It's been the third week for Chak De India and, to put it mildly, the film is doing much better than what many people expected. There are many things all of us in the team that made the film are thrilled about, but what has given us the most encouragement is the response of the people to the kind of patriotism the film attempts to stand for.

There was a time, post-Independence, when we were perhaps smarting from being ruled for so long by foreigners, and there was perhaps a tendency to feel better about ourselves by being slightly unkind to foreigners in our references, especially in our films. So you would see a bird shitting on a bald foreigner’s head arising from a hope in the filmmakers’ hearts that the audience would derive some kind of vicarious pleasure. There were references to how our civilisation gave the world everything that was good in it, and perhaps they did reflect the popular feeling in the newly independent nation.

But that was then. Over the last decade or so, as the country and the economy have opened to the world, the suspicion and awe of the foreigner has been replaced by a confidence, not always quiet, and sometimes bordering on a techno-cricket-film chauvinism. And as we went about making a film celebrating India’s women athletes, we were faced with some decisions about the kind of patriotism we would reflect.

On the one hand was the almost blind love for the flag among the athletes who were our inspiration, and we had to stay true to them. On the other was our own hesitation to seem like we were guilty of wrapping our story in the flag, which may be the conventional wisdom in the industry, but which makes our stomachs churn. For us their story was a story of people daring to dream, and going flat out to achieve it in the face of all kinds of odds which athletes from developed nations have never even heard of.

... contd.