Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan also met Messi earlier in the day, according to the Reuters news agency.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Kolkata is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal and has a large football fanbase in an otherwise cricket-crazed country.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the city, it is common to see hundreds of thousands of fans gather at stadiums at a derby of local clubs.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the early hours of Saturday, thousands lined the roads and congregated outside the hotel where Messi was staying to try and catch a glimpse of him.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hitesh, a 24-year-old corporate lawyer, flew nearly 1,900 kilometres from the south Indian city of Bengaluru.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“For me it’s personal. You can see I am quite short, and I love to play football with my friends,” Hitesh told the BBC, standing in front of the statue.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“Messi is the player I related with the most, no one can match his talent. He gives me hope that with talent you can d.o anything.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan also met Messi earlier in the day, according to the Reuters news agency. Kolkata is the capital of the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":144,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-sport-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/socializenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/socializenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/socializenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socializenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socializenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/socializenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":145,"href":"https:\/\/socializenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions\/145"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socializenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/socializenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socializenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socializenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}