It was an unusually bizarre week in the city. The weather, stuffy and suffocating, may have had something to do with it; a touch of the sun prompting people, otherwise credited with good sense, into saying and doing things which some of them may have started regretting.

It started with the state’s sports department confiding that Netaji Indoor Stadium would be renovated and let out for wedding receptions. The move, the babus are reported to have assured, will more than double the current level of revenue collection and the rent, they added, would be in the region of a trifling Rs 4.5 lakh per day.

Then came the announcement from the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC), that it would provide land to skipper Sourav Ganguly at Behala for a token sum of Re 1.

Sourav is an icon the city is immensely proud of, but does he really need such grand gestures from fund-strapped CMC when he is among the highest individual income tax payers in the country?

Such decisions also appear arbitrary and discriminatory at the same time. If Sourav is to be given land for Re 1, why not dozens of other bodies doing remarkable work against greater odds?

The sports department, of course, takes the cake. After having failed to promote various sports, it appears to have discovered ‘marriages’ to be a better money-spinning sport. The indoor stadium is expensive to maintain and the cost of lighting the area alone must be prohibitive, driving away most amateur sports organisations, even as the stadium was liberally used for consumer fairs and political rallies.

If the idea of a marriage hall clicks and brings in more moolah, the sports department will surely think of more lucrative means of using the stadium.

We do hope the department will come up with more innovative ideas of using the indoor stadium. For starters, it could hold a competition and invite ideas, because clearly it has run out of them.

The balmy week had just begun, though. Parents, relatives and friends of Dhananjoy Chatterjee, convicted for the rape and murder of a teenaged girl, descended on the city and threatened to commit mass suicide if Dhananjoy was executed.

And the state’s solitary hangman had become smarter and was demanding money, a bottle of whisky or a job for a family member as price for an interview. Nata Mullick, who appears to have acquired a dubious celebrity status, is possibly the first ‘official’ executioner anywhere in the world to publicly lobby for hastening the death of a convict.

Then there was the chief minister’s wife, among others, sharing a platform with the executioner and clamouring for ‘death’ to a 42-year-old man who has been in jail for 14 years, 10 of them waiting for death.

The curious case of Dhananjoy Chatterjee has several discordant notes. When the governor first turned down the convict’s mercy petition, it is reported, an appeal was filed before the Supreme Court with the plea that the governor had failed to consider all the materials produced before him.

The apex court allowed the appeal and sent the mercy petition back to the governor for re-consideration.

The avalanche of reports in the media do not, however, spell out what those materials were that prompted the apex court to urge for a review.

The second discordant note is the apparent show of solidarity for the convict in his native village. His neighbours and fellow-villagers, judging by what they said on camera, believe in his innocence and apparently nurse some affection for the “shy Dhanu”.

This aspect has not been adequately explored or explained yet.

Finally, the lawyer of the convict said something rather interesting. If Dhananjoy could afford a better and more renowned lawyer, he is reported to have said, the man would have been acquitted by now. The loaded statement raises several uncomfortable questions.