From the Wreckage of the Mind to the Miracle of Victory Is " MIDAS TOUCH AND MIRACLES OF INDIAN SPORTS "
Pic - William Shakespeare , a class example of a " SOLILOQUAY " which according to the scripter who reviewed this book is the book.
Once again, a book authored by me and scripted has found a place, in the review section of a famous AMERICAN SPORTS journal, which is names as " SPORTS COLUMN "
This review has been scripted and written by Ravi Teja Mandapaka and this are his words for the book. Ravi is a famous contributor to Sports Column and his words can make the readrs to understand all about the book.
Easily available at AMAZON the book could also be obtained from BOOKSCLINIC, based at Bilaspur , Chhattisgarh and if one places the order with the publisher whose adress could be easily obtained from the google, as this publisher also has his addresses inscribed in google, the publisher will despatch the book to anybody, based at any corner of the world.
BOOK REVIEW: From the Wreckage of the
Mind to the Miracle of Victory
by Ravi MandapakaJanuary 2, 2026India's
sports, Midas Touch and Miracles of Indian Sports
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.
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.
That is it
He carries a solid experience of about 35 years in Marketing , and Business Analytics .
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