When Mihir Sen passed away in 1997, most people were unaware of the incident. Now over 2 decades later if you were to ask the average Indian sports fan who this man was, the odds are he or she would stare at you with a blank face. Not that you can blame anyone for this, after all, he has been pushed back so much into oblivion that he is pretty much forgotten.
So who is this man? Well, this long distance swimmer was the first Indian who swam across the English Channel from Dover to Calais. He covered the distance in 14 hours and 45 minutes. It is the fourth best timing.
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Mihir is the only man to have swum the oceans of the five continents in one year which he achieved in 1966. They were namely? Palk Strait, Dardanelles, Bosphorus, Gibraltar, and whole Panama Canal. It earned him a place in The Guinness Book of Records as the 'world's greatest long-distance swimmer'. Now that is a big deal.?
In 1959 he won the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan followed in 1967. A legacy that is hard to match.?
But the start of the journey was not easy. Mihir's father Ramesh Sengupta was a physician and his mother Lilabati was the lady who worked hard to help her son get a good education. She sold eggs and milk to bring in the extra money.?
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After completing his law degree, Mihir went to England to prepare for the bar. He hardly had enough money but he made it. While he was there he even worked as a night porter at a railway station to keep himself afloat.?
So where did the inspiration to swim come from? He read about? Florence Chadwick, the first American woman to swim the English Channel in 1950. Now he wanted to do the same for his country. He practiced hard to master the freestyle technique. He was not successful initially but finally achieved the feat and create history. From then on there was no looking back.
When he returned to India after his English Channel feat, he started a movement to allow clubs to allow all Indians inside after he was denied entry into the same clubs. After practicing Criminal Law at the Calcutta High Court, he started his own business. Mihir's company became India's second-largest silk exporter.
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When Jyoti Basu asked him to join the CPM in exchange for a high-profile government post, Mihir not only refused him but contested against him as an independent candidate. As a result, they targeted his business and it eventually had to shut down. He had to file for bankruptcy and nobody came to his aid. His bank accounts were frozen and all his money was confiscated. It caused Mihir to start suffering from dementia at the age of 50.
When he died at the age of 66, he was suffering from both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. He died in poverty and was forgotten. His legacy faced oblivion as the death went virtually unnoticed.
Mihir is not just a sad tale of the forgotten Indian athlete, he is an example of a promising life that ended in poverty and isolation.?