The eye-popping sculpture — two muscular legs topped by a globe for a torso — that greeted visitors to the Salt Lake stadium for over eight-and-a-half years has been given the boot.
Tea stall vendors at the Kadapara junction, a stone’s throw away from the statue’s perch across the EM Bypass, could not specify when on Friday night the demolition took place. But on Saturday morning, all that office-goers could spot were a couple of boots with socks. By Sunday, even those were gone and two holes were all that remained.
This was one statue from which the creator had sought to create a distance from Day One. Subrata Banerjee, the man behind numerous crowd-pulling pujas, had told The Telegraph Salt Lake in 2017, when the work was installed ahead of the Fifa Under-17 World Cup: “Please make it clear that I am not responsible for the design.”
The article carried on the cover of The Telegraph Salt Lake’s October 13 edition carried the following quote from him: “The drawing came from the chief minister and was handed to me by the PWD. I had to decide on the angle of the feet, the proportions and the 3D muscle formation. Rather, I had the scope to show my creativity in the murals I made at the ground floor foyer.”
The Beleghata resident further said that he had been asked to cover a space 14ft in width. “The legs were supposed to tower over the entire gate for people to pass underneath. But that would have restricted the height of vehicles passing through. Neither was there space in the approach for a view from afar. So the idea was modified, reducing the height to 28ft,” he had said then.
The cover page article on Subrata Banerjee and the sculpture in 2017
Contacted on Monday, Banerjee, who conceived and executed the theme for the then sports minister Arup Biswas’s Suruchi Sangha puja pandal for eight years in a row, was more forthcoming. “The design was sketched by Madam (former chief minister Mamata Banerjee) — two legs sticking out of a globe. I reasoned with Saheb (Biswas) that ‘At least, let me add the waist’.
He asked me to create a miniature model to show to Didi. This much modification I could do, other than convincing the authorities to reduce its height and place it between the entry and exit gates rather than make it tower over both,” said the man who stays in Beleghata, just off the Bypass..
Asked to suggest an idea to replace the dismantled installation, Banerjee said he was in favour of something that incorporated the essence of the three local football clubs — Mohun Bagan, East Bengal and Mohammedan Sporting. “It could be something using their jersey colours,” he said.
