False Bengali pride: There's nothing Kolkatan about KKR's IPL win

Kolkata’s Number 1 local English newspaper The Telegraph, not surprisingly, looks like a Kolkata Knight Riders newsletter this morning. Eight pages are devoted to the Kolkata Knight Riders nail-biting (oh, Gautam Gambhir, do you have any nails left anymore?) victory over Kings XI Punjab last night in Bangalore. And spelling goes for a full toss in the service of KKR in the banner headline on the front page over a photograph of an anxious Shah Rukh Khan at some heart-stopping moment during the final. KING OF KUP RULES [caption id=“attachment_1552843” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The a snapshot of The Telegraph’s front page today.[/caption] But it’s the subhead that’s actually more interesting. And quietly ironic. Kolkata snatches victory from the jaws of a Calcuttan. The authentically Kolkatan connection to the night, it turns out, was actually playing for the Kings XI Punjab. Even sweeter for him, he began his IPL career with KKR in 2008, the team whose butt he was royally kicking on Sunday night. Bengal boy Wriddhiman Saha’s 115 not out off 55 balls for the Kings looked like it would change the famous KKR slogan to Korbo, lorbo but Wriddhiman jeetbey. The Bong connection to the final, Shakib al Hasan is from Bangladesh. And the other Bong connections in KKR - Siliguri-born Debabrata Das and Burdwan-born Sayan Mandal were not playing last night. There’s little that’s Kolkatan about the Knight Riders other than its name. Who knows how many of the Knights can say Kolkata properly instead of mangling it to Kolkota or Kawlkata. That lack of local ties is pretty much true for all the teams which carry the names of a city, and thus the hopes and loyalties of that city, but in reality have precious little to do with the city. They are commercial enterprises put together at auctions by bean counters, strategists and ambitious team owners most of whom live far away from the city in question as well though they might profess passionate love for the city. SRK might proclaim “the madness of Kolkata mattered more than revenues” but everyone knows this is big business. There’s no room for sentimentality here as Sourav Ganguly found out when SRK dumped him in 2011. The May 5 2012 match between Knight Riders and Pune Warriors in Eden Gardens was dubbed a “Dada versus Shah Rukh grudge match” forcing Gautam Gambhir to protest, “Whoever Kolkata wants to support they are free to support. I have always maintained KKR belongs to Kolkata.There is no other team that belongs to Kolkata.” But it did bring home the fact that there is loyalty by blood and loyalty by money and the two are different. At that time an engineering student from Durgapur, 150 km from Kolkata had told India Ink, “Eden may be KKR’s home ground officially, but Pune players are going to feel more at home because we are going to cheer for them even louder than fans in Pune.” Ganguly made a respectable but unspectacular 36, Pune Warriors lost, and the grand face-off was a bit of an anticlimax. During the IPL 4 auctions, KKR retained Gautam Gambhir and Sunil Narine prior to the auctions. And they let go local star Laxmi Ratan Shukla who had been with the team all through. After Delhi Daredevils offered Rs 1.5 crore, KKR decided not to pursue him. Other local boys Mohammad Shami and Manoj Tiwary also went to the Delhi Daredevils making that team feel more Bengal/Kolkata than Kolkata Knight Riders did. “I love these guys, Laxmi, Manoj, Shami. In fact the higher price they got was because they flourished at KKR,” said Shah Rukh Khan later but added, “We want to be professional while finalizing the squad." Shah Rukh might promise dancing on the Hooghly but victory is not really about boosting a city’s pride. Victory is about boosting a team’s brand. If the city’s pride gets boosted along the way that’s incidental. While Kolkata the city burst patakas to celebrate, and the city’s bars put up big screen televisions to follow the final and Usha Uthup wore her big purple bindi and kept on her purple shoes till the end of the match, it’s the team sponsors like Royal Stag and Manyawar and Nokia who will be popping the champagne. And the KKR owners will be measuring the victory not by the applause of some ticker-tape parade down the streets of Kolkata but by its increase in brand value. After the 2012 IPL victory, KKR’s first, a team official told Rediff.com “Had we not won it would have been difficult to register profits this year, it would be an almost-there situation, but for the champions kitty which puts us firmly in the black." In 2013 when the IPL auction happened, KKR flush from its 2012 victory saw itself jumping two notches to occupy second place with a brand value of Rs 243 crore just behind Chennai Super Kings at Rs 245 crore. In 2012, when Mamata Banerjee threw open the streets of Kolkata and Eden Gardens and acted as the de facto mistress of ceremonies for an extravagant celebration of KKR’s first victory, CPI(M) had acted as the party pooper asking “Is the victory of KKR in true sense an achievement for Bengal?” [caption id=“attachment_1552851” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Wriddhiman Saha batting for Kings XI Punjab. Image courtesy: BCCI[/caption] It’s unlikely that the CPI(M), still smarting from its electoral drubbing, will carp too much this time around. People like to feel good. And cricket, especially with a humdinger of a finish, is very much the opium of the people. Everyone loves a winner and the city is happy to bask in the warmth of victory embracing KKR as “our boys” even though they know that “our” boys are “our” boys only until the next auction. But these days that’s good enough. The KKR teams brought Bengal a taste of “acchhey din” and Kolkata and its leaders have no reason to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Bengal is proud that our Knight Riders team had been victorious,” said Didi at the grand celebrations in 2012.Then she added with Mamata-esque hyperbole, “We believe it has conquered the world.” Last night Didi gave the 2014 victory her own unique Didi spin on her Facebook page. “Congratulations… KKR. Congratulations… shahrukh. Congratulations to Wriddhiman for his brilliant performance.” One could say in the end Kolkata had the best of both of worlds. As one fan commented on Mamata Banerjee’s Facebook page “banglar cheleo valo kello abar KKR o jitlo er cheye valo r ki hote pare?” (A son of Bengal played well and KKR won as well – what could be better than that?) If KKR had lost last night, as writer and cricket fan @GreatBong joked on Twitter Wriddhiman Saha might have been the newest Maoist in the eyes of Didi. But in the magnanimous flush of victory, perhaps we are looking, he quipped, at Trinamool’s newest MP.