Princes are like this. They take life as they tweak it to come. They never allow life as it comes to them. They set the term; life has to follow.
Princes are like this. They always fall in love with a distressed damsel who is incarcerated elsewhere. They undertake an expeditious odyssey to rescue her from her oppressors only to marry her to live thereafter happily.
Diego Maradona is a prince and he must qualify both these qualities.
Maradona celebrates life the way he wants to. Life, to him, is a happy ocean to cruise along with flamboyance; never a deterrence.
Maradona is wedded to football that he spends his entire life with, until death, in wild passion after rescuing it from the drabness of coach-planned moronic man-markingness with flashes of individual brilliance. (Tradition always trails against individual flourish of talent irretrievably.) Rare is such stellar instance of conjugal faithfulness; rare is the instance of such intense bonding of conjugality in the history of marriage anywhere in the world.
Maradona is a fall guy to those who strictly go by the rule book. To them, a city or two can be demolished with a feather-touch of a button that leaves them dead within moments; charred lives lie behind. To them, taking drug is a cardinal sin.
These people hardly are to blame. They see the world in the shape of themselves. They measure it in the size of a tea-spoon. Because they are spoon-fed by conventions as they bow to them for fear of retribution from society or state.
They cannot realize a prince. Because he dazzles their eyes with his princely rebellion.
Maradona‘s left foot sends out shots to goals like thunderbolts. His left foot dodges past opponents like lightning wonder.
Is it any wonder that Maradona bids farewell to this planet, on a day, his icon, the beacon of Left movement in Cuba, in post cold-war world, Fiedel Castro, whose tattoo he bears on his left hand and leg, died on the same day four years back?
This world is getting starved of its people day by day. Pandemic contributes largely while natural deaths also chip in.
“We’re getting distant from each other gradually…” Shokti Chattopadhaya says in his poem, Hemonter Aronye Ami Postman, wistfully.
Yes, the prince leaves the day Shokti came to this planet decades back.
Yes, Shokti Chattopadhaya, too, was a rebel. A romantic. An Iconoclast, like our prince. Like our prince, Shokti mesmerized us with his “Hand of God”.