This is the first football World Cup which I won’t be able to watch live on TV and hence I am awashed with thoughts about it. Waking up midnight to start the match…falling asleep midway …only to wake up hearing “GOOOAAAAAAAAAAAL”…..may be that’s why we love Brazil so much…so many chants of GOAAL per match…kept me and my father awake thru the night…compare it to ITALY (ugh….u’ll be lucky if they score more than 1-0…that too the goal will come after the 70^th minute)…next day school/college used to be a hot bed of all analysis….wonderful terms like “insurance goal”, “attacking third”, “in-step”, “banana kick”….enough to impress a mind…specially when u see your friends churning them out. I remember my classmates discussing the skills of reserve bench footballers for teams like Belgium and Cameroon as if they were next door neighbor players…and then you have the Bengali Newspapers…(Anandabazar, Aajkaal etc)…a regular 8 page paper with 1 page for sports used to magically get converted to a 16 pager – starting 1 month before the WC …with 8 pages of football..and with all the spicy news and tidbits which God knows how they got access to….it was FUN…I will miss those…even though I am hell bent on reading every top Bengali Paper in the Net just to get some taste of that… 

I guess many of us have an idea of the craze of football in Bengal. Every family member supports either MB or EB (there is Mohammedan Sporting as the 3rd of the holy Trinity…with their predominant muslim support base). In most cases whom you support is pre-determined before your birth depending on who your parents support. If u’re lucky (like me) your parents will support different teams – and you will get a chance to choose ur team. In my case my mom (who comes from a traditional West Bengal family – popularly called GHOTI) was a MB supporter by lineage and my father (whose family came to West Bengal from Bangladesh some generations back) had a ticket to support EB lifelong….and hence I had a level playing field to choose my team. I chose EB and had a reason for it (but that’s for another time).   

For any True Blooded Bengali…World Cup is the time to rise up from the mundane life to the frenzy of debates, analysis and discussions. Lot of people do not really understand the phenomena or rather dynamics of it. Even the FIFA president is said to be astounded at the amount of excitement over football (I hate to us the word Soccer) in India and West Bengal in specific (specially when we are ranked a lowly 118 among the football playing nations)….but we, the Bengalis do not care if others understand our passion for East Bengal (EB)/Mohun Bagan(MB) or Brazil/Argentina…we still continue to discuss at all the tea stalls (THEK) in all our drawing room debates (ADDA) and even during work (which we love not to do anyway)…World Cup is just the icing on the cake …the pinnacle of the passion and starting today I imagine it’s a mini festival time for Bengalis…for 1 month people will forget all “Reservation”, “Rahul Mahajan” and “Stock Market Panic”…and just live for this….ITS GREAT TO BE A FOOTBALL FAN!!!