Indian football did not need this row

I have to confess that I didn’t watch Baichung Bhutia dance. I caught bits and parts of the dance show, which he won, on news channels, but never saw his performances.

Yet, I was updated about the eliminations, the judges’ comments, the costumes and the dances by my mother. She would give me details over breakfast, the one meal we eat
together courtesy the unmentionable hours I work.

Her final verdict was that Hard Kaur was by far the best dancer on the show, but Baichung Bhutia put in a lot of hard work and improved with every performance. In fact, she was quite excited the day Bhutia won and has since been keeping herself abreast with everything written or spoken about him in the papers or on television. She’s even keen to watch him play football. That, my friends, was the highlight for me. My mother interested in Bhutia, not MS Dhoni!

But well, she is unique as far as mothers go. She wakes up to watch India play cricket in New Zealand. She thinks nobody can take a catch like Mohammad Azharuddin. She
argues that Gundappa Viswanath was a better batsman than Sunil Gavaskar. She can
tell John Terry from Frank Lampard. But Indian football, I didn’t think that would interest her, ever.

Was I wrong! All it took was a twinkle-toed Bhutia showing his tapori moves to the tune of ‘Dil mein baji guitar’.

I’ll tell you another little story.

I have a friend in New Delhi, a fellow journalist. He has a 10-year-old son, who became a die-hard Bhutia fan after watching the show. Recently, the boy convinced his dad to take him for an exhibition match because Renedy Singh was playing in it. He wanted to take a picture with Renedy because he had read somewhere that the Manipuri footballer is a friend of Bhutia’s. The boy recorded the whole match on his handycam, got the picture clicked, showed it off to his friends and now it’s the screensaver on his computer.

What Bhutia did in three months on the show, Indian football hasn’t been able to do in six decades. He made Indian footballers look cool. He was the perfect ambassador for the sport — soft-spoken, humble, hard-working and, importantly, a winner.

I am in no way trying to say that Bhutia’s winning the dance show will suddenly sky-rocket Indian football’s stocks. Nor will it improve the quality of the game in the country. But it certainly created a buzz, an interest in the young and the old. Got them thinking, maybe our footballers can also be as cool as the Ronaldos, the Kakas and Zidanes someday. Maybe pursuing football is a good idea. Look at Bhutia, he isn’t doing so bad.

That’s why I think Mohun Bagan football club erred in publicly humiliating Bhutia and suspending him for six months without pay. Firstly, he took the club’s permission (coach Karim Bencherifa vouched for that) and the show started even when the I-League, India’s premier club competition was on. Club didn’t object then. Importantly, Bhutia didn’t miss a single I-League game. The only game he missed was an inconsequential off-season exhibition match. Surely that didn’t deserve such stern action.

And surely not Baichung Bhutia, the one man who has done more for Indian football than anybody else I can think of.