The Story Of Us. Review on Chak De India

Sometime in late 2000, Ashutosh Gowariker decided it was time to give India its first cricket movie. What could go wrong, he must have reasoned, as long as there was a cricket match in the movie that India won? Aamir Khan agreed. Somewhere along the line, the team decided to set the story in British India and have us play the colonial masters directly.

That way, you can play the “English against us” and the “caste system” cards along with the cricket card you were already holding. They probably felt like they were going into a poker game with all the aces. And as we now know, they were right.

But hey, we liked it. We knew we were being played; I mean, come on, we were watching a story of peasants playing a cricket match against the tyrants to settle a squabble over taxes. We could see that they were playing every rule in the book to win us over, but we still liked it. There was something about Lagaan, wasn’t there? Maybe it was the sets and the costumes; maybe it was the music, maybe the writing, maybe the performances…or maybe we just didn’t mind letting our emotions be so shamelessly exploited. Maybe we don’t even now.

As I write this, Jaideep Sahni and Aditya Chopra are probably sharing a villainous laugh over a beer or two in their lair. If Gowariker can make a story about cricket, I can make one on Hockey, Sahni must be thinking. If Gowariker could get Aamir, I have got Shah Rukh, Aditya must be saying.

Poor old gullible devils, they must be thinking about us, all you need to make a profit is to give them a nicely gift-wrapped package of senseless emotionalism and cheap patriotism. It works every single time. Common sense and reason clearly don’t fall within the mental capabilities of the Indian cine-goer.

Let me take you through a thought experiment (this works best if you haven’t seen the movie yet). Given the outline of the story, i.e. a former hockey player coaching the national women’s hockey team, what are the different issues you would expect the movie to handle, taking into account our abysmal standards of movie-making?

To answer this question, casting your mind back to Lagaan might help. What kind of issues did Lagaan handle? If you have a pen and paper handy, take a couple of minutes to write down five main sub-plots you would expect to make an appearance in the movie.

If chauvinism figured somewhere on your list, give yourself a pat on your back because this one has oodles and oodles of it.

Everyone, from the president of the Hockey Association to the cricketer boyfriend of one of the girls, seems to be blessed with this trait in abundance, and they miss no opportunity to make their stance known. Dialogues that effectively mean “They are just girls” and “Girls are meant to stay at home” are liberally sprinkled all over the movie. Thank God they at least made Shah Rukh normal in this respect.

Chak De India also slings a lot of mud at cricketers and cricket in general. Preeti’s boyfriend, Abhimanyu Singh, has all the traits of a film-star, signing autographs, wearing well-ironed designer suits, traveling in luxury cars and in general doing a good job of looking cool.

I couldn’t tell he was a cricketer until they told me. Of course, like all cricketers (or is it all Indian men?), he thinks his girl friend should give up on her career so that she can get married to him and travel the world with him. And like all cricketers, he makes it a point to refer to Hockey as “Gilli Dande” every single time. But hey, in my defense, there were not many other cues to go on.

And what’s with these Muslims? Don’t they get the point? We simply don’t like them, full stop. We don’t really like them captaining our sports teams, but we can handle that. What we can’t handle is when the captain of our team shakes hands with a Pakistani captain after losing a game. Such blasphemy is usually rewarded with match-fixing allegations and life bans.

The only way we take them back, or rather, stop calling them traitors, is if and when they coach a national hockey team to become world champions. Handshake implies bribe, successful coach implies redemption. The logic is so perfect it is almost divine. We really do enjoy watching ourselves being vilified in our own movies by our own film-makers, don’t we?

For the last time, we are sick of the Hindu - Muslim angle already. Given the number of people in the country and the number of different religions that co-exist in it, it is only reasonable to expect a religious riot here and there. It is a surprise, and a very pleasant one, that there aren’t more of them. It means that on the whole, we get along quite well as a people. Sure, there is certainly scope for improvement, but where that improvement will not come is from opportunistic movies that keep reminding us of our religious rifts. It is like you are trying your best to ignore your headache and concentrate on work only for your colleague to keep asking you every five minutes how your head is feeling.

Muslim-bashing is not patriotism, in any shape or form. Neither is playing cricket or hockey for your country. Losing a game representing India is no more detrimental to the country’s name as losing an inter-school match is to your school’s reputation. Words like “honour” and “pride” among sportspeople are just often repeated sound bites that don’t mean anything. It is time we woke up and smelled the coffee. Our sporting achievements mean nothing, absolutely nothing, when it comes to assessing our development as a nation. So playing a sport for your country is not a terribly patriotic thing to do. It just happens to be something that is very hard to be able to do. So the next time you see movie showcasing a sports team and shamelessly touting the tricolor in your face in every second scene with dialogues like “I am seeing a white person hoist the Indian flag for the first time”, make sure you spit at the TV screen. Oh, here’s Chak De India. Line up.

What is it about the underdog story that we like so much? We liked to see the peasants win again the English Team in Lagaan, and even though every logical cell in our bodies was crying out against the possibilities, we believed it, and we enjoyed it, because we wanted it to happen. We were willing them to win. Expect the same to happen when you see Chak De India. You will be willing the girls on, even though you know how the story is going to end. Maybe this is just a way of admitting to ourselves we are indeed underdogs, notwithstanding all the sounds we make otherwise. We like to believe that even though we are not good enough to win, we deserve to, and we can, just by wanting it more. That is the moral of the underdog story, and irrespective of whether it is real or not, we love it. No matter who tells it to us, no matter how many times they tell it to us, no matter what shape or form it is told, we love it just as much. Because it is The Story Of Us.

That is what Chak De India will give us. It will give us our story, complete with a pinch of chauvinism and a dash of misplaced patriotism. It is just like watching Lagaan without the realistic characterization and cinematography. It exploits emotional vulnerabilities that come with being Indian; if you are alert enough to catch on to them, you will hate yourself for liking it. If not, you will just end up plain liking it. Thankfully, most of us belong to the latter group.