Shashi Tharoor and Gopalkrishna Gandhi at the venue of the book launch. Aranya Sen

Calcutta, Oct. 31: A request to Shashi Tharoor: please think before you tweet your disappointment with good old Calcutta traffic.

Not that he hasn’t reason to be put off: a traffic snarl apparently prevented Sourav Ganguly from attending the city launch of the junior foreign minister’s cricket book, Shadows Across the Playing Field, this evening.

Sources, however, suggested there could be more than one reason for the delay that saw the former India captain reach the venue minutes after the programme had ended and Tharoor had left with the other VIP guest, governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi.

The organisers said they had been in constant touch with Sourav over the mobile and learnt from him he was stuck near No. 4 Bridge on the Park Circus connector, a well-known bottleneck that, according to police, saw no “unusual traffic jams” this evening.

“Sourav Ganguly is on the way,” the announcer kept repeating after every little while at the central Calcutta hotel hosting the launch.

“He is caught in a traffic jam. He will be with us any moment.”

Sourav on the ground floor of the venue. Aranya Sen

Tharoor and Gandhi waited on the dais, just as Steve Waugh had done a few miles away at the Eden Gardens, at the toss before the 2001 Test.

The launch of the book, co-authored by Tharoor and Shahrayar Khan and launched in Mumbai by Sachin Tendulkar, was scheduled for 5pm.

At 5.15, with the shadows lengthening and Sourav still nowhere in sight, the organisers were forced to start without him. Tharoor had a Rotary Club programme to attend, too, before leaving for the airport to catch his 8.55pm Delhi flight.

From the start till the programme ended around 6.10pm, every time the door opened there was an expectant hush. Heads, including those of the dignitaries on the stage, turned to see if Dada -- never the quickest mover on the cricket pitch -- had arrived.

“The traffic does seem to be worse than when I came here in 1969,” Tharoor, who had been a Calcuttan for three years as a schoolboy, later said.

“Yesterday there was an event (the BCCI Health and Lifestyle Fair) I was to reach at 5pm but we reached at six (that too with a police escort clearing the way before him). That’s how bad the traffic is.”

Ratan Tata and Shah Rukh Khan would agree -- both had been stuck in city traffic -- as would former SAIL chairman V.S. Jain who had to switch to a journalist’s car to reach his destination.

But before he taps out a denunciation on Twitter, Tharoor may want to take a perspective broader than a 140-character limit affords.

Sources said Sourav had been shooting for his quiz show Dadagiri Unlimited at a studio on Jessore Road near the airport. “Two episodes were shot today and he could not leave before 5.15pm,” a source said. The studio refused comment.

Police said the traffic on the rather long route “was the same as on any normal Saturday evening”.

“There are no reports of any unusual traffic jams from the Park Circus connector to the Park Circus crossing this evening,” deputy commissioner (traffic) Dilip Banerjee said.

Tharoor later said he was disappointed that Sourav couldn’t make it, not just because he was a great cricketer and captain but also because he is a “fellow Xaverian”. Both Tharoor and Sourav had been students of St Xavier’s School, a few hundred metres from the book launch venue.

The book launch organisers had planned an interaction between the two, the cricketer presenting the players’ points of view and the minister the fans’.

Gandhi told the audience he was looking forward to the discussion. But since it was getting late, Tharoor entertained the crowd with cricketing anecdotes from his life.

When the governor was asked to make an observation on one such story, he said: “I will make three observations; that might help Ganguly get here.”

But even slowing the game down, a tactic the much-fined Sourav would know only too well, didn’t help.

With inputs from Sudeshna Banerjee