Why not saffron, green and white?
Every four years, when the world crowns a new football champion, I root for Brazil. I grew up a being a Brazil fan — my father told me Pele was the greatest athlete ever.
As I grew older I wondered why my homeland wasn’t able to field a team to play in the World Cup. After all, when I was a young girl in Kolkata, I watched my cousins and friends kick the ball around with bare feet on a dirt field in the neighborhood park. Even now, every open field sports a goal net or stumps and bails.
So why then can’t an emerging global power, a nation of 1 billion plus, compete in soccer?
Why is India ranked a miserable 133rd out of the 202 football playing countries. Yes, India ranks even below war-ravaged nations like Rwanda and Sierra Leone. I suppose our only solace is that Pakistan and Bangladesh come even further down the list.
Many theories abound on India’s poor performance.
Some say India’s soccer program is run by people who are corrupt. They are more interested in lining their pockets than they are in athletics. The head of the football federation is, for God’s sake, the aviation minister!
Others say India’s real love is that other sport that Americans have yet to embrace, the one that involved the stumps and bails: cricket. Or that club football has never attained the kind of professionalism it has in other countries.
India last qualified for the World Cup in 1950. But the barefooted team never made it to Brazil to play because they couldn’t afford plane tickets to the other side of the world.
A football fanatic friend of mine says India can’t play anymore because it has fallen behind the curve. For many years, players insisted on bare feet when other nations were speeding ahead with fancy spikes, special grass and other new technology.
Instead, in my hometown, millions of people are crazy for Brazil. I remember watching World Cup games in 1998 — the crowds lining the streets were awash in yellow, blue and green. They cried openly when France defeated their team in the final. I felt as though I were on the beach in Ipanema, among Rio de Janeiro’s Cariocas — not in a middle-class Bengali neighborhood of Kolkata.
So I am forced to root for a country other than my own again this year. I have to reserve the Indian flag for that other World Cup, the one that involves the stumps and bails. India plays host next year. Maybe they will even nab their second Cup win.
Viva l'Italia
I never wanted Italy to win until today. But it’s my top pick in the World Cup pool this year. So…
… at 2:30 this afternoon, I gathered with friends at Fritti, a neighborhood restaurant, to watch Italy versus Paraguay.
In the end, my friend Jack said he’d buy me another glass of fine Italian Pinot Grigio if I donned his tricolor shorts. So I did. And said a Hail Mary. It didn’t quite work. Score: 1-1.
That’s really a loss for the fine talians.
But the Pinot Grigio was fine-r.
Happy Birthday, CNN
It’s CNN’s 30th birthday today.
I was not yet 18 when Ted Turner launched his visionary network. I didn’t know then that I would be a journalist, let alone work for the world’s most reputable news network.
I watched CNN cover the Challenger disaster, Baby Jessica and then the Gulf War. CNN had arrived. I watched Christiane Amanpour report from Bosnia-Herzegovina and admired her talent and courage.
Just before the invasion of Iraq, I spent several weeks in Baghdad covering the U.N inspections and writing about the fear in Iraqi hearts. War was imminent in a nation that had already suffered so much.
I was alone on that trip. And nervous to be in a police state. I found friends at CNN. Eason Jordan, then a top executive at CNN, offered me workspace and conversation. It was a relief just to be in the presence of friendly faces.
But the world of broadcast remained alien to me.
I was a print journalist and newspapers were still turning profits. But the industry changed rapidly.
Last year, I left the Atlanta Journal-Constitution after 19 long years. Needless to say, the decision was tough.
But I was lucky enough to land at CNN. The more I learn about television, the more I am fascinated.
The stories on CNN’s 30th anniversary are focusing on a pivotal time for the network. Outdone in the ratings race in prime time, CNN, say analysts, has to figure out how to reinvent itself before it gets beat at its own game.
Maybe.
We’ll see where the next few months take us.
But f you ask me, CNN does a mighty fine job bringing the world to millions of homes. Every day. 24/7. And I am glad to play a part.
Ma
I refrained from posting this on Mother’s Day out of respect for all my friends who are mothers and for all my friends who still have mothers.
But Mother’s Day is tough. Very tough.
Nine years ago, my mother died.
May 19, 2001.
A few months before 9/11. It became a year that everyone remembers for the terrorist attacks. I remember it as the year my father died, and, exactly two months later, my mother.
Every year on this day, a melancholy descends on me.
I don’t feel like doing much of anything save look at her photographs and her handwriting — I still have all the letters she wrote me from Kolkata. I even have her clothes, fresh from her closet in our flat. Even after all these years, they smell like her, though the scents are fading and I desperately don’t want them to. I put a few of her things in a plastic bag to prevent her from escaping.
I miss her smile. I miss her hand on my forehead. I miss her kiss and her embrace.
I miss everything about her.
She had a massive stroke in 1982. She was only 51 then. But she lived another 19 years, bound to a wheelchair, half her brain cells gone. Toward the end of her life, we exchanged roles. I became a mother, taking care of her, making all the important decisions in her life. She was almost like my child, completely dependent on me.
And yet, every time I gazed into her eyes, I thought of the immense sacrifices she made — as a young Bengali woman who came to these shores not speaking English, not knowing how to operate an electric stove or drive a car. She endured the death of her own parents from afar, endured her loneliness. Never shared her pain with us; only her joy.
Only later, only after she died and it was too late to talk, did I discover her journals and writings. Only then did I realize how incredibly steely my mother was.
Only now do I appreciate her fully. Now that she is gone. Forever.
And a deep void fills my life. Today on the anniversary of her death. And every day that I live.
After 'le catastrophe'
Celebrity in Haiti
More about Mariot
You read about Mariot in an earlier post.
In January and February, he was hired by CNN to drive us around. On my latest trip, he drove me around and translated for me. Mariot’s English, all self-taught, is very good.
Stuck in Port-au-Prince traffic, Mariot and I enjoyed interesting conversation.
He gave me a book this time: “Like the Dew that Waters the Grass.” It’s a collection of words from Haitian women — about gender violence, political turmoil, Aristide, jobs, lives and most of all, perseverance and courage.
Mariot signed the book to me: “Don’t try to be a copy of somebody else.”
Even more precious is that he rescued the book from the rubble of his quake-destroyed home.
Thank you, Mariot.
The rainy season
It rained heavily in Port-au-Prince tonight.
I stood in the balcony of the Plaza hotel — the exact spot from which Anderson Cooper broadcasted his show in January — and looked beyond. At the Champs de Mars, the city’s central plaza that is now home to thousands of people left without anywhere to go after the massive January 12 earthquake.
I thought about what the rain must feel like under a flimsy tent or plastic tarp, water seeping in from every direction. I watched as people tried to close shut the entrances, some of them just thin cotton sheets or blankets. Suddenly, the constant noise of the street came to a halt, replaced by the thud of monstrous drops falling hard from the sky. And the laughter of gleeful children cooling off after another scorching day.
The water started building along the roadside and I knew that in many of the camps, dirt had turned to mud. I was at the Petionville Golf Club earlier in the day, where resident Vital Junior had told me how treacherous the place becomes when it rains. About 50,000 people are living on a hilly nine-hole golf course at the once-swanky club for the elite. From its perch, the club affords a beautiful view of the city on a clear day. So many of Haiti’s elite must have sipped cocktails in the clubhouse and looked down on those below.
Now, the view was marred by human misery.
From the Plaza balcony, I ran back to my room, wet from the few short steps through the hotel’s open-air courtyard. What must it feel like to have no shelter from the elements.
I listened to the rain; reminded me of the monsoons in India. I knew more was on the way for Haiti — May starts the rainy season here.
And people who have already suffered too much will suffer some more.
Back to Haiti
I returned to Port-au-Prince yesterday.
Before January, it was a city known to me only through books and a few films and of course, the news – always bad news. But CNN sent me to Haiti to report on the aftermath of the earthquake. And my eyes were opened to a whole new world.
I saw Haiti for the first time after devastation and suffering of epic proportions. I regretted that I had not seen it before.
But before in what? “Normal times?” What were normal times for Haiti? This country has been through more turmoil and pain than any other nearby.
In news stories, you see phrases like “the most impoverished nation in the Western hemisphere.” You see on CNN that Haiti’s comeback will be that much more difficult because of lack of government, lack of system, lack of everything.
When I was there in January and February, I worked closely with a CNN producer, Edvige Jean-Francois. She taught me to see Haiti the way it ought to be seen – outside the American lens. She showed me the richness of culture, the wealth of Haiti. Not in monetary terms, but in other ways that matter.
Now, almost four months later, I am back.
I still see uncleared rubble and buildings teetering on the verge of collapse. But the smell of death has gone. There is no longer that dazed look on people’s faces – the look you have after you have lost everything, when you haven’t yet distilled the horror that has befallen your homeland.
On the way from the airport, I saw school children wearing bright checkered uniforms. I knew then that Haiti was progressing. Slowly, perhaps. But moving forward.
