Wrestlemania

January first started off with a bang! I went and watched 'Dangal' with friends and it was the kind of movie that would make you sit up and take notice.
Based loosely( one has to take cinematic liberties with the original ) on the ascending stardom of wrestling sisters Geetha and Babita Phogat, it was resounding in its capture of the obstacles both physical and mental that women face in India, specifically in the field of sports and even more specifically in something as male oriented as wrestling.
The University of Oregon fired its football coach this November and the severance pay was somewhere along the lines of eleven million dollars. Hardly news in the USA because this country thrives on sports.Childhood poverty is dramatically high in Oregon, but no matter, sports programs are always well funded by well 'heeled' philanthropists( hope you catch my drift...this is Oregon, where a major corporation is headquartered...).
Considering the kind of support and encouragement given to sportsmen here, it is hardly surprising that Team USA trounces the competition and returns home with zillions of medals.India on the other hand, came home with two at the 2016 Olympics. If our sportmen and women were blessed with the kind of facilities and encouragement and coaching and all round support that the leading countries give theirs,we would definitely make our marks. But alas, that still remains a pipe dream. Frankly the playing field is not level if you ask me. No one can fault better prepared athletes but the backing they recieve cannot be ignored.
The other remarkable thing about the indian medals this year is that both were won by women- in a country where female infanticide is still practiced, where women still feel subjugated, where women still feel unsafe, it was the women who rose to the top. Kudos to them! Unlike here in the US where your gender is not a barrier( or is it?), Indian women have to fight that burden constantly - not all, but most of them.
Northern India is still backward when it comes to feminism and Haryana is no exception. For two women from there to have made it to the Commonwealth games is a huge achievement and this has spurred a lot of young girls to get into the field of wrestling and some day, they will make it to the Olympics for sure.
One common comment about the movie was that the father did not care about what the children wanted.That he lived vicariously through the girls, without caring for what they wanted for themselves. And he was a hard taskmaster. He drove them hard, worked them ceaselaessly, doled out praise infrequently and that all of this was for his satisfaction.
Having had a father like that myself( not the hard taskmaster, oh no, no), I mean someone who lived vicariuosly through my sister and me, I can totally relate to the situation.
My father had always told us that he wanted atleast one of us to go into engineering because he had no sons and we had to make up for that. I did. I even did my master's degree because my father wanted me to. I still remember the first day at University when we were asked why we wanted to do our Masters in Business Administration and I was pretty frank in letting people know it was because
my dad wanted me to.That got a  good laugh out of everyone, but I wasn't joking.
Now that I am a mother with kids, there is this constant dilemma about whether we let kids free to choose what they want or guide them not so gently into what they are good at.A friend of mine who lives here was telling me about how absolutely she hated singing classes but was compelled by her mother to take classes. But she taught carnatic music to kids here for the last ten years and enjoyed it so much she said she knew her mother was right in pushing her towards things that she did not find interesting, but was actually very good at. The law of inertia is always in action when it comes to kids and the momentum to change needs to come, in most cases, from outside.
A few scenes stood out and were moving enough to bring tears to my eyes. The one where he has their hair cut- two pretty girls with shorn hair, heartbreaking. And the one where no words are spoken between father and daughter in their reapproachment- moving. The mother's fury at having chicken cooked in her kitchen and the way she takes it out on the nephew by swatting him on the head- funny. The father hearing the Indian national anthem and realising his daughter won- priceless!
Aamir Khan has always been an amazing actor, so one cannot say enough about how he inhabited a role so unlike him-older,heavy, with an eternal scowl - I thought back to 1989-90, QSQT and had to sigh- he has aged ( very gracefully) ,hopefully I have too.I was in twelfth grade for crying out loud!
But the four young ladies who played the younger and older version of the Phogat sisters ? Kudos ladies!!! These girls are so real in the way they wrestle in the movie,that I had to go online to check if they were selected for the roles because they could wrestle and I found out that they were actually trained for six months prior to shooting the movie - the kind of effort they need to have put in to show the finesse they did...
The movie was an Aamir Khan starrer but the scene stealers were the girls through and through- more proof that girls can do anything they set their mind to- even swipe away the limelight from someone like Aamir Khan.
Great start to 2017!! Here's to all women- may this year be ours, to seize, to shape, to change, to mould, to arrive- at the top!