Click to play videoKolkata: Durga Puja is barely a month away and artisans of Kolkata's Kumartuli are going through their busiest time making images of the goddess.
But this time it's the Mahisasura or the evil force in the divine battle, which is taking forms of sports personalities who we all know.
Dilip Pal, who has been making images of the goddess for past three decades, is a busy man.
Pal's focus is more on the demon and the Mahisasura resembles India's cricket coach Greg Chappell.
"Our beloved Sourav Ganguly is outside the field for a long time now. So for the sake of Sourav, I perceived this image as Ma Durga welcoming Chappell as guest in our country and requesting him to give Sourav another opportunity to play," Dilip says.
Ganguly and the pujas are two factors, which most Bengalis can easily relate to.
Now that they are successfully merged, puja organisers feel this could well be another potent form of registering a community protest.
"This year we felt that Chappell should be portrayed in this manner. We could imagine him in place of the asura (demon) because of the injustice he did towards the Bengalis," puja organiser Avik Patra says.
Chappell is not the only villain in Pal's images.
A head butting Zinedine Zidane is also very much in the making. That's because the artist feels that it was the devil that led the footballer to that violent act on field.
Not so long ago, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya used the binary of good and evil while talking of his perception of the arena of sports.
Looks like it would be the Mahisasuras that the organisers would be counting on more than the goddess for their puja themes this year.
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