Many many moons ago, Suhel Seth was a well known debater and talker on the college circuit in Calcutta (before it became Kolkata) and I was a student at IIT KGP. I remember being on a JustAMinute round with him where I did not do too badly. After I graduated, I noticed Suhel again - with is brother he was running some advertising company and they would use the tagline Bakwaas Advertising, First Class Bread to promote the product (never remembered the name of the brand, sorry). Once in a while Suhel would make a TV appearance, act Mr know-all and talk his out into and out of everything. India has always needed a fast, glib talker, it seems. Over time, he became a certified celeb, he failed in is acting attempts but is a bonafide TV talker - when they need to show a sophisticated educated professional, they call on Suhel, who I assume obliges. And as most sophisticated educated professionals, he can hold fort on most topics under the sun - who cares what the topic is. I met Viren Rasquinha about 2 years ago courtesy my friend Ashish Gupta who was helping him with the OGQ (olympicgoldquest.in/) project. I was, like all sports fans, only too happy to meet an Indian Hockey Captain (we played a bit of hockey at school/college like all folks of our generation). Viren was charming, humble and so focused on his project.I offered him help with whatever fund-raising, tech contacts I had. To be frank have not been able to do much at all. Yesterday, I saw that Suhel insulted Viren at the TimesLit festival and used the words dont know what that bald guy was doing on a panel on sport, whats he done. I tweeted this yesterday : Hey @virenrasquinha, u only made India hockey captain; @suhelseth made bakwaas into celeb status. Cant match that. I am very very happy to see twitter users put Suhel on the mat. He has apologized which is the least one can do. If he has any real grace he can make the apology impactful by raising resources for OGQ to succeed. Will he?
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 08:09:00 +0000