Sandip Roy: Kolkata is an afterthought in modern India

When I heard Kolkata was building a 70-foot statue of Lionel Messi and he would inaugurate it virtually during his visit to Kolkata, I winced.

I don’t play football. I don’t follow the game. I couldn’t explain the offside rule if my life depended on it.

But in 2011 I was asked to cover Messi’s visit to Kolkata. I didn’t have a ticket to the actual exhibition match between Argentina and Venezuela at the Yuva Bharati Krirangan. So I stood in front of his hotel and tried to cobble together copy by interviewing the Messi-hopefuls hanging out outside.

I could not reveal my football ignorance to them. So I just nodded knowingly as one young man rhapsodised about Robbie Fowler’s 3-minute hat trick against Arsenal. I never did see Messi. But it was just as well. The local newspaper reporter managed to get inside the hotel and see him. The only thing I learned from reading that 600-word front-page story was that Messi smiled as the elevator doors closed.

The real story, I realised, was always outside. Like the fan who was on his way to work at the nearby medical clinic but had come in Argentina’s blue-and-white colours just in case he spotted his hero. Or Sabuj Sarkar who had a homemade poster of Messi propped up on his bicycle. His handwritten sign read “Argentina and Venezuela are great. We are sorry. Play, India, play.” He told me there were more football fans in West Bengal than the entire population of Argentina.

The Messi debacle in Kolkata last weekend, at the very same Yuva Bharati Krirangan, is tragic on many levels. But most of all, because it is the betrayal of the love of fans like Sabuj Sarkar. The Bengali newspaper Anandabazar Patrika recounted some of their stories. Sanatan Mandal from Bankura district, a 3-4-hour train ride away, had spent the night at Howrah station in order to reach the stadium on time. He said, “I just about make ends meet selling fish for a living. I took a loan at high interest from the mahajan to buy a ₹4,000 ticket. Now I am finished.” A 60-year-old man had come from Krishnagar, over 120km away, with his wheelchair-bound son. “My son is obsessed with Messi. That’s why I spent ₹7,080 on tickets. But we didn’t even get to see him.”

Messi entered the stadium at 11.30am. He was instantly surrounded by some 70-80 officials, politicians, semi-celebrities all wanting their selfies and autographs. Fans like Mandal who had bought tickets out of their hard-earned money only saw them not the 5ft, 7 inch-tall footballer.

His team complained that even the police were more interested in taking selfies than crowd control. He was whisked away at 11.52am before even the state’s chief minister Mamata Banerjee and actor Shah Rukh Khan could arrive. Soon the furious crowd started pelting the field with water bottles, uprooted bucket seats, destroyed sound equipment and stole the flowerpots. Messi’s events in Hyderabad and Mumbai went off relatively smoothly. His Kolkata outing became yet more proof of the city’s fall from grace for legions of Kolkata bashers.

It certainly was not a football-loving city’s moment of glory. The videos circulated showed angry people, upset people, irate people but also grinning people looting, breaking and plundering. It reminded me of those reels after the fall of Sheikh Hasina in Dhaka and the crowds leaving her home with whatever they could find—ducks, fish, undergarments.

In Kolkata, one man carrying a big roll of carpet on his shoulders told a news channel, “Don’t show my face. I spent ₹10,000 and did not get to see Messi’s face. I am taking the carpet home. We will practise on it.” It felt like a city acting out, cutting off its own nose to spite its face. Yet it was also somehow too gleeful compared to the broken-hearted sadness of the true fans like the man with the son in a wheelchair. Both were part of the same story but it’s the images of the rampage that will go viral, the whole city’s image tarnished by the actions of some.

Kolkata is often an afterthought in modern India. When Coldplay comes to India, it does not come to Kolkata. No international carrier flies directly from Kolkata anymore to anywhere in Europe, a humiliating fact for a city that once prided itself as the Second City of the Empire. That’s where it stings. Finally an international superstar had come to the city and Kolkata managed to score a self-goal.

The state’s opposition has lambasted the ruling party. The ruling party has blamed the private company that organised the event and arrested the man behind it. That’s just political football but the real rot runs deeper. In 2011, some Messi fans had lamented that the exhibition match between Argentina and Venezuela would do little for Indian football. They said when Pele had come to Kolkata in 1977, he had played against local team Mohun Bagan. The madness about Messi was somehow also a reminder about the sorry state of India’s own football.

Fourteen years later that seems even more evident. The Messi GOAT tour was a celebration, not even an exhibition match. Fans were paying through the nose to just see their icon in the flesh, not in action.

Olympic gold medalist Abhinav Bindra tweeted that while he does not fault Messi in any way, “as a society are we building a culture of sport or are we simply celebrating individuals from afar?” He added: “Millions were spent for moments of proximity photographs and fleeting access to a legend.” And while people had every right to do what they wanted with their own money, Bindra could not help but “feel a quiet sadness wondering what might have been possible if even a fraction of that energy and investment had been directed towards the foundations of sport in our country.”

In Kolkata the fans were deprived even of the opportunity to see Messi. Instead they witnessed an orgy of VIP privilege. A VIP passholder was seen clutching Messi’s hand for a selfie even as he tried to wave to the crowd. The love of the game gave way to the hunt for the selfie. It showed how we are all held hostage by a VIP culture and the entitlement that comes with it. In the videos, one can hear the pleas from organisers asking the throng of politicians and hangers-on to move aside but those pleas fell on deaf ears. Those who had access flaunted their access, everyone else be damned.

Proximity to Messi was social capital in a culture built around celebrity-gawking, selfies as markers of self-esteem. Anandabazar Patrika had a front page picture of Messi and the beaming sports minister with a caption that drove home the point: Yuvabharati Kriranganey Lionel Messir ga ghenshey Kriramantri Arup Biswas. (At Yuvabharati Sports Stadium, Sports Minister Arup Biswas almost rubbing up against Lionel Messi.)

What is sad is that nothing will happen to the VIP selfie-seekers who ruined everyone else’s Messi moment though the sports minister has since resigned. The fishmonger fan will return home broke and broken-hearted. He might get reimbursed for his ticket but no Messi rerun.

On Sunday evening a friend and I wandered over to the Messi statue, now a glaring memento to a city’s loss of face. There were still posters and cutouts welcoming Messi, all emblazoned with the name of the local politician. Three young men in blue-and-white Argentina jerseys posed for pictures in front of the statue. A small boy kicked a football at Messi or rather at the “Monumento de Messi” made by artist Monti Pal. It felt like a quiet moment of bonding between a football star and a football fan.

That’s what the Messi visit could have been about. I don’t understand football but I understand the loss.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy (@sandipr) is a writer, journalist and radio host.