Happy Birthday Harsha

 In our short travel history, we could meet a few celebrities and had some interesting encounters. There was that time when we met Rahul Dravid and my companion started crying out of joy, or when we met Sourav Ganguly and my companion informed on his face that she is not a fan of him and likes Rahul Dravid more. But the funniest incident having with the man who is celebrating his birthday today.

It was that day in August 2018 when we could snick into the Lords’ media center during the lunch break of an England-India test match thanks to our good friend Sandipan and could meet legends like Michael Holding, Kumar Sangakkara, Nasser Hussain, Sanjay Manjarekar, and Harbhajan Singh. Our main target was Ganguly with whom we wanted to have a picture. Ganguly was late and it is a story for some other day of how we managed our picture with him. What we later realized was that during the break there was a special segment featuring Smriti Mandhana (we had a glimpse of her also) along with Ganguly and the hero of this story Harsha Bhogle.

Due to that segment, Ganguly came down to lunch pretty late. Once we had our photo session with Ganguly we just hung around for a bit to soak the environment. This was when in almost empty lunch room of the media center we found Harsha. He was the last man among the commentators to have his lunch that day. We noticed that he just took his plate and sat at one of the corner tables. He had his phone out and was looking at it while eating.

It looked like he was preparing for his next stint on air and at first, we were hesitant to approach him. But it is not every day you meet your favorite commentator and finally, we could not stop ourselves. I and my companion went near his table and very gently asked him whether we were disturbing him. To our surprise, he jumped out of his sit and in an urgent voice mentioned that, he is ready and coming to the commentary box in a minute. We were also surprised, I said, “Harsha, we are your fans. We are just looking for a picture with you!”

Then came the famous smile and silky voice, “Of course! You know what, I thought you are my production manager and came to call me for my next slot!”

The confusion was gone and then we got our photo with one of the most famous voices of cricket! Happy Birthday!!

Happy Birthday Baba

 Baba was a big fan of Tintin and he was successful in passing on that love to me quite early in my childhood. I started with a generous dosage of ‘Tuntunir Boi’, ‘Bnatul the Great’ and ‘Thakumar Jhuli’ but one day Baba started to tell me the story of this young boy who roams around different places with his little white dog. And that’s how Tintin entered my life.

At some stage, Baba started to tell me the story from one Tintin book which he had in his possession. They obviously had the full set in our ancestral place in Munger but at that time (it was around 1987-88) he only had one Tintin book with him. The Bengali ones were just coming out but the one he had with him was an English copy of ‘The Broken Ear’.

As a 4-years old, I used to go through the images of the book, and then at some point in time Baba started to tell me the story. It was fascinating for me at that time. Those two killers trying to kill Tintin and every time missing it by just a few inches, the talking parrot of the artist Balthazar, the plot to put Tintin in jail and the escape, the Arumbayas and the Rumbabas, and of course General Alcazar!

General Alcazar was Baba’s favorite character in the book and soon he became my favorite character too. The Eccentric president of San Theodoros, an imaginary country in South America, Alcazar was a friend of Tintin and provided multiple comic moments in the book, including telling Tintin how one of the previous aids had jaundice when he played a prank on him with his gun. Soon enough the General himself had jaundice from the shock of another blast in his garden!

At that time only, Baba told me about General Alcazar becoming a knife thrower in a later book (The Seven Crystal Balls) and the leader of the rebels in ‘Tintin and the Picaros’. Soon I got my first Bengali Tintin book from my Pisu, a translation of ‘Red Sea Sharks’ where the story started with a chance meeting between Tintin, Captain Haddock, and General Alcazar.

Baba’s love for Tintin remained till his last days. Till the time he could read comfortably very often he used to sit with Tintins from my collections. Whenever a new Tintin book was added to the collection, Baba was the first to read it, even before me.

In later years, I started my collections of Tintin figurines and other TIntin-related accessories and he was always very interested. He had a keyring with one of the Thompsons, another favorite character of his and we used to have an identical mask with a fallen Captain Haddock on it which he was very fond of using whenever he had to go to hospital during the pandemic.

Today is Baba’s 80^th birthday. This is the first time I am writing a Facebook post to celebrate his birthday as I can not wish him face-to-face. However, I hope wherever he is now, he is getting a regular supply of all his favorite books, Tintin, Asterix, Shibram, Sharadindu, and many more! I also hope he would love this figurine which I gifted to myself to celebrate his birthday!