Go! by Aparna Ravichandran & Aparna Ravichandran

Author:Aparna Ravichandran & Aparna Ravichandran [Kamath, Nandan & Ravichandran, Aparna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353055691
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Who were these girls with the winning ways? Where had they come from? What inspired them to keep going? In sport, as in everything else in life, the truth is to be found not on the podium, but in the backstory. The fascinating thing is that each backstory is quite unlike any other—the nudge that first pitches a girl into a particular sport; the insanely difficult journey to the top, as much a test of her mental and emotional strength as her physical; the kind of social, economic and cultural background she comes from, which helps or hinders her progress in particular ways—the factors are specific to each person; they can never be whittled down to four or five neat categories.

Even more fascinating, however, are the unexpected fallouts of such success, especially in terms of its social and cultural impact. Mary Kom moved from athletics to boxing at the age of seventeen because she was inspired by the medal-winning success of her fellow Manipuri, Dingko Singh, at the Bangkok Asiad in 1998. She didn’t tell her dad about it because she knew he would not allow it—he worried too much, as dads of daughters did, about the damage boxing could do to her face and how that might affect her chances in the marriage market. Her stupendous success has not only brought a slew of exceptional sportspeople from the region on to the national stage, it has led to an increased awareness about, and respect for, her state in national consciousness. In its turn, the eponymous Bollywood movie made on her life has hopefully inspired a generation of young women—and more importantly, young men—to rethink their notions of what a supportive husband really means.

Geeta and Babita took to wrestling not because of any love for the sport, but because their wrestler dad insisted they did. After waiting several years in vain for a son, Mahavir Singh Phogat decided he would coach his daughters to be wrestlers instead, and brave the social backlash that would undoubtedly accompany such an act in his conservative town. Today, the success of his audacious experiment—which, it must be said, could have gone very badly for him and his girls—has not only propelled many more girls from Haryana into wrestling and other sports, but has also brought about a sea change in the mindset of a patriarchal state that had the worst sex ratio at birth among all states in India as per the 2011 census: 834 girls to every 1000 boys. In early 2018, the ratio had gone up a remarkable 80 points to 914, and one cannot help but wonder how much of the credit for this should go to an iconoclast called Mahavir Phogat, whose experiment is captured in the blockbuster movie, Dangal (2016, Aamir Khan Productions, UTV Motion Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures India).

Saina (who, like the Phogat sisters, was another Haryana girl responsible for altering perspectives about women in her home state) and Sindhu owe their success, in large part, to their

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