Who’s afraid of a big bad BRIC?

SKEWED PERCEPTION Ever since it was awarded the World Cup, only bad news seemed to come out of Brazil. The ground reality was very different

KOLKATA: This didn’t happen to me but it is worth retelling to give an idea of the experience Brazil was during the World Cup. A taxi driver in Rio de Janeiro insisted that an Indian journalist pay only the minimum fare because his meter was faulty. “That’s my fault, not yours,” the journalist was told. The journalists paid R$4.80 (approximately ` 140) for a ride that would cost him R$20 (approximately `650).

By then Germany had won and the world was preparing to leave Brazil to Brazilians. The past five weeks having been a lesson in how to be good-natured as a people, I was only mildly incredulous on hearing the story.

To say that Brazil hosted a memorable World Cup would be understating the obvious. Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, gave the country 9.25 out of 10. In the absence of any obvious mechanism, the number seemed as random as some of his statements but even those who love to hate Blatter would have found it difficult to disagree with this.

Seated on Blatter’s right at the auditorium inside Rio’s Maracana stadium that July 14 morning was Fifa general secretary Jerome Valcke, who, in May 2012, had said Brazil needed a “kick up the backside” to deliver this World Cup. Since 2007 when Brazil was awarded the World Cup, the only news that seemed to come out of that country was bad news.

So, last December when Carlos Alberto Torres told HT in Kolkata that he was sure Brazilians would embrace the tournament, it seemed the 1970 winning team’s captain was just being a goodwill ambassador. A journalist from O Globo reporting on the World Cup trophy tour too had said as much.

Yet reports about Brazil’s crime rates, stadia missing deadlines, domestic airlines and airports being unable to deal with over 30 lakh Brazilians and 6 lakh foreign tourists kept emerging with the regularity with which Lionel Messi scores goals. An e-mail for journalists headed to Brazil reached my inbox one day before departure to Sao Paulo. It was a not-to-do list of things that stretched over two pages. Be careful, be very careful was the message from the European scribe of international renown.

Christiane’s warm smile and keenness to give a lowdown on Sao Paulo to the travel-weary passengers in her taxi seemed at odds with such an image. Wasn’t Brazil supposed to be like a slice from City of God, the violent Fernando Meirelles film that talks about organised crime in a Rio suburb between the 60s and the 80s? By the third day when a 10-minute late evening walk from the Paulista station to the apartment in Sao Paulo’s Bela Cintra was just that, Brazil seemed a lot safer than it was made out to be.

It would be the first of many such walks in different cities and at different hours of the day. There were areas, Savassi in Belo Horizonte for instance,

OFF THE PITCH, WE SAW THE ESSENTIALLY SUNNY DISPOSITION OF BRAZILIANS, PEOPLE WHO WERE APOLOGETIC BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T KNOW ENGLISH