A 11 yr school boy's day out with DADA..!!

He was the aggressive captain with the shirt-stripping victory dance. But as quiz master on a Bengali channel, Sourav Ganguly is short on gimmicks, big on smiles. He appears to have mellowed down. “You can almost call me docile,” he says.

Shubhajit haldar is a surprisingly patient 11-year-old. He turns up on a quiz show set right after school and quietly stands in a corner, cradling his cricketing helmet and pad, careful not to run into the TV crew gone berserk at the Howrah Indoor Stadium auditorium. As the producer rushes him backstage, you wonder if he is an exception to the PlayStation generation. But Shubhajit would not miss this chance for anything.

After all, he was born in a Bengal which had, by now, eagerly edited its bible of legends to include Sourav Ganguly, and in whose shirt-stripping victory call, Bengalis had found a befitting answer to Rajinikanth’s cigarette-flick. The Class VI student’s cameo in Ganguly’s prime-time quiz show on Zee Bangla, Dadagiri Unlimited, has also urged his parents to leave their respective jobs for the day and be in attendance on the set for eight long hours.

“I dress up in my cricketing gear, and hand over dada the gifts he gives to the participants. During breaks and before the shoot, he talks to me, discusses cricket, shows me a trick or two. It’s tiring after school, but I would do anything to be around dada,” chirps Shubhajit, who has been learning cricket for the last five years.

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