BE College, Sports and Us

BE College, Sports and Us
Udayan Bhattacharya, 1992 Electrical Engineering

The author was a College Blue during his 2nd to 4th year sessions, representing college in Cricket, football and Athletics, and also captained college Athletics team in the 4th year.

Like most of us in our generation, my supposed priority in life was cast in stone probably even before I was born, “ছেলে ডাক্তার বা ইঞ্জিনিয়ার হবে” and that’s the end of story, case closed. My boring life dragged along slowly, until I reached BE College. The first place I checked out during the counselling day was not my department, but the vast open green space, I had heard so much about, from my cousin brother (Debaditya Moitra, 1985, Arch), another BE College alumni., I immediately knew that my lifelong dream is fulfilled. She was more beautiful than I imagined. The first sight of the immaculately cut green, the majestic yellow and red-bordered Madhusudan Bhavan besides the Red Principal’s quarter at one end, the small pavilion in the corner, the gigantic Wolfenden Hall over-looking the other end; and just as if, it was not enough; the tall, green and handsome rows of Debdaru trees adorning the other side, the sleepy one-lane roads all around, seemed to jump out from a painting book. I was simply awestruck. I found my Eden Gardens and Maracanã Stadium, rolled into one, my heaven. Oval ….. She was a love at first sight, and I never stopped loving my beloved Oval ever since.

Hostel rivalry was fierce; also the most mind-scarring and sentimental ones. H-7/8 vs H-9/10 football rivalry was legendary during our times. You would go into a deep state of depression for quite a number of days, if you lost that match, and needed to re-discover the reason for living again. I used to stop talking to my closest buddies from the rival hostels, leading up to the match day just to be mentally prepared to be ruthless to my enemies.

Table Tennis was another sport, where the hostel pride mattered a lot. Me, not being a part of the team, I happily took part in the other important activity; being part of the vociferous “AWAJ DEWA” gang. Thankfully we had our Don Bradman of BEC Table Tennis (once Bengal sub-junior #3), Satrajit Mookherjee aka, Satra, my roommate for 3 years, and the street thug Javed Miandad alias Tito (Suryapravo Trivedi) (happened to be my first cousin too) as our hostel representatives. Tito was really nasty, as I have never seen a TT player sledging his opponent, other than him. Ponchu (Sudip Mazumdar)) was also a very good TT player, but from the competing H-10. During college matches, we used to carefully choose our strategic spots to camp out (generally behind our competitor) and direct the nastiest and worst of expletives to our enemies. It really worked; we even made one of the college competitors cry once.

I suddenly discovered in myself, that I was a long-distance runner too, while trying it out during the 2nd year, and duly won most of the long-distance races (800m, 1500m and 5Km) over the next 3 years, even earning me the collegiate Athletics captaincy in the final year, with poor Satra coming in the 2nd place most of the time. Stallone look-alike Satra was a natural athlete; he was the son of a pair of ex-BECans (both 1964 Architecture), his father Sukdeb Mookherjee represented India University in Water polo; and his mother is our beloved Mashima (Sonali Mookherjee). The bugger used to swim across Ganges like it’s nobody’s business, he used to practice running, heck … he even used to go and come back from college running, used to visit gym religiously, eat only healthy food vs. me, the lanky bamboo, living on 300 “Shada Suto” Biris every day; I quickly figured out, that, it was quite a longshot for me. My entire strategy was hinged on telling Satra, “My dear roommate, let’s stick together until the last lap, and take out everyone else”, however, I never told him “Then in the last Lap, I will take you out too”. I used to throw my desperate long legs and eat my lungs out and somehow complete the final lap. Boost was certainly not the secret of my energy; this was, and now I am revealing my dark, yet successful secret after 25 long years.

Yes, we were despicable scums, I know, and we were quite proud of it too, in fact more, the better, as we got treated with even more respect in the BEC social hierarchy. In one of those races, some junior ETC girls showed up. Alas, they cheered for Satra, being their department senior, and it went like “Satra-da jore, aro jore …..”. That fatal cheer stayed with their beloved Satra-da for eternity, as the merciless scumbags, we are, even today, we use that phrase to mean the worst of things to Satra.

We had a staple diet of organized sports, July till Puja vacation, it was hardcore football. On a given afternoon, rush back from classes, eat or not, we would head to Oval, replace our sandals with football boots and off we go. The sandals themselves were an interesting story. Once you had parted with your sandals on a given afternoon, you were not sure, whether you would get back the same pair or not, not that it mattered much, worst case you will come back with a pair made out of two separate samples. A number of times, I stole back the same pair of sandals, which was stolen from me to begin with. As my seniority progressed, I learnt, that, I earned the right to steal, however, no one would steal from me; a very basic and important lesson in life.

Mini Lords, now long gone, used to be our venue for all the 6-a side football tournaments. And, per Murphy’s Law, if it was a bare-foot 6-a-side tournament, it had to be one of the nastiest, muddiest and slipperiest fields you had ever encountered in your life. Forget running, just standing normally was a balancing act. My routine was very simple; curse myself for agreeing to play there until the inevitability did set in, I used to get on with the preparation. In regular football games, I would do my stretches, some mindless jogging to warm-up etc. Here, the smartest thing was to go and take a quick dive on the mud and immediately ravage yourself as much as you can, to get prepared for the ignominy that was about to befall on you, i.e. rather start as a joker to begin with; eliminating any fear of the situation getting any worse in future. Still, there used to be handful of those magicians, who somehow could manage their balance, run with the ball and never have acquire that muddy imprint on their back-side. Friends, competition, mud, lots of goals, funny falls, and even funnier situations brought laughter all along. At the end of the day, with heavily scraped knees and elbows, twisted ankles, battered bodies with an even more battered ego, we would troop back to our respective hostels.

Cricket would start right after Puja and last until the end of February, when the dreaded Test Exam (rather the Exam season) started in March, followed by Study leave in April (please, at least try to understand the logic; you needed to stop classes to get some “time” for these hardworking studious souls to “study” !!!), culminating in May with finals. Cricket was lot more civilized, white pants and white shirts, only the elite ones got to go and practice at the corner of Oval, and you could see the Curious Georges would walk by and look at these jackass jocks with part envy and part disdain.

Representing college, I have to say, there was a subdued sense of ego; a long invisible tail of pride wagging and tagging along. Be it football or cricket, the best part was our journey in the college bus to the great Calcutta University ground, bordering the Red Road in one side, and Mayo Road on the other. While playing cricket, with every 4s or 6s, if the individual fielder was not careful enough, while fetching the ball, he risked either being run over by the speeding cars/ buses on Red Road, or by a tram on the Mayo Road side. Right across the Red Road it was the home ground of Mohammedan Sporting Club with the rickety wooden gallery, which I always wondered how it held up during the football season with thousands of zealous supporters jumping on it.

I distinctly remember 2 incidents from those days while playing cricket at the University ground.

First, while playing a scheduled game, and suddenly, literally like an army invasion, a couple of hundred army men in full battle gear charged down the ground, ran over the pitch, past us, almost taking us with them, and started firing on a couple open trenches, some started carrying other folk, battle cries, fake moaning of injured, para-troopers jumping down etc. We were simply stunned at the sudden turn of events. It turned out that it was a scheduled military exercise. The game was held up for a couple of hours, and we wandered away from the battlefield. Suddenly, we found out a cinema shooting was going on, not far away from us, not much fanfare, just 10-12 folks. That is where I saw the maestro Satyajit Ray for the one last time, shooting what turned out to be his last film and directing the other great Utpal Dutt. All of you, who have watched Agantuk (The Stranger), you would remember the scene shot in Maidan, with Utpal Dutt explaining to the kids the solar and lunar eclipse with coins, and the scene starts with a paratrooper coming down.

We had a decent team during college days, and we reached semi-finals of the intra-Calcutta University cricket tournament 2 out of 3 times ((1989-92) I played. We had our trump card, the ferocious fast bowler, our own MP (Mahesh Prasad Singh), our gentle, dashingly handsome batch-mate, a broad shouldered, 6 feet hunk, unlike us, the generally spectacled, 50Kg-ish, straw-like renegading Bengalees. And man, he used to bowl fast, slinging action, and with those shoulders, boom to the unsuspecting legs. Ouch …..

During one of these matches, we were playing against a team, who clearly looked outclassed against us. We batted first and scored loads of runs, and MP opened the bowling for us. From the very first ball, one of their opening batsman was charging down the pitch and throwing kitchen sink at every ball. Most of the deliveries missed the stumps by a whisker, some flew over slips/gully, and one or two even landed outside the ground. We were all irritated, but not sure what to do. I was fielding near his run-up, and, I remember telling MP, “Maar Sala ke”. MP was a simpleton, and he simply listened to his dear friend Udo. Next ball, MP charges in, and ….. Bingo, 10 out of 10, “X marks the spot”, Jackpot … you name it. The batsman charged again, and the ball like a tracer missile, crashed bang in the middle of that idiot’s forehead (Remember, no helmet those days). A very interesting sound came out of ball hitting something very unusual. The whole ground stopped breathing for a while, to see what happened next. The hunk stood still for a second, next, the blood started spurting out from his forehead, and then as if his legs were cut-off, he collapsed face down. The next scene was chaos… MP was banging his head on the ground and howling and crying “Main aur kabhi nahin Cricket khelunga”. Some were running to the injured player, some were running towards MP and then back to the fallen batsman, what a chaos! Later the batsman regained whatever consciousness he was left with, and was carried out, MP stopped crying, however, still sobbing. The opponent team decided, that’s it, they were forfeiting the game. I remember, we searched the newspaper the next day to find out, if the guy was still alive or as we feared, was indeed dead, but we never found out the truth. MP later joined the Indian Army himself, and I always wondered, if he used to cry every time he fired a shot, maybe I should quietly ask MP in person.

Football was a lot more controlled and relatively uneventful. We were barely average, we will win a few matches, lose a few, and come back home, just happy that we played. The opponents (and even the referees) would look at us, as the elite class, with some unjustified awe, silently questioning, these nerds also play football? Once, I viciously tripped an opponent on a goal-bound move, for which I should have been shown a red card but was only shown a yellow. The referee still profusely apologized to me during the half time. During the second half of the same game, with a 50-50 ball possession battle, I fell down, and one of the opponents, in the heat of the moment, swung his boot towards my legs. All I did was to squeal, anticipating the impending kick in my leg, and that’s all it needed. The kick never landed on me, but the opponent player was promptly shown the red-card and thrown out. The same player came back after the game and apologized to me profusely, although he never even touched me. Hence, some inherent perks came along with representing BE College for sure.

My sporting journey in BEC will be left incomplete, unless I narrate some of the anecdotes from our out-of-station sporting trips. One such was a trip to Banaras Hindu University (BHU). Before we left college, we were instructed to find respective partners with whom individuals would carry their own and hence share the same mat and the comforter set (Lep/Toshok), and I (part of the cricket team) of course chose my roommate Satra. Everything was going fine, only until about 5 days of sharing the “closeness” with Satra in January Banaras winter; when we found out, Satra had contracted Chicken Pox. Anyway, just like Satra, even the virus in his body was super friendly to me and spared me from any further agony, and I did not contract Chicken Pox.

Our volleyball team was just too good for the rest of the competition. They were playing a scheduled match, and the next day being an early morning cricket match, most of the cricket team stayed back in the hostel allocated to us while we were in BHU. We were playing REC (now NIT), Durgapur, and we were badly thrashing them. But that would never stop us, the handful of BEC supporters, verbally thrashing all the Durgapur players and their unknown extended families. As a rule, when you had the upper hand, the expletives used to come out even more mercilessly and with a high dose of never heard before phrases. One of their players, I guess, had enough of the abuses thrown at them, suddenly landed a solid blow on Tito’s face, who also happened to make the trip representing the BEC TT team. Me, the stick of a physique, and the champion long distance runner that I was, did what I could do the best, i.e. Run ….. On one breath, I reached the hostel, and got the other sticks to come out with even more sticks (the wickets and bats), and we all came back to the war zone armed and dangerous. Someone even brought the spare volleyball with him, not sure why. Tito, the unwritten arm-wrestling champion of our college, was bleeding profusely from his nose, and could barely be controlled by the BHU folks; he was willing to take on the entire Durgapur Army all by himself. Cease-fire was declared quickly, and they kept the two groups apart for the next couple more days we were there, until the end of the competition. We were very scared, about what would happen to us, when we would pass through Durgapur, enroute to Howrah, however, nothing untoward happened, and we reached home safely. This was January 1990. During the study leave, i.e. April 1990, 3 months later, one lazy afternoon, when I returned after a weekend trip from home, heard one (or couple) of those REC-Durgapur folk(s) were spotted in Botanical Garden, and Tito found that out and hunted them down in B Garden. Rest, I will not go into details of the indescribable event. I was terribly disappointed for missing out the opportunity and did not return home for 3 weeks in repentance. Later in 1991, we visited ISM, Dhanbad to play a football tournament, and you guessed it right, we met Durgapur again, this time only to make friends with a bunch of fellow football players.

Innumerable stories, anecdotes and memories…. Individuals used to receive a college Blazer, if s(he) had represented at least 75% of the college matches in any given sports every year, and 3 years in a row, which I ended up doing in Football, Cricket and Athletics, the “College Blue”, the 3-sports jock, as they said. I proudly wore it during the Campus interviews. May be that is why I even got a job, because I knew nothing about engineering. I still have my navy blue Blazer, which today, barely covers one arm, the cheap and battered metallic buttons still hang on, just I am hanging on to it. I take it out from time to time; fondly look at it, brush off the dust a bit, try to show off to my daughters, and quietly remind myself about what it meant to me. Some of the crests are there, some are lost, just like the golden days in BEC we left behind and some were lost in time.

“Oval simply took over my life for four years, and I still carry a piece of her with me. Even today, I can still smell the grass, and I can still feel the touch of the soft earth…. It was a place, I always found peace and more importantly, I found myself; my place of self-meditation in my own way. Some of my best memories come rushing back. I can see the stupid, spectacled, curly haired Udo with headband, running amuck on the Oval green with Bappa, Firoz, Chandan, Beguni, Amit, Tito, Arnab, MP, Partha, Sujoy, Rajkumar, Satra. and so many other similar wide-eyed kids. Sometimes I wish I had that magic pause button to keep it that way, forever……”

Rules for College Blue,
1. A student gets a crest (the one to be hung on your blazer) once he/she represents the college team in 75% of the matches against other colleges / institutions in a calendar session.
2. A student gets a blazer if he/she receives crest in 3 consecutive years.
3. A student receives College Blue if he/she fulfills point no. 2 above in 3 separate sporting events. So essentially, he/she must have 3 crests every year for 3 consecutive years representing 3 different sporting events.