Dangal - wrestling to Wrestle

I arrived late to the Dangal party. But thankfully, I caught up with this movie a couple of weeks back, before it moved out of most theatres. The uniform reaction I heard from people who watched the movie was “What perfection - everyone in the movie seems to have learnt & lived wrestling so much so that nothing appears to be an enactment”. I must agree, since I looked up Geeta Phogat’s Gold-medal winning ‘real’ match after the movie, and it didn’t come close to any of the prelims matches shown in the movie!

I’m a big fan of sports movies and particularly those inspired from real life events, for they celebrate triumph of the human spirit against insurmountable odds. They not just inspire people to march-on when massive challenges come in the way of their passion, but they also do the dual job of endearing them to a new sport. Several Bollywood movies have done an outstanding job here, like Chak de India (Hockey), Bhaag Milka Bhaag (Athletics), Mary Kom (Boxing), Lagaan & MS Dhoni (Cricket, though this sport hardly needs any further push). So have movies in Tamil like Irudhi Sutru (Boxing), Vennila Kabadi Kuzhu (Kabadi) apart from other commercial movies with sports as a key track - like Chennai 600028 (Cricket again) or Ethir Neechal (Athletics). They have done a world of good to promote sports and get audience interested in stuff beyond the obvious cricket bat-and-ball, when on the ground. Perhaps its no coincidence that a lot of non-cricket sports leagues have sprung up in India, in the recent years.

What struck me with Dangal was the incredulity that something like this could have happened in real life. The first thing I did after stepping out of the movie hall was to google and check how much of it was real vs reel. Understandably, the director has taken some creative liberty and added elements to make the movie work commercially - such as the antagonist character of Indian national coach and Phogat Sr getting locked up during his daughter’s Commonwealth Gold bout, to name a few.

Nevertheless, there are several aspects from Phogat’s journey that makes his real story on the love for wrestling & the doggedness to get a gold medal, incredible. Without doubt its good to see such stories come out in the open, be taken up commercially (albeit with some ‘reel’ embellishments) and achieve the reach they have, rather than taking a puritan approach by being a stickler for factual accuracy and bury such tales forever.

The Dhaakad video from the movie has been playing on repeat mode in my machine for a few weeks.