Dear Friends:
By the time i returned from shopping, India Ink has added two more stories. Here's one(Note: I don't like the heading of the story) -bhuban: Sports Tales Cast India as the Villain By MANU JOSEPH Published: March 14, 2012 NEW DELHI — About seven years ago, the Indian national women’s field hockey team had a problem — the players’ tracksuits were two years old, and there was no money to replace them. Their coach’s campaign to secure free tracksuits and his eventual failure would inspire one enraged writer to produce the screenplay for a movie that everyone predicted was as doomed as women’s field hockey. But “Chak De India” went on to become a blockbuster. The women’s field hockey team watched the film laughing and whistling and crying. Indian athletes who are not cricket stars usually have to endure corrupt officials, humiliation and poverty. Olympians die in penury and in want of medical attention. Some have had to sell their gold medals. Their stories make very bad cinema, and “Chak De India” was a rare tribute. But now, a grim film about a forgotten athlete who later became a bandit, “Paan Singh Tomar,” which was released in India and elsewhere this month, is attracting attention. As with “Chak De,” the villain of “Paan Singh Tomar” is India itself. Paan Singh, the subject of a Hindi film that does not feature slender girls dancing in formation, used to run for India with a villager’s pride and held the national record in steeplechase, one of the toughest and least glorious track events. He represented India at the 1958 Asian Games in Tokyo, where he stopped midway in the race to throw away his new and unfamiliar spike-shoes and then ran barefoot. Very little is actually known about him, and the film, although based on interviews with his family and acquaintances, “is a dramatized account of the man’s life,” according to its director, Tigmanshu Dhulia. What is not disputed is that Paan Singh was the soldier and the national record-holding athlete portrayed in the film, that he later became a bandit and roamed the ravines of central India, and that he was killed by the police in 1981. As the film unfolds, Paan Singh is happy in an unremarkable way. He is a fierce athlete with a natural talent for middle-distance running, a patriotic soldier and a young man in love with his wife. But everything changes after a land dispute with a powerful armed faction and his relatives. According to the film, he goes to the police for protection, but an officer insults him, asks him what steeplechase is, and flings away his medal. Paan Singh’s family is attacked. He becomes a bandit to seek revenge, and later takes to kidnapping for ransom and killing police informants. He becomes yet another legend in the lawless ravines. There were many like Paan Singh in the 1970s and 1980s (and even today) who took up arms because they had no faith in the government. Like many bandits of the time, he called himself a “rebel.” The real bandits, he says in the film, were in the Indian Parliament. (The audience clapped because they feel that way too.) In “Paan Singh Tomar,” India wins in the end, and the audience shuffles out feeling an ache in their hearts for a man who once ran wearing the Indian jersey. In “Chak De,” the women’s field hockey team overcomes India and other odds, and wins an international tournament. When Jaideep Sahni, the screenwriter for “Chak De India,” began shadowing the women’s field hockey team, he was not sure why he was doing it. He thought he might make a documentary film about them, or write a book. He found the conditions in which they trained appalling. They were impoverished and under-nourished. Almonds and other wholesome snacks that in theory were to be provided never reached them. “Most of them were thinner than the white players’ thighs,” Mr. Sahni told me. Their bathrooms weren’t lighted because the electric bulbs had been stolen. When they had to change their clothes they stood behind a jersey held by two teammates. Then came the tracksuit problem. The team’s coach, an Olympic gold medalist in field hockey, approached several people for help but was turned down. Then he decided to meet a politician in Bangalore, where the women’s field hockey team was training at the time. According to Mr. Sahni, who accompanied him, the politician had a relative who ran a garment company. The coach explained the situation to the man and asked him to donate tracksuits to the team, worth about 200,000 rupees, or $4,000. The politician agreed on the condition that the company’s brand name be featured prominently on the apparel. But the brand, though Indian, used the word “American” in order to impress its buyers. The coach pleaded that it would be ridiculous for the Indian national women’s hockey team to wear tracksuits with the word “American” on them. The politician asked him to look somewhere else. Mr. Sahni found this baffling, but he himself was too broke to help at the time, struggling just to pay his mobile phone bills. He decided to go to Mumbai and ask some companies for sponsorship, but he failed to persuade any of them to part with the 200,000 rupees for the women’s field hockey team. Infuriated, he swore to himself that he would make the team famous. “Even,” he said, “if that meant I’d have to write a mainstream commercial film in which the women’s hockey team danced.” So he wrote the screenplay for “Chak De India,” which was rage masquerading as entertainment. The breakthrough for the project came when one of India’s biggest film actors, Shah Rukh Khan, who has played field hockey, decided to take a risk and star in the film. When some multiplexes saw the trailers, in which women were shown playing field hockey, they refused to run them, saying they would only drive potential viewers away. But the film quickly became a hit. There have been no such happy endings for the field hockey team itself, though. Although its situation has improved marginally, most of the problems persist, and it is not uncommon for the players to go on strike demanding better pay and facilities. But they did get their tracksuits — from the creators of “Chak De India.” Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel “Serious Men. ” A version of this article appeared in print on March 15, _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
