ISUPPOSE when it comes to legends, we all become little boys (or girls) with autograph books hidden in our sleeves. That's why the Nehru Centre auditorium was filled to capacity with men and women, boys and girls taking every available seat and the media photographers and cameramen occupying every vantage point.

So what if the invitation itself was a bit of a con? "Celebrating 40th year of Glorious 1971...Felicitating Ajit Wadekar's warriors..." That's what the card said, complete with those two sets of three dots.

Now simple arithmetic tells me that 1971 plus 40 adds up to 2011, but why wait another year when you can rake in the moolah now? (A little aside here. Ask a Parsi how old he is and he will tell you "49 complete, running 50". The same logic obviously prevailed here: 39 complete, running 40. This way they can have another do next year).

Another question no one asked was who was doing the felicitating.

We know who were the felicitated: the 1971 team that beat the West Indies in West Indies and England in England, twin triumphs the likes of which no Indian team had seen before. And what a roll call it was! Ajit Wadekar, Sunil Gavaskar, G R Vishwanath, Chandra Shekhar, E A S Prasanna, Abbas Ali Baig, Syed Kirmani, Abid Ali, Salim Durrani, Farokh Engineer, Venkataraghvan, Bishan Singh Bedi, Jayantilal Kenia and Rusi Jeejeebhoy. There were five others, but in a cruel reminder of the passage of time, they were represented by their widows (Dilip Sardesai, Eknath Solkar, Ashok Mankad, M L Jaisimha and Krishnamurthy).

But, and here we come back to the question no one asked: Who was doing the felicitating? Not the Indian cricket board, not the Maharashtra cricket body.

Not even the Mumbai Cricket Association. Prominently displayed was the name of two event management companies, and the invitation credited the "Concept, script, Audiavisuals and compere" (their spelling, not mine) to a certain Dwarkanath Sanzgiri, who made his opening remarks in Marathi, though the chief guest was Sir Garfield Sobers. And I am sure Sobers' admiration for Subhash Gupte, Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar notwithstanding, he understands their language when it's cricket, not their mother tongue.

Since Sanzgiri also made political points while speaking in Marathi, one's instant speculation was that he was an MNS politician. Bang on!

So then, how does the entire 1971 team turn up for a non-official function organised by bodies with zero standing? How do they get Gary Sobers to fly down from the West Indies? How do busy cricketers such as Sachin Tendulkar, M S Dhoni, Zaheer Khan, Harbhajan Singh and like find time to come?

My guess is you start with someone like Sobers, who must now be relatively free, and tell him that you would like him to be chief guest at a function to felicitate the 1971 team, a team he played against. Then you tell the Indian cricketers and tell them that Sir Garfield Sobers wants to felicitate them. Which cricketer could resist shaking the hand of the world's greatest all-rounder?

If this is any indication of the 39 complete, 40 running year, just imagine what will happen next year when it's 40 complete. It's going to be a mad scramble for sure.