chak de which india

i don't write as well as the screenplay writer for the movie, obviously. please read what jaideep sahni has to say:

It's been the third week for Chak De India and, to put it mildly, the film is doing much better than what many people expected. There are many things all of us in the team that made the film are thrilled about, but what has given us the most encouragement is the response of the people to the kind of patriotism the film attempts to stand for.

There was a time, post-Independence, when we were perhaps smarting from being ruled for so long by foreigners, and there was perhaps a tendency to feel better about ourselves by being slightly unkind to foreigners in our references, especially in our films. So you would see a bird shitting on a bald foreigner’s head arising from a hope in the filmmakers’ hearts that the audience would derive some kind of vicarious pleasure. There were references to how our civilisation gave the world everything that was good in it, and perhaps they did reflect the popular feeling in the newly independent nation.

But that was then. Over the last decade or so, as the country and the economy have opened to the world, the suspicion and awe of the foreigner has been replaced by a confidence, not always quiet, and sometimes bordering on a techno-cricket-film chauvinism. And as we went about making a film celebrating India’s women athletes, we were faced with some decisions about the kind of patriotism we would reflect.

On the one hand was the almost blind love for the flag among the athletes who were our inspiration, and we had to stay true to them. On the other was our own hesitation to seem like we were guilty of wrapping our story in the flag, which may be the conventional wisdom in the industry, but which makes our stomachs churn. For us their story was a story of people daring to dream, and going flat out to achieve it in the face of all kinds of odds which athletes from developed nations have never even heard of.

And we made our choices. We chose not to falsely glorify everything about India. We chose not to skirt the issues of gender, religion, region and language biases but take them on, because we thought that was patriotic. We chose not to conveniently edit out the inconvenient truths, hiding behind national team’s thrust forward as examples of perfectly channelised nationalism by sports administrators. We chose to display our admiration for incredible people in unfashionable clothes, many belonging to parts of India which the shining new India doesn’t have much time for. We chose to giveutmost respect to the foreign teams and coaches our team played against, and not portray them as devils incarnate out to destroy our 5000-year-old civilisation.

We chose to treat athletes like athletes, irrespective of the fact whether they were Indian or foreign, women or men, winners or losers. And we did all of this not because we thought we were some great messiahs who would redefine either films or nationalism, but as storytellers telling a story the only way we understood it — with the sensibilities that made sense to our hearts and minds. We tried to neither use chauvinistic patriotism to push our characters for commerce, nor sweep the genuine patriotism of national athletes under a carpet of chic modernity.

And today, even in the third week, the audiences are rewarding us, scene after scene, in theatres all over India.

What does this show? To us it appears to show the same thing that general elections in this country have shown, decade after decade. That the Indian people are by and large reasonable, like to live with each other, and believe in a patriotism that is not violent, chauvinistic and stupid. And they are perfectly happy to look within themselves, warts and all, and still be proud of what they need to be proud of. They don’t need films, politicians or supposed external enemies to feel more Indian. There is a time honoured name for this kind of patriotism — it’s called the spirit of sportsmanship.

And there is another thing we learnt while researching for the film. As we spent more and more time with the sportspeople — players and coaches — we began realising that sport may probably be the most powerful way to build character in the young and teach new generations about honest ways to achieve recognition. It kept coming to us while writing and making the film but we were worried that it may sound like a lecture. So we didn’t talk about it directly, but we hoped that it would kind of lurk somewhere in the sub-text and touch viewers subconsciously — even magically.

I was trained to be a computer engineer and am a great believer in the power of information techno-logy to bring in positive change in developing societies. But in the course of researching for this film it dawned upon me that in the race to produce the engineers, doctors and managers so necessary for a developing nation, we have ended up completely ignoring sports and arts in our resource allocation — and we may end up a nation of selfish techno-yuppies with very little character development, a distaste for teamwork and a weird understanding of what this nation is, what its needs are, and where we and our personal quest for success, recognition and achievement can fit into all this. Maybe this is too simplistic an assumption. But then again, it may not be. And in that case, the cost of not addressing it right now may be somewhat more than what it takes to make a film.

Sahni is screenwriter and lyricist of ‘Chak De India’. He has previously written scripts for films like ‘Company’, ‘Bunty aur Babli’ and ‘Khosla ka Ghosla’