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Time was when you watched a film and exclaimed that it had
captured so much of real life. Today the trend has reversed: we
compare a real life situation to a certain turn of the script in
some film. "Just like in that movie," we say wonderingly. That
sense of wonder has nothing to do with real life; it has everything
to do with reel life. In fact, the image has become more real than
the real thing.
Take the case of the much deserved runaway success - the film
"Chak De! India". In cold print, over the radio waves and on TV
screens, the media seized with gratitude this opportunity to milk
the positive messages of the film every which way. In the process,
the media inscribed itself into the liberal message of the film. It
made perfect marketing sense.
It seemed as if an astonishingly gender-sensitive, hockey crazy
nation had been born overnight. Newspapers devoted their weekend
double spreads to interviews with each actor of "Chak De! India".
Coaches, for long accustomed to the darkness of obscurity in small
towns, were brought in from nowhere and made to stand with their
students in a pose made popular by the film. The reference was to
the film and not really to the game, but no one quibbled. It was
enough that a film on hockey had become so popular.
Newspapers piously editorialised about the lamentable tendency to
play hooky from covering unglamorous sports like hockey and
especially women's hockey. They thought they were talking about
hockey, but actually they were talking about a film - albeit woven
around the game of hockey.
Maybe the media thought it had done enough service to the cause of
the sport. For when the real thing came up, no one had much
patience for it. The 6th Asia Cup women's hockey tournament
started in Hong Kong on Sep 1 (a day after the 7th Asia Cup for men
commenced in Chennai). The tournament, held every four years, is
considered a pre-Olympic 'showdown' between Asian giants who come
high in the current world rankings of the FIH.
Being the naпve sort, if you had hunted the sports pages of
most 'national' newspapers for news of the Chak De! team as the
women's team had been christened, you were in for a major
disappointment. What you saw was news squished into the corner,
literally, or boxed in solitary paragraphs within news items of the
Indian men's advance. This despite the fact that the Indian women
(like the Indian men's team) went into the tournament as reigning
champions; despite the fact that this team has grown out of the
dream team of 2002 which came from nowhere to clinch the
Commonwealth gold in Manchester and provided inspiration for "Chak
De! India".
In the first week of September, the women's team indulged in some
serious business of winning their matches, like the men, but did
not manage to get past the prejudices of 'national' news desks.
No, Indian hockey skipper Mamta Kharab's five goals against
Singapore or Surinder Kaur's five goals against Thailand were no
match for Sania Mirza's female doubles partner in the US Open
whose leopard skin printed outfit got her those 15 minutes of fame,
or even a sprawled-on-the-ground derriere of Spanish dynamo Raphael
Nadal who exited the tournament. Certainly, Kharab's goals were no
match for the exploits and non-exploits of the men in blue-who
'play' once in a blue moon-in England. That's where the money
comes from. This is the real life situation.
The touching aspect of this whole business is that the women's
team left the shores of India with music CDs of "Chak De!" in their
kits for inspiration. As far as the nation is concerned, it has
supported hockey by watching the movie and remembering each scene,
each dialogue, each song and each time actor Shah Rukh Khan could
have hammed but did not.
Why is it important to know about hockey to be a hockey lover when
you can love a movie and be a hockey lover? Isn't sport all about
watching a spectacle today? What better spectacle can there be than
reel life? A sports lover is not one who plays on the street or in
the park but one who watches images flit past the TV screen. For
one it is more convenient.
If the women had won the title, a nation obsessed with developing
muscles would have celebrated the adrenalin rush of victory -
without caring to know how a young team in the process of building
cohesion reached there. That is so boring. Or maybe the nation
would have feted the "Chak De!" actors once again, seeing the real
win as a pale imitation of the rousing reel win.
But Mamta Kharab need not be very unhappy to see the reel dominate
the real. After all, an entire generation of Indians conjures the
image of a muscular Ben Kingsley in Richard Attenborough's magnum
opus while thinking of Gandhi. That is the power of the image to
play hooky from reality.
By Chitra Padmanabhan
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