Ganguly abt his lyf in Dadagiri !!

In his make-up room, Ganguly, like his school-going fan, shows little trace of being hounded by a monster called the Kolkata Knight Riders. The room is clean and sparse, the clothes hanger nearly bare, the rifle-wielding security person is requested to stand out for a while, and he has just finished his day’s make-up. (“Takes two minutes actually,” he says with a laugh.) “I did the show to try out something different. I used to be very camera-shy, not much of a TV personality, but I wanted to see where this thing takes me,” says Ganguly, who is now doing the second season of the show.

You wonder what made him choose a Bangla show populated with fawning middle-aged women, starstruck men, and difficult general knowledge questions, when he had been on national TV, rubbing shoulders with Shah Rukh Khan and Malaika Arora Khan, tasting showbiz in its skin-sequin-sound best.

He frowns in recollection of his stint as a judge on Knights and Angels, the TV hunt for a KKR cheerleader that he did before taking up Dadagiri. “I was extremely uncomfortable doing it. I did it as part of KKR, and I had cricket at the back of my mind. I didn’t understand it, I didn’t like it a lot either,” he says. 

Those who’ve met him off the field, like cricket writer Ayaz Memon, say Ganguly is showing his other side to the public for the first time. “He was almost mercurial on field. And off the field, he was confident, sharp and knowledgeable. The latter is what we get to see on the show,” he says. A side that has impressed the average Bengali.

And Ganguly knows that too well. “I was known to be aggressive as a cricketer. But that was largely situational and driven by a passion for the sport. Otherwise, I am very quiet and soft-spoken. You can call me docile. I am just being myself on the show. I make the contestants comfortable. You might think they are star-struck, but Bengalis are very demonstrative by nature,” he says. 

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