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| Three young fans wearing Sachin Tendulkar masks step out of Eden Gardens after India wrapped up the Test in three days. Picture by Sanjoy Ghosh |
Calcutta boy Mohammed Shami crushed 90kg of rose petals along with the West Indian batting.
The Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB)’s grand plan to bid farewell to Sachin Tendulkar by getting three aircraft to shower rose petals on him failed to take off on Friday because it hadn’t bargained for the Test ending in three days.
Officials said 90kg out of the planned 199kg of rose petals were packed and ready for the aerial felicitation, but the aircraft didn’t have permission to fly on Friday.
Trans Bharat Aviation, the company entrusted with the job, had permission for the Sachin sorties on Saturday and Sunday. “We were waiting to load the petals on our aircraft this afternoon in preparation for either tomorrow or the day after when we learnt that the match had ended,” Saket Agarwal of Trans Bharat Aviation told Metro. “It’s disappointing that we missed out on the opportunity.”
By the time it became clear that Shami was in a hurry to wrap up the Windies innings, it was too late to get the necessary permission for the aircraft to fly over Eden on Friday itself.
“The major portion of the 199kg of rose petals was supposed to come from Bangalore...We have cancelled the orders,” CAB treasurer Biswarup Dey said. “We had made alternative arrangements in case (enough) rose petals were not available…. Once the match ended today, we tried but couldn’t arrange for air-traffic time slots.”
Sources said around 3.30pm representatives of the company contracted by the CAB to organise the show turned up at the hangar of Trans Bharat Aviation in Behala with polythene bags containing 90kg of red rose petals. The rest of the consignment was to have arrived later.
Florists estimate that 199kg of petals would be equivalent to 400,000 roses. At the flower market in Howrah, roses were selling for around Rs 3 a piece on Friday.
The plan was to shower the petals from the aircraft over the entire prize distribution arena, creating an approximately two-inch thick carpet of roses. “Our aircraft are two-seater Cessna-152 light-engine planes capable of carrying around 30kg of flowers at a time,” Agarwal said. “We would have made more than one sortie each to airdrop the 199kg of flowers. It would have been such a spectacle.”
The petals were to be stashed into 10kg cloth bags for the co-pilots of the three aircraft to release them from 500-800ft above Eden.
“The aircraft carrying the petals were to hover over the Hooghly and fly over Vidyasagar Setu to reach Eden on cue,” said Pradip Biswas, CEO of Trans Bharat.
A senior official of the CAB said the idea was to make Sachin realise the “intensity of the emotions of his fans” on his last day at Eden as a player.
“We were looking forward to this occasion. A lot of hard work had gone behind arranging this ceremony for Sachin. That we had to cut it short is a setback,” Dey said.
Besides permission from the DGCA and clearance from air traffic control at Calcutta airport, any aviation company requires the government and the police’s nod to make a sortie like the one planned for Sachin. “That isn’t possible over a phone call,” an official said.
Not that anyone would have been unaware of Tests finishing in three days quite frequently in the modern era.
As Sachin Tendulkar took the field on what turned out to be his last day at Eden as a player, a large contingent of schoolchildren trooped into the stands to watch the master in action. The children of Asian International School in Howrah, most of whom were at the stadium for the first time, were brought by STAR Sports. Sachin had completed 10,000 one-day runs before most of the children, aged between 9 and 12, were even born. Metro sat with them in Block C on Day 3 to find out what the little master means to them, what they think he should do post-retirement, who is likely to succeed him and what they would like to watch at Eden.
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