At the Salt Lake Stadium, we all saw a very hapless Satadru Dutta screaming into the microphone, asking people to vacate the stadium. He tried his level best to keep announcing and was then seen passing the mic to a police officer, knowing that the event had gone out of control.
That’s what brings me to ask: why did Satadru have to make the announcement? It wasn’t his expertise or his domain. The hosts should have done it and taken control. As event hosts, they should have owned the event. Taken control. All the hosts needed to do was give him confidence, take charge when he was losing his nerve, and get things back in sync.
They ought to have advised him not to bring Messi on to the field of play until the people inside had vacated the pitch. Constant announcements that Messi wouldn’t come out if people did not leave were the need of the hour. Then, once that happened, you get Messi in and allow only those with Field of Play (FOP) access inside. Whatever you did, you needed to get control back and redeem the situation. The event could have been salvaged and Kolkata spared a disaster.
In my book, two people in Kolkata could have hosted the event: Mir Afsar Ali, who I think was approached first, and Gautam Bhattacharya, who was asked to do Delhi later. These things need to be done months in advance and closed. In this case, the organisers did not bother to communicate with Mir for weeks, and he was eventually forced to withdraw, feeling disrespected. Gautam da did not do it based on what happened, and there was an acute lack of professionalism at every step.
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This is yet again a very Indian thing. We do 95 percent of things right and think the remaining five percent isn’t important. Satadru worked for three years to get this tour done. He worked hard to get sponsors and others on board. Yet, he did not work on the finer points and left things to chance. There was no contact with Mir for weeks, and it resulted in a breakdown.
Hosts who were asked to step in at the last moment had little or no experience handling a crisis of this nature, and couldn’t take charge. You can’t blame them either. The truth is, the lack of attention to detail cost us the event.
As someone who has done events globally, I always make it a point to prepare days in advance. Be ready and visualise all kinds of possibilities. You need to have a Plan B and a Plan C, knowing full well what you are dealing with. Anyone who had an idea of this event would have known that VVIP entitlement would be a feature and needed to plan for it. Last-minute choices meant there was no time to do so. This was one of the reasons why I declined to host Delhi, as there was no time to get ready.
When I do a deep dive into what failed and led to the catastrophe, many small but decisive steps come to light. As professionals, each one of us has a job to do. Satadru was the promoter of the event, not the host or the security in charge. For him to push people – or even try to push people out – and scream into the microphone in desperation was the result of not doing the small things well.
There is a lesson in this for all of us: decentralise and play as a team. Do what your domain expertise is, and don’t hold too many cards close to your chest for too long. To see the event fail pained us all. After all the effort put in, this wasn’t the outcome the city needed. The same applies to Satadru and everyone who worked on it for months and years.
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