Art & Entertainment

Picking Up An Ankle With A Mat Finish

Smash-hit <em>Dangal</em> plays fast and loose with facts about the ‘villain’ of the uplifting piece —women’s wrestling coach P.R. Sondhi

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Picking Up An Ankle With A Mat Finish
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It wasn’t superheroes or mythologies, romances or crime thrillers, comedies or musicals but a biopic on a sports personality that’s given Bollywood its highest revenue earner in over 100 years. And it took all ‘Mr Perfectionist’ Aamir Khan had to offer as producer and actor for the film’s fiendishly successfully run across the country in its fourth week. Dangal, a biopic of legendary wrestling coach Mah­avir Singh Phogat, had on last count already crossed Rs 350 crores and looks set to cross the Rs 400-crore mark—a new box-office benchmark.

Former wrestler and Dronacharya Award-winning coach Mahavir Phogat gets pride of place not only in the film but outside reel life too. He will always be remembered for shaping India’s first-ever woman wrestling gold medal winner at the Commonwealth Games—his daughter Geeta. She won gold in the 55 kg category in the Delhi Games in 2010, etching her name in the record books. Aamir Khan’s Mahavir brilliantly brings out the coach’s obsessive, single-minded goal: to guide his daughters—he has four—to gold at the Games. Indeed, critics and fans have applauded the film in rare unison. However, to add a bit of drama—an essential ingredient of a sports biopic—Aamir rubbed the official coach of the then Indian women’s team at the Delhi Commonwealth Games, Piara Ram Sondhi, the wrong way.

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In the film, Mahavir doesn’t agree with the national coach, named P.R. Kadam, over Geeta’s training at the national camp, held at the National Institute of Sports in Patiala, before the Games. Mahavir also dis­­agrees with national coach’s strategy for her at her matches in the competition.

All this—particularly the depiction of Sondhi’s character as the arch villain in this fairy-tale—has caused a controversy. Son­dhi, 69, says the pain this has caused him would always remain, stressing that certain elements of Dangal’s storyline “didn’t exist at all” in real life. Quite strangely, Sondhi himself hasn’t seen the film yet, and has based his reaction on what others have told him about his character, as portrayed in it. “The character of the coach in the film is shown in a negative way. Is baat ka mujhe puri umar dukh rahega (this will pain me for the rest of my life). Aur baki coaches ko bhi dukh hai (other coaches are also disappointed). People who know me and have seen the film in England, Canada or America are also disappointed about how my character is portrayed,” Sondhi tells Outlook. “Aamir Khan told me that since it was a biopic, ‘we’ve put some mirch-masala’ in the film,” Sondhi says about his conversation with the actor-producer. “It’s okay that he has made the film on the father of Geeta. I also encourage women empowerment, which is the theme of the film and which is apparently well portrayed.”

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Geeta agrees that certain incidents shown in the film didn’t take place. She even def­ends Sondhi, agreeing that his character has been negatively magnified. “The nat­ional coach’s role has been a bit exaggerated; he was not so bad either. Incidents shown, like how my father was locked in a room (during her final match at the Games), did not happen in reality,” says Geeta. But isn’t it true that her father Mahavir couldn’t watch her final bout at the Games? Who could have stopped him? “The security people posted at the NIS had stopped him,” she says. The movie shows that Mahavir could not watch Geeta’s final match against Emily Bensted of Australia at the Games after a person, apparently acting on a plan devised by the angry national head coach, locks him in a room so that he couldn’t pass instructions to Geeta from the stands. Mahavir is shown shouting instructions for Geeta in her earlier bouts at the Games.

“The government of India conducted the Commonwealth Games. They had deputed enough security that monitored the events and the athletes. Also, the print and electronic media were there. Would this (locking Mahavir in a room) have been possible? And they are now saying it is only a biopic. Aamir told me he had to give importance to the person who had achieved such a great feat,” says Sondhi.

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Aamir Khan as Mahavir faces off with national coach Kadam in Dangal

Mahavir was so keen on monitoring the intense training of his daughters Geeta (55kg category) and Babita (51kg) that he, along with the rest of his family, relocated from Balali village in Haryana to Patiala in Punjab for about six months, the duration of the camp. Although he wasn’t allowed inside the NIS, he managed to impart extra coaching before the morning sessions at the camp started. Sondhi was the camp in-charge. In the film, his character is shown complaining to NIS authorities about Mah­­avir’s additional coaching to Geeta and Babita.

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Sondhi says that he didn’t even know that Mahavir was living close to NIS, Patiala during the camp. “The training at the camp was imparted in the mornings and in the evenings. If Mahavir trained them, he might have done that before or after these two sessions, but I am not aware of that. I later learnt that someone who teaches in the NIS diploma section stopped him from training his daughters. Also, there’s a government rule that anyone from outside can’t enter the NIS and train athletes,” says Sondhi. “It is a fact that my father was not allowed to meet us during our training camp. The security guards (at the NIS, Patiala) had stopped him from going inside the campus where our training and bouts used to take place. Their (administrators’) viewpoint was also correct, when they said that if every athlete’s parents started coming inside there was no need for coaches,” says Geeta. “My father was not satisfied with the training at the preparatory camp and he wanted his daughters to train harder. This part has been depicted correctly in the film.”

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In the film, Mahavir is shown to disagree with Kadam, the Sondhi character, over the strategy that Geeta should adopt against her opponents. Sondhi, however, says Mah­avir never interfered with his coaching.

After he came to know about how his character was cast in a negative light in the film, Sondhi had a talk with Aamir over the phone. “Two things I told Aamir. He has shown in the film that when Mahavir interfered in training the chief India team coach did not take it in the right spirit. This is wrong; Mahavir never interfered. And the girls who trained under me were never indisciplined. They used to do whatever I told them to do, I told this to Aamir,” the veteran coach emphasises.

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Emraan Hashmi in Azhar

Sondhi, who now runs a wrestling academy in Phagwara in Punjab, says that old age prevents him from doing anything else except lodging his protest orally. “I am at that stage of life where I have to remain calm. And the negative portrayal not only affects me, it affects all coaches (who were then attached with the women’s team). I’m serving wrestling as a coach and he (Aamir) has done it by making this film,” he says even-handedly.

Earlier, when the film was being shot, Sondhi met Aamir through Kripa Sha­nkar, a former wrestler and his disciple, who trained the female actors who played the roles of the wrestlers in Dangal. But the retired coach claims that despite knowing what the film was about and his proximity with its subject, he didn’t ask Aamir if his character was also part of the biopic. “Kripa Shankar had told Aamir that I was coach of the women wrestlers at that time. But it never occ­urred to me that I should ask him about my character,” he says now.

Geeta Phogat says she appreciated the film very much. “I liked the film a lot. All the characters—whether it is Aamir Khan ji or the character of my mother or the younger Geeta—are good. Aamir Khan ji has played my father’s role very well. He was fit to play the role. I am very satisfied with the characters depicted and the overall film,” she says. Mahavir’s unrelenting training regimen for her daughters continues, says Geeta. “He was stricter than what is shown in the film. He still is very strict, particularly with my younger sisters,” she says.

Dangal was released in December, close on the heels of former India cricket captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s MS Dhoni: The Untold Story, and Azhar, the life story of former India captain Mohammed Azharuddin. A common thread that runs through all three biopics is that certain plot twists were added to make them more entertaining—often they are in the form of conflicts that magnify the drama, or accentuate the obstacles facing the protagonist. Azhar ends when he dramatically returns the money and mobile phone to the person who had given it to him to underperform, which had led to his life ban by the BCCI. In another shot towards the end, his first and second wife enters the courtroom together, thus signalling a happy ending to the film. Real life, wreathed in bewildering shades of grey, rarely unfolds according to the smooth requirements of a well-written script. Even fairy tales have to be touched up for greater effect.

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