Author: Boria Majumdar

‘You fetch social-media likes.’ It was October 2022, and I was on my way to Australia for the T20 World Cup. I was checking in at Kolkata Airport when I got a call from Subhayan Chakraborty, one of my colleagues. He asked if I was amenable to two young and aspiring social-media influencers working with him on a show. I had always wanted to promote new talent on the RevSportz platform. But when he mentioned their names to me, a switch was flicked in my head. These two gentlemen, whom I have subsequently come to know reasonably well, had both…

Twenty-six months. More than 800 days, to be exact. I hadn’t stepped inside a cricket ground in India. Rather, I wasn’t allowed to. All because of a series of untruths paraded by a cricketer and the subsequent social-media vitriol that followed. Yes, I have served my ban. Complied with every condition imposed on me. And yes, I am now entitled to go back. To the Eden Gardens, or any other stadium in the country. As we parked the car opposite the Club House and stepped out, it all started to come back. The same chatter, the same intensity and the…

During the two years of my ban, the event that I was most apprehensive about was the World Cup on home soil in October 2023. It was the biggest cricket event in India in years, and to not be able to do my work in the manner that I was used to was going to hurt a lot. It wasn’t a level playing field with the sanction still in place and I was starting out with a serious handicap. When I compared the Cricket World Cup to the Asian Games, for instance, I knew as a team we would do…

I may have been away from cricket, but there were occasions in the two years when I realised that, even in cricket, not all was lost. My rather surprising meeting with Ravi Ashwin was one such occasion. On my flight back after the deferred England-India Test match at Edgbaston in July 2022, I was pleasantly surprised to find Ravi Ashwin, one of my favourite players and someone I know really well, in the seat immediately in front of me. It had been Mayank Agarwal on the way to Birmingham. Now, it was Ashwin. The cricket Gods, it seemed, were intent…

I left for Oxford on May 15, 2022. With the abuse continuing unabated, it was perhaps the best thing to do to retain sanity. Just two days earlier, on May 13, Pullela Gopichand, one of my closest friends, visited Kolkata for a function. He was staying at the ITC Royal Bengal and messaged me saying that he was coming to the city. Gopi and I go back to 2003-04, and have been extremely close friends ever since. While I wasn’t really in the mood to meet anyone, I responded instinctively to Gopi’s message, and asked him if he would like…

In one of the book signings today, a gentleman asked me where the maximum abuse came from. It was a pretty straightforward answer. And the truth is, it came from The Cricketer’s official fan page and was engineered by the principal administrator of that platform. We were shocked to see that he was allowed to go ahead without any checks, whipping up a frenzy day in and day out – directed at my wife and family, who had absolutely no role in the entire issue. The fan page was actually used as a troll army by those in power and…

The athlete is always right because he is an athlete. An Indian reality. For days and months, I sought validation. I tried to make people understand that what was in the public domain was not the truth. There was another side to it, my side, which should have been heard at that point. Entire articles and opinion pieces were written even in well-respected dailies without asking for a response from me. Public sympathy was not in my favour. The Cricketer who had represented the national team for over a decade, was always more powerful than I on social media. His…

A 100 international hundreds. Impossible, but true. A testament to greatness that can never be challenged by even the most vociferous critic. Cricket has always celebrated Jack Hobbs scoring 100 first-class hundreds. In most debates on the world’s best opening batsman of all time, Hobbs has beaten his other illustrious successors like Sunil Gavaskar to the finish line on the strength of these hundreds in the first-class game. They are a monument to his hunger and phenomenal run-scoring ability. The difference between first-class and Test cricket is like chalk and cheese. It is akin to the difference between India playing…

YPU. A term that starts with one of the lesser-used letters in the English language, and three letters that are seldom used in this configuration. But strung together, they had the power to nearly destroy a life, and deeply damage a career built with two decades of hard work. Why do I write this now? Do I not know that I will be abused and trolled relentlessly once this book is published? Have my family and I not had enough? More than half a million abusive tweets in the week between February 20, 2022 and February 26, 2022. Weren’t those…

Maria Emilianova and Boria Majumdar At an age when most teenagers are struggling with high-school trigonometry or an acne outbreak, D Gukesh is the Candidates chess champion, storming past a strong field of eight, including two other Indians, to book his place against Ding Liren, the Chinese who took over as champion after Magnus Carlsen lost his appetite for classical chess. After his epochal triumph in Toronto, Gukesh spoke exclusively to Boria Majumdar, RevSportz editor-in-chief, and Maria Emilianova. Also included are excerpts from his interaction last January, where he had spoken of the influence of Viswanathan Anand and much more.…