For a few days, there was a very good chance that Jagdish Singh, India's Nordic skier who had qualified for the 2018 Winter Olympics, would not go to Pyeongchang because three sets of officials were arguing over who should accompany him. It was a tawdry happening and yet de rigueur in Indian sport - to treat an elite Indian athlete who had qualified for his Olympic Games like loose change.
Actually, it's hardly surprising. If you can't imagine the lifeforms that lurk beneath the immovable object that Indian sport can become, someone has now made a cracking movie about it. Mukkabaaz (The Brawler) has been out for a few weeks and does not follow the conventional arc of sports movies. In the newly-minted, soaring Bollywood genre of the sports biopic, Chak De! India was more realistic than anything before it and ended in glory.
Mukkabaaz, directed by India's indie-movie king Anurag Kashyap, however, has become the mind-bending outlier.
The story of a small-town boxer from western Uttar Pradesh has much else happening in it, including a central love story and many socio-political truths thrown in. It is the series of events in the boxer's life, though, that reveals the brutality, injustice and touches of sweetness that exist around Indian sport. Such bare-knuckled truths, you discover, belong to the life experiences of the movie's male lead.
Vineet Kumar Singh, 36, was a junior basketballer who participated in six age-group nationals as a part of the Uttar Pradesh state team. He wrote the original Mukkabaaz script along with his basketball-playing sister Mukti Singh Srinet. The characters and stories are drawn from who and what Vineet ran into in sport. He remembers seeing middle-distance runner Gulab Chand, the Asian Games and Asian Championship 10,000m medallist, cycle 25km from his home during training season and bunk in empty rooms around an abandoned swimming pool in Benares.
On another occasion, Vineet says, he saw an athlete carrying a railway guard's trunk on his head at the local station, averting his eyes, trying to be invisible. "I saw a lot of this happening to people I'd seen in the papers, with their medals and everyone around them applauding."
While "some things" may have changed since he was a junior player, Vineet says, much remains the same at the level the movie is played out. He has dozens of acquaintances who got government jobs on the 'sports quota' - those in good designations, others who medalled at state or nationals and were stuck in the "Group D" aka the lowest- level "Class 4 jobs" and others who slipped through the cracks into complete anonymity. They come to life in the story of Shravan Kumar Singh, the character he plays.
The choice of boxing as his sport in the movie was a conscious one, even though Vineet had "not touched gloves" in his life. Boxing is a reflection of the terrifying element of chance that runs through Indian sport. In a team discipline like basketball, Shravan's obstacles could get spread around his mates. In athletics or swimming, the superiority of every athlete is clearly visible and quantifiable - ignoring them becomes a palpable case of bias.
Boxing, however, is a largely subjective maze, controlled by a referee and judged on points by independent outsiders. Other than a knockout, the closer the fight the more the chances of random external control on the outcome.
"You can find sporting skill anywhere in India. Unfortunately, there will be so many who have no idea what it is they are best at because of what happens around him. The whole structure that exists has its effect on our talent." Vineet
In the movie, for the rebellious, confrontational Shravan in small-town India, the odds naturally stack up at speed. The fissures in Indian society - caste among them - play themselves out on his life. Even if you strip away the rest of the plot, the truths about the ordinary struggles of an aspiring Indian athlete ring through Mukkabaaz.
Vineet, an acutely aware and thoughtful witness, says, "Somewhere at the macro level, our social structures - like, say, the idea of casteism - make us carry so many grudges or our identity-'pride' all the time. And both these things are working against us. Sab apna nikaalne main bhide hue hain aur iss mein bahut bachche suffer kar rahe hain. (Everyone is at loggerheads trying to exert their power and many kids suffer because of this)."
It is an enormous call but he makes it without hesitation because along the lengthy food chain that an Indian athlete must travel to get to the top, chance/ luck/kismet, as the film shows, begins to rule. Got a kind coach who won't make you do "home duty" (like run personal, domestic errands)? Then maybe the federation boss of the region doesn't like your sass. Or even if he does and you do land a government job, your senior officer doesn't want to give you leave for training or competition. Or he might, but that's just your good fortune. This churning spits out so many well before they can achieve their best and we are left wondering about Olympic medals.
"It's not black and white," Vineet is quick to say, "not that only people in government are bad or the federation officials are all bad. Everything can work, till you get to somewhere and then you run into your colleagues spoiling the atmosphere for their own reasons." Unfairness, the movie shows you, never works like a one-way street, especially in a structure where no one is accountable and resentments never fade.
An all-out sports nut and also a medically-qualified doctor in Ayurveda, Vineet says, "You can find sporting skill anywhere in India. Unfortunately, there will be so many who have no idea what it is they are best at because of what happens around him. The whole structure that exists has its effect on our talent."
It is not surprising that Vineet has produced the most hard-earned, convincing performance of a sportsman in Hindi cinema. Not because he merely looks like one, but because he immersed himself in boxing. From scratch. At 34, he went into a year-long boxing training in Patiala, after having spent three years working on his stamina through cardio and strength training while pitching his script to producers. In Patiala, he says, "I wasn't out of breath during training, my legs didn't tire, that never happened. But the skill wasn't there, the art that boxing is wasn't there."
The fight sequences in the film look real because they were real, his sparring partners competitive, title-holding boxers who landed real punches on the actor. When the first punch came his way in Patiala, Singh's eyes snapped shut instinctively, his "neuro-muscular reflex" belonging not to a fighter but to every thirty-something on the street. It was painful learning, as no one at the Polo Ground Boxing Centre, other than head coach Harmeet Singh Hundal and later coach Anudeep Singh, knew that he was an actor. Other trainees had a good go at him during the bi-weekly sparring, acceptance and learning coming after endless cuts on the face, punches to the body and a broken rib. After nearly three months in Patiala, for the first time when Harpreet threw a punch, Vineet's eyes didn't shut, he saw it coming and got out of the way. "Everything changed after that."
On his voice down the telephone line from Mumbai, you can hear Vineet's love for our sportspeople. "The athlete who wants to play - he sees the tricolour, that's a young child's dream, isn't it? He sees the flag, the Olympics, playing for the country. There's a dream growing in him but he is not ready for the road down which he will have to go."
In Mukkabaaz, Vineet also wrote an acerbic rap song titled Paintra (Trick/ Manoeuvre) that could become the anthem for the Indian athletic aspirant. Its lyrics are cheeky, searing. And, like the film, very, very true.