Telling the story
I liked this Indian Express piece by Chak de India scriptwriter Jaideep Sahni on the spirit of the film:
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…Read the whole thing here.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…
There is a time honoured name for this kind of patriotism — it’s called the spirit of sportsmanship.
Would the comments box be the appropriate place to express envy + gratitude for all the wonderful posts you put up? And to ask you for your news?
Comment by Amitava Kumar — September 1, 2007 @ 4:52 am
:) My news is all good. Email follows…
Comment by Uma — September 1, 2007 @ 3:13 pm