It’s the time when hyperlinks to sites on football and its high priests cross our cyber paths at every step, often turning up at unexpected moments and pages. Therefore, I am not a wee bit surprised to have been led to a pictorial commentary on top footballers and their heart-stoppingly expensive cars, while searching online for global poverty figures.
I think discussing these footballers and their big, fast and smart cars is not a great idea, because no matter what you are looking for online these days, you are sure to find these superstars of football staring at you from behind the wheels of their magnificent machines.
Also because, there is something else that needs to be done: turn the spotlight, if only briefly, on the football fans who have made their cars central to a celebration of this sport and its frontline stars.
From the days when the World Cup fever was building to now, when we are in the thick of the excitement, images have been pouring in from across the globe, displaying cars painted in colours of participating teams, and others that have been enhanced by fittings and elements that seem to suggest that the FIFA World Cup 2014 is all that matters and that life could be put on hold.
Amidst the exercise to marry football to automobiles stand 52-year-old Uttam Saha from football-drunk Kolkata and his 2006 Fiat Palio, which he has painted in the sky-blue and white of Argentina’s national flag.
“Before being painted in the Argentine colours, the car was almost gold in colour. The seat covers also now reflect the flag: they were made only for this makeover project,” says Saha, founder-secretary of Argentina Football Fan Club, a 720-member group from Ganguly Bagan, famous for its spirited support of Argentina’s football team from the playing days of Diego Armando Maradona.
“Maradona is a football god,” explains Saha. “When Maradona visited Kolkata in 2008, we installed a 25-feet-tall statue of him in Ganguly Bagan. We also kept 48 other statues of the footballer, each of which between four feet and five feet, which signified Maradona’s age at that time.”
Among the present crop of Argentine players, Lionel Andres Messi is a god of football to Saha and the other members of this fan club from Ganguly Bagan.
Messi was offered nothing short of worship when he descended on Kolkata in 2011 for a match against Venezuela at Salt Lake Stadium.
“We placed cut-outs of Messi in Ganguly Bagan, around 10 of which were 20-feet tall,” says Saha, who is into the business of making hoardings in South Kolkata.
Now, in 2014, the past and the present of Argentine football seem to converge at the bonnet of Saha’s new-look Palio, where two stickers, one of Maradona and the other of Messi, have been stuck.
