible for him, given his proximity to certain top-order icons. This is why the rest of India probably feels that the Saha-versus-Majumdar kerfuffle could have broken out only in Kolkata, due in the main to the ambience the Maidan has been wrapped in since Dalmiya began setting the commercial tone of the Indian game once he got going and Doordarshan’s outdoor broadcasting van was obliged to lumber out of Eden Gardens. Quid- pro-quo warp and weft ~ or wheeling and dealing ~ are what is said to shape everything. You can allegedly pay your way into a club as a player. Age-faking is known to be rampant. Even la creme de la creme of such cricketing talent as Bengal possess acknowledge having to defer to extra-constitutional sources of authority, tactfully to skirt nettlesome situations. So, a rejected interview request is but a momentary disappointment ~ or a career setback at worst ~ elsewhere but hell’s foundation’s quiver when a media heavyweight is put in his place by a Bengal cricketer who has experienced top-level action.
Additionally, Saha, on being dropped from the national squad, let it be known earlier that board president Sourav Ganguly had promised him virtually perpetual continuance as long as he headed the institutional decision-making hierarchy himself. The letdown would have been bitter. Well, might Saha have reached the end of his tether? He showed the world what his tormentor had been up to and, cleverly enough, refrained from talking.
Majumdar was later quoted as saying that the wicketkeeper-batsman had put a “doctored” version of previous exchanges on social media, but we would never really know if the BCCI panel that dealt with him asked him anything about it. If, after all the shock of a steep plunge into the totemic black hole of the city of nightmares the board deemed the punishment of a two-year ban ~ widely predicted since long before the official announcement ~ condign, it probably was sure that it could shrug off the hostile criticism of those who were inclined to believe that brevity was not just the soul of wit but could also be an index of the uttermost indifference. “Grind through the two years and Bob’s your uncle” is the central idea; everything else is peripheral.