Sport: Shiv Shankar Prasad Chowrasia

Caddie-turned-champion Shiv Shankar Prasad Chowrasia lifted the Indian Masters at the Delhi Golf Club in February. His “maiden” winning score read: “a bogey-free five-under 67”.

Translated, it means that by lifting the title Chowrasia, 30, scored arguably the biggest sporting triumph by a Calcuttan in an individual sport, pocketing $416,660 (about Rs 1.6 crore), qualifying for three years on the European Tour and moving closer to “realising my dream of playing on the US PGA Tour”.

A Class VI dropout, Chowrasia is the son of the man who tended the course at RCGC, a club to which the champion, now in New Delhi playing a tournament, says he owes “everything”.

True, since then he hasn’t done much. His Official World Golf Ranking stands at 324. But as they say: “Golf can best be defined as an endless series of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle.” It applies to champions too. Even those called Shiv. But maybe not Tiger.

Fiction: Amitav Ghosh

After the decline and fall of the small-car project this year, Bengal may not look a good place to do business in. But it once was, which may be a consolation but not quite anything to be proud of.

This is one good reason to read Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. This first part of a projected trilogy revisits colonial Bengal, when this part of the country was what we may today consider to be a Very Special Economic Zone. It is bleakly comforting, in these days of provincialism, to recall those cosmopolitan times, poised on the cusp of foreign and familiar cultures.

Ghosh is unique in using a richly audacious prose, interlaced with Lascari dialects, Anglo-Indian, Bhojpuri, Hindustani and even Bengali. There is no readymade glossary to help you wade through this sea of words, so the reading is halting and difficult, and hugely rewarding. It is a pity that Ghosh, despite being a clear favourite for the Booker Prize, did not manage to pull through in the final round. But with a hugely ambitious trilogy he will have his poppies one day, surely.

Music: Debashish Bhattacharya

Jazz-rock guitar legend John McLaughlin calls him “the leading slide guitarist of our time”. Debashish Bhattacharya, who lives in Tollygunge, has also been nominated for a Grammy this year.

So what is a slide guitar? It’s playing the guitar with a slide, which can lead to stunning innovations. Bhattacharya plays Indian classical music on his trinity of custom-made, new generation slide guitars — the Chaturangi, the Gandharvi and the Anandi — and the ragas echo the depths of a veena, sitar or sarod. In the process, Bhattacharya brings a new respectability to the guitar.

A student of Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra, Bhattacharya has collaborated with jazz and fusion stars all over the world. In November, he received a Grammy nomination in the Best Traditional World Music Category for his 2008 solo album Calcutta Chronicles: Indian Slide Guitar Odyssey. What next? “I want to do more riyaz and spend time with my family,” says the guitar man. Slip slidin’ away.

Art: Rashmi Bagchi Sarkar

Rashmi Bagchi Sarkar attracted much attention when she exhibited a striking painting of a dead woman amidst the bounty of nature. She often bodies forth the insecurities of women, but what makes her works stand out is their earthy and elegiac quality. Her works have a shock value meant to make viewers aware of social inequities (self-portrait as Bharatmata). Trained in Santiniketan, Rashmi went for further training to Japan where she learnt calligraphy and iwa-enogu, a tempera technique using crushed stone pigment. This gives her paintings a gem-like lustre. She is currently engaged in paperwork, film, installation and sculpture.

“I am a conscious human being, and everyday things and incidents that haunt me and my reaction to these are reflected in my work. Since I am a woman, my thinking also has a feminine side to it. All this is filtered through my consciousness and my paintings develop around them,” says Rashmi.

Technology: Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla

Brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla developed Scrabulous (now Lexulous), a word game that became a rage on the social networking site Facebook. The Xaverians fought it out with toy giants Hasbro, which owns the US and Canada rights to the crossword game Scrabble, and Mattel Inc, which owns the rights elsewhere. The makers of Scrabble claimed Scrabulous was a “virtual version of Scrabble”. Hasbro has “settled” the lawsuit with RJ Softwares, the company owned by Rajat, 27, (right, in picture) and Jayant, 22, in a New York court. The Mattel lawsuit is still on.

“We showed the world that Calcuttans, usually known for their rich culture and mouth-watering cuisine, can rock the IT world and change the name of the game!” says Jayant. The brothers have now found fans by the lakh with their latest online word game, Wordscraper. Always game for a good old scrap!

Science: Subhasis Chattopadhyay

Subhasis Chattopadhyay (circled in picture), a physicist at the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre in Calcutta, is part of the world’s largest scientific experiment that began earlier this year in an underground machine beneath Geneva (Switzerland).

He is among scientists from several Indian institutions who helped build key components of the Large Hadron Collider — a giant accelerator designed to look for a subatomic particle called the Higgs Boson — proposed decades ago. But ask the physicist about his role in building the accelerator, and he’ll talk about his teammates and team leader, Bikash Sinha.

Subhasis, along with Tapan Nayak, Yogender Viyogi and Sukalyan Chattopadhyay at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, and others from Mumbai, Jaipur, Chandigarh and Jammu built two devices that will help track, count and study the behaviour of unimaginably tiny subatomic particles that will be created in proton-proton collisions in the accelerator.

About 6,000 scientists from 50 countries helped build the device that cost $8 billion and took over 10 years to complete. The machine is now shut for repairs, but is expected to begin operations in June 2009.

Courage: Ryan Chakravarty

The Mumbai terror attack has given to a shell-shocked nation a line-up of heroes. Ryan Chakravarty kept his parents at their Patuli home in Calcutta on the edge for 60 hours as he led a counter-hijack task force of the National Security Guard (NSG) on the rescue mission in Mumbai. “There was a lot of firing and we intercepted every possible escape route. Everyone did a good job,” said the commando from Calcutta.

The Xaverian was detailed for the Mumbai operation 10 months after joining the NSG. He has a son, two-year-old Agastya. How does it feel to leave a kid and wife at home to go on a dangerous mission? “We have been on the field. When you are given a job you do it, you don’t think.”

Fashion: Kallol Datta

This year was special for the latest torchbearer of the Calcutta school of fashion, Kallol Datta. “The Australian magazine Autore featured my spring-summer 2008 collection along with Armani and Gareth Pugh. Then came a write-up in Guardian (the British paper),” says the 25-year-old who is dramatically androgynous in person — flowing black hair, kohl-lined eyes and a nose ring, teamed with a moustache and beard.

After two successful innings at Lakme Fashion Week, Kallol was mentioned in Vogue’s style.com and fashion forecasting biggie WGSN. He is quite content with the “critical acclaim”. “My personal look was also finally accepted. Since I am my own PR machine, this is important,” he signs off, tossing his hair off from his kohled smoky eyes.

Theatre: Tin Can

Tin Can first made noise with Intro in 2006. Since then they have been heard much beyond the city. Experimental, often bilingual, speaking the language of today’s youth, they rock. Literally too.

This year they were the youngest group — most of the actors fresh out of college (read JU) — at the Odeon Theatre Festival, where they staged Onko (in Picture), which is about how numbers achieve political significance, structured around seemingly disjointed monologues. Video opened to warm reviews in Calcutta in February. Talks are on with the National Theatre of Scotland for an exchange programme. The team is shooting for Anjan Dutta’s next film that is about “youth and rock”.

The group is committed to retaining talent in the city. “We don’t need to migrate to a Bangalore or a Mumbai,” says director Soumyak Kanti De Biswas. Rattle on!

Business: Natasha Aggarwal Roy

To the owner of Mama Mia, Natasha Aggarwal Roy, gelatos happened by chance. She was studying BBA in London, when on a holiday to Italy she came across the creamy, milky, chilled confection, and decided to take it up as a career. Back in Calcutta, she set up Mama Mia.

The 26-year-old had to do some hard talk to establish gelatos, which by now can be called the most popular low-fat dessert in town. Best flavour: triple chocolate. For the record, gelatos are “an Italian variant of ice cream. They are more intense in texture, low-fat, made fresh and with natural ingredients,” says Natasha. Well, Calcuttans haven’t had any trouble gelling with it.

Film: Pubali Chaudhuri

The 32-year-old from Dover Road, of Carmel School and JU vintage, has literally played a hand in the making of the year’s “cult” flick Rock On!!. The FTII passout wrote the screenplay for the Farhan Akhtar-starring, grungy-looking, but ultimately cockles-of-the-heart-warming tribute to the Indian rock scene. “I have seen rock bands at close quarters in Calcutta,” says Pubali.

Pubali is set to start work on a script based on a story written by her. Was writing in Hindi a problem? Pubali informs that in Bollywood, the screenplay is written in English: the dialogue-writer translates it into Hindi lines. Two exclamation marks to that!!

Politics: Rachna Bhowmik

Rachna “Ruchi” Bhowmik, a member of the national security and arms control councils under US President-elect Barack Obama, was named after “Rachana”, a popular club in Bongaon her father had once belonged to. From there to Obama’s club has been a journey of many leagues.

Rachna, 38, a Yale University history graduate who also holds a law degree and is a mother of two, was a die-hard Democrat from early, following her parents who had migrated to the US. An activist against gun violence, she has been an Obama “adviser” since the first stages of his campaign in 2006 on civil rights, internal security and old-age.

She is planning a visit to Bongaon in March 2009, her family said. “But she gets upset with the power cuts and mosquitoes,” says a relative. This time, all the buzz will be around Ruchi.

Samaritan: Dipak Kundu

The 47-year-old railway employee came to know of an old man languishing in a Sodepur hospital for one and a half years. Monoranjan Halder, 81, had been abandoned by his family. Kundu was moved deeply by his suffering and knew the only way to help him would be to keep him in a family atmosphere.

He decided to “adopt” the octogenarian. The authorities granted him permission to take Halder home — Kundu is known for his charitable work. On December 22, Halder got a new family at Kundu’s residence in Ghola near Sodepur, where he lives with his wife and three children. A 6ft x 6ft room is being built in Kundu’s house for Haldar, who, attended by Kundu’s family, has begun to walk by himself.

Idol: Sourav Ganguly

He has been Bengal’s poster boy for over a decade. If his ton at Lord’s in 1996 announced his arrival with a bang, his exit this year from international cricket was as dramatic.

He may have bowed out, but Dada continues to rule Calcuttans’ hearts. He will not retire from that job till the next poster boy arrives. Plus 2009 will again see Dada wield the bat for Kolkata Knight Riders.

SRK

Finally, thank you Shah Rukh, for adopting Kolkata Knight Riders as your team — and Calcutta as your city. We are used to hearing Ta Ta, but that’s another story.