Tamasha on the seas

Indians love tamasha, a rich word which means fun, frolic, excitement and surprise all rolled into one. The Indian Premier League, the world’s richest cricket league, is great tamasha, as are Bollywood movies. Between 3rd and 5th March the sea front in south Mumbai, which saw powerboat racing come to the country for the first time, provided the latest tamasha. The only problem for the organisers was that, unlike Bollywood movies where the surprise comes at the end, here the tamasha’s surprise came even before the event had begun and very nearly stopped this grandly titled Indian Grand Prix of the Seas being staged.

The first surprise was in February at the press conference being held along Mumbai’s historic sea front, where George V had landed back in 1911. James Durbin, the chief executive of Powerboat P1, was talking to a local television reporter when he saw something that was certainly not in the script: a bulldozer approaching the site. It had been sent by the city’s Municipal Corporation, which claimed that Procam, the local organiser, had not paid dues of UK£326,190 for organising the Mumbai Marathon the previous month. [Procam disputes this]. The bulldozer swiftly demolished the stage that had been built and the chief minister of the local state government of Maharashtra who was on his way to the event, deciding he did not want to be in the path of a JCB, ordered his car to be turned around.