Word: bengals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...while these new supermarkets still only account for less than 5% of the industry, opposition to their presence is growing louder. In the past few months there have been protests in Uttar Pradesh in central India and the communist-ruled Kerala and West Bengal, including violent demonstrations last September that forced Reliance Fresh, the food stores arm of Reliance Retail, to shut their shops and lay off staff. "We want the government to stop large corporations from entering the retail segment until it puts in place a national policy that is agreeable to all the stakeholders including small traders, shopkeepers...
...rankings do not lie. At Kolkata's packed derby match, the play is hapless. But it is roared on in an atmosphere of intensity and passion unparalleled anywhere else in Asia. The enmity between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, the teams respectively of the city's West and East Bengali populations, mirrors the Catholic-Protestant sectarianism of Glasgow's Celtic versus Rangers. It stretches back before Indian independence and is embedded into the very fabric of Kolkata society. Prices for prawn and hilsa, the preferred seafood of each community, fluctuate depending on the results of the clubs' matches. An entire...
...north of the city where most well-to-do Bengalis lived. From its founding, the club was consciously modern and nationalistic, eager to cast off the much-invoked colonial stereotype of the effeminate Oriental. Drinking and smoking were strictly forbidden, and young athletes, some scouted from remote villages in Bengal and other parts of the country, had their school scores monitored...
...keeping with the legacy of Indian independence, the aura of nationalism that surrounded Mohun Bagan soon faded with the conflicts of partition. The well-heeled Calcuttans who ran Mohun Bagan often discriminated against athletes from the eastern parts of Bengal, whose accents, culinary tastes and even modes of dress differed. A contingent of eastern officials and players broke away from Mohun Bagan and set up the East Bengal club in 1920. The rivalry was ramped up after 1947, when the departing British divided Bengal along religious lines, its east becoming East Pakistan. Millions of Hindu refugees fled west to Kolkata...
...Matches between Mohun Bagan and East Bengal dominated the Kolkata sports scene for decades thereafter. "It was hardly football; it was religion," says Kishore Bhimani, a veteran journalist who did football commentary in Kolkata in the 1970s. Though the playing squads were often mixed - eight of Mohun Bagan's 11 who famously beat the British in 1911 were from East Bengali backgrounds - supporters, for the most part, were fiercely sectarian. On both sides, they would routinely wait three days in line to collect tickets. The names of game-winning goal scorers and clumsy defenders entered city lore year after year...