An able administrator

Satyabrata Ganguly perhaps hasn’t ever thought that his rise to fame would be through his kidnapping. Before that fateful event, he was more recognized as an able administrator in Kolkata’s corporate circle, which of course he is else he won’t be the only choice to head the trouble-prone Indian Football Association (IFA).

On Good Friday, 1999 Satyabrata Ganguly was abducted allegedly by a Bihar gangster near his Alipore home in Kolkata in the wee hours when he set out on his morning walk. Some 7 days later, he came back apparently unharmed and since then he hasn’t uttered a single word as to how the whole thing happened.

One understands there was good enough reason for him to maintain a stoic silence after he returned from captivity. After the thought-to-be mastermind of his abduction, Akhilesh Singh was arrested on May 30 two years back from his ancestral village in Bihar, it was surmised that perhaps the time has come for him to tell the story.

But that didn’t happen. For good reason as it now seems.

Last month when he stepped down from the post of Chairman of Exide Industries, he revealed that he would speak about his infamous captivity, which will be in the form of a memoir he plans to write shortly. That no doubt is a masterstroke from him.

But Satyabrata Ganguly is in news these days for an altogether different reason. He is said to have reluctantly agreed to head IFA to fill in the gap of effervescent ex-Tata honcho Aditya Kashyap, who died of cancer few days back.

If he decides to lead IFA, it’ll be a very welcome development. A person of his managerial caliber is direly needed in that post if only to bring about a change in the moribund affairs of football in Kolkata.

To draw comparison, one has seen how Jagmohan Dalmia, now shoved aside, has led from the front to transform the cricket scene in India. Now, if Ganguly can do the magic to football, he’ll forever carve a place in the hearts of uncounted football lovers in the city, and indeed in the rest of the country.

Here is wishing him all the best in perhaps his toughest job yet.

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