Proud to have edited a new book written by Shyamal Bhattacharjee, Midas Touch and Miracles of Indian Sports.
Some books chronicle sports as a procession of scores and statistics, while others step behind the curtain where the play is rehearsed in sweat, silence, and sorrow. Midas Touch and Miracles of Indian Sports belong unmistakably to the latter tradition. If Shyamal Bhattacharjee’s earlier psychological writings carried a lamp into the inner cave of the human mind, this work strides onto a harsher stage like a Shakespearean battlefield where the ground is strewn with swords, broken dreams, scorched training fields, cracked stadium benches, and lonely railway platforms of Indian sport where confidence is not coached but salvaged from ruins.
This book does not arrive as a sudden idea. Instead, it enters like a ghost summoned in the fifth act, demanding to be heard. Bhattacharjee appears less as an author and more as a witness called late to testify before history’s court. The question animating the book is not how victories occur. But what survives long enough inside an athlete to make victory possible at all. Indian sports, in his telling, are a pipeline, a crucible, and a forge where souls are tested as ruthlessly as Hamlet tests truth.
Indian sporting history, Bhattacharjee argues, resembles a river that, like Shakespeare’s forgetful kings, no longer remembers the bloodline of its own sources. Federations rule like distant landlords, harvesting success while leaving the cultivators starved. Dreams are recruited when they are young, brutally disciplined, and silently discarded. An athlete’s life is first divided into seasons and then into obscurity. Many champions vanish from public memory as if written in sand before the tide of applause recedes. For Bhattacharjee, Indian sports is less a relay race and more a battlefield triage where fate plays the role of a merciless stage manager, ushering only a few into the spotlight while the rest bleed into anonymity behind the scenes.
Poverty lies at the foundation of this tragedy in India. Nearly every Indian athlete, Bhattacharjee reminds us, begins with hunger for success. Parents struggle to feed themselves, let alone fund equipment. Shoes wear out before dreams do. Injuries can be both medical events and existential threats. A torn ligament in India is a physical rupture, and a dagger plunged into the family’s future is worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy.
Then, there is the public gaze. Indian athletes are tried nightly on televised courts. Commentary becomes cruel. Social media has become a firing squad. The untrained spectator, armed with opinions but stripped of empathy, turns defeat into character assassination. The athlete, already bruised, is forced to shoulder national frustration like Atlas in a tragic soliloquy, condemned to hold up a sky that offers no mercy.
Yet, this is where Bhattacharjee refuses to despair. Miracles still occur.
What fascinates him is not talent but transformation. How does a mind battered by neglect stand upright? How does belief regenerate in soil poisoned by indifference? His answer returns, unwavering: psychology is destiny’s hidden script and the unseen prompter whispering courage when the actor forgets his lines.
That’s why the book reads like an archaeological dig rather than a sports column. Bhattacharjee studies athletes the way one studies fault lines, examining the fractures that precede earthquakes of greatness. He follows players through humiliation, selection snubs, benching, and ridicule, then watches the psyche recalibrate itself like a compass in King Lear’s storm, finding true north amid the chaos.
In this sense, the Indian athlete becomes a blacksmith of the self, hammering belief back into shape as if reforging a shattered crown on an anvil of adversity.
Indian sporting culture, Bhattacharjee writes with surgical bluntness, treats sports like a terminal illness. Parents fear it. Society distrusts it. Governments ceremonially tolerate this. There is no guarantee of livelihood, dignity after retirement, or institutional memory. Heroes are celebrated briefly and then shelved like props after the curtain has fallen.
Dhyan Chand, Roop Singh, and Salim Durrani are mountain ranges. Even mountains erode when they are abandoned. Their decline becomes a warning etched into the subconscious of every young athlete: excellence does not ensure survival. Even Caesar, after all, must bleed. Such betrayals corrode an athlete’s inner architecture. When recognition expires faster than the effort, collapse becomes inevitable, and the system fails. Yet, Bhattacharjee insists that those who rise despite this rewrite possibility. They become the authors of a new act in a play long thought to be finished.
This conviction shapes the book’s central thesis: that the most outstanding Indian athletes are living archives of resistance. When one emerges despite systemic neglect, he becomes, in Bhattacharjee’s words, a historian and a Prospero who reshapes the island so that others may survive its storms.
The book pays deep homage to the unsung architects of Indian sports: the coaches. Bhattacharjee’s chapters on the five legendary coaches and the Pentagon of East Bengal footballers read like hymns. These men coached without contracts, planned without resources, and believed without evidence. They sold their personal belongings to fund training camps and traded domestic stability for national hope. They were gardeners planting roses in salt soil, aware that the land was cursed, yet planting all the same.
The medals India won were first minted in their minds. Their deaths without recognition are both tragic and indicting. Bhattacharjee resurrects them with prose that raises monuments where institutions failed to erect gravestones for the dead.
Perhaps the most startling excavation is the chapter on Mohinder Amarnath’s life. Here, Bhattacharjee dismantles the sanitized mythology to expose the psychological truth. The 1983 World Cup, he argues, was born from a rupture. The slap became a thunderclap worthy of Shakespeare’s tempests—violent, controversial, but catalytic.
Across the book, Indian sports appear as a gallery of unfinished statues—raw, scarred, and luminous. Milkha Singh runs against trauma. P. T. Usha sprints like a question mark racing its answer. Mary Kom punches through geography and silence. Neeraj Chopra’s javelin arcs like a rewritten line of fate, correcting decades of tragic pauses called “almost.” Each chapter is a pearl, formed by the irritation endured, Bhattacharjee insists. He admits that regret is inevitable. However, regret is also a form of propulsion. Thus, painful wounds, like Shakespearean suffering, transform the wounded into the wise.
Midas Touch and Miracles of Indian Sports ultimately read like a continuation of Bhattacharjee’s lifelong inquiry into invisible wars. If his earlier works carried a lamp through the inner cave, this book holds it onto a battlefield littered with broken careers and forgotten names and refuses to let darkness claim the final soliloquy.
This book discusses endurance as a form of national inheritance. About beliefs stitched together from loss. And about the Indian mind, scarred, stubborn, luminous, and forever stepping back onto the stage, even when the world has already written its exit.
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Availability Note: The books Midas Touch and Miracles of Indian Sports are available on Amazon and Flipkart and are easily accessible via Google search. For readers abroad, the publisher, Hitesh Bisen, has personally assured them that the book is globally available. Overseas readers may contact him directly at booksclinicpublishing@gmail.com or via phone at +91 95891 33777, and he will ensure that all international orders are fulfilled and dispatched.
