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Fanattic Sports Museum will be the first of its kind in country

Kolkata: City of Joy is all set to get the first multi-sports museum of the country. Renowned historian Boria Majumder in association with industrialist Harshvardhan Neotia has launched the Fanattic Sports Museum (FSM) at EcoSpace in New Town, Rajarhat. FSM will display rare memorabilia of world’s top sportsmen, which has been collected for over two decades. Former India cricket captains Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly along with Olympic champion Abhinav Bindra and Para-Olympic medalists Devendra Jhajharia and Deepa Malik will inaugurate the museum on Sunday. 

Boria has been passionately collecting the memorabilia for the last two decades. His collection includes artefacts from the field of football, hockey, badminton, tennis, golf and athletics. Cricket obviously holds a prominent place in the sports museum.

According to Boria, “I had long been waiting to have a state of the art sports museum in the city. The MCC museum at Lords and the IOC Museum in Lausanne has been a source of my inspiration ever since I first visited these two museums.  It was at that time the idea of having a composite museum for sports developed.With such a rich heritage and a fandom less to none, I felt the need to preserve our own sporting history," said Majumdar, who had been collecting sports magazines since childhood but began buying artefacts from auctions around 2004-05. 

ISL franchise Atletico de Kolkata’s principal owner Harsh Neotia has been a sports enthusiast. According to Mr Neotia, “The basic idea was to do something for the people of Kolkata. As soon as Boria came up with the idea I thought about associating my name with the project. The sports loving people of the city will be enjoying visiting the museum which will have an incredible collection of memorabilia, artefacts and other stuffs.”

It is initially planned that the tickets for the museum will be priced at Rs 100. The museum will be opened to general public from 12-7 pm except on Mondays. The famous Lords museum at Lords or the MCG museum in Melbourne has a tour for the visitors. FSM will have no such tours at the moment, but with the passage of time the owners will have a look at it.

Among the prized possession of Boria are football legend Pele's 1970 World Cup jersey, soccer wizard Lionel Messi's boot and super sprinter Usain Bolt's spikes, which he purchased in auctions.

The other items which will be on display at the museum are the gloves which Sachin Tendulkar wore on his way to scoring his 100^th international century in Mirpur, PV Sindhu’s jersey which she wore en-route to winning silver in Rio Olympics and the gloves won by Abhinav Bindra as he shot his way to gold at the 2008 Olympics.