Just hours away from America’s biggest game of the year, the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams will square off in Super Bowl LVI. A thread on its exquisite Indian connection. (1/9)
When Paul Brown, an American football coach from Ohio, was fired by his previous employer, he founded his new franchise Cincinnati Bengals. (2/9)
Brown, named the franchise after another Cincinnati football team named Cincinnati Bengals who played between 1937 and 1942 and was forced to close down due to World War II. (3/9)
Benzoo, the Royal Bengal Tiger from West Bengal, a unique specimen of Cincinnati Zoo, was chosen as the mascot for the Bengals. Benzoo proudly enjoyed her Sunday outings to the stadium in front of 50,000 fans in the 70s. (4/9)
Now, the original Bengal team that played in the 1930s had a fascinating story behind their naming. When Hal Pennington, the founder of the newly formed Cincinnati Bengal, sat in his mother’s kitchen one late summer day in 1937, he observed a stove. (5/9)
The logo of the stove caught his attention - it was a mighty roaring Bengal Tiger. The stove line, manufactured between 1870 and 1940 by Floyd-Wells, was named Bengal Stoves. (6/9)
It is this Bengal Stove line that influenced the name of the franchise playing the Super Bowl LVI today. While why ‘Bengal Stove’ was named after a Bengal Tiger is not clearly understood, many believe it was due to the owner’s fascination with safaris. (7/9)
It is rumoured that the president once went on a safari to hunt the Bengal tigers, and he was enchanted with the beast leading to the name of his stove line. Note to remember: it was common for Americans in that era to visit India for Tiger ‘shikar’. (8/9)
This Government-issued advertisement in the "Field & Stream" magazine, USA in 1956 luring Americans to contact the local office (at NYC & SFO) for Tiger hunting information, is a testimony to the above. (9/9)
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As Diwali lights up homes across India, Bengal and the East mark the night with worship of Goddess Kali. But here’s a story few remember. Over a century ago, she was the face of a swadeshi cigarette brand. Long before the Marlboro Man, we had our own Gutsy Goddess. 1/19
This curious chapter of India’s commercial and political history came to light through an exquisite lithograph advertisement we spotted few years back inside the Calcutta Gallery at the Victoria Memorial Hall. 2/19
The Bengali text on the poster proudly presented Kali Cigarettes as a “Swadeshi Product” — a label that, in the early 20th century, carried an unmistakable weight. It was not merely about commerce; it was a political declaration. 3/19
Taj Mahal is back in the news again. This time, not for love, but for all the wrong reasons. But decades ago, it made headlines for something far stranger. Because once, a man almost sold the Taj Mahal. The unbelievable story of Natwarlal — India’s greatest conman. Thread 1/17
Mithilesh Kumar Srivastava — better known as Natwarlal — was born in 1912 in Bangra, a small village in Bihar. His father, a railway station master, introduced him early to the world of documents, seals, and signatures. 2/17
Very little is verified about his childhood. In 1980, journalist Pritish Nandy noted, “Natwarlal has no background worth talking about… Right now, there is hardly any past you can track down. And thank God for that.” 3/17
The Cathedral of the Sacred Heart near Connaught Place in New Delhi is one of the city's oldest Christian establishments which have a strange connection with your favorite coffee drink, the Cappuccino.
Read on. 1/17
Who would have thought while sipping Cappuccino at a café in Connaught Place that their cup of coffee would have a strange bond with a church just a few miles away at the junction of Bhai Vir Singh Marg Road and Bangla Sahib Road. 2/17
Built in the early 1930s in an Italian style, the cathedral of the Sacred Heart was envisioned by Father Luke, a member of the Franciscan first order founded by the followers of the poor man of Assisi, Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone. 3/17
What connects the American Civil War to Durga Puja in Bengal?
It's the nostalgic toy cap guns. The story of the cap gun is stranger than it looks.
Thread. 1/14
If you didn’t grow up in Kolkata, you might have missed it — the streets during Durga Puja once alive with kids firing toy cap guns, little puffs of smoke and crackles everywhere. A vivid pre-social media ritual of childhood, with a fascinating origin story.
2/14
The Civil War (1861–65) was the first truly industrial war. Soldiers of both the Union and the Confederacy moved away from old flintlock muskets and embraced the percussion cap - a tiny copper or brass cup holding a shock-sensitive explosive. 3/14
Four years ago in Kerala, sixteen strangers walked into the Russian House in Thiruvananthapuram. They were from different districts, different walks of life. But they all carried one name that bound them together.
Gagarin. Yes, Gagarin.
So, What brought them together? 1/16
The name needs no introduction, or does it?
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into space. For the world, it was history. For a section of Kerala’s left-leaning families, it was inspiration strong enough to echo in their children’s names. 2/16
Take P.D. Gagarin from Cherthala.
According to reports in Hindu and New Indian Express, he was born on that very day in 1961, when the Soviet cosmonaut made his historic flight. His father, a communist and space enthusiast, named him Yuri Gagarin. 3/16
Long before she was a global icon, Mother Teresa walked the streets of Kolkata, and when she had nowhere to go, the city’s iconic Kali Temple opened its doors. On her birthday, we remember the unlikely home that started a journey of compassion that changed the world. Thread 1/19
When Mother Teresa began her work in Calcutta in 1948, she had almost nothing of her own. She wore a plain white cotton sari with a blue border and carried little more than conviction. 2/19
Her belief was simple yet radical: that the poor who lay unwanted on the pavements, the sick abandoned in the streets, and the dying left in filth deserved dignity in their final days. 3/19