Chavan, an athletic, lanky fly-half of the junior Magic Bus team was thus featured alongside Rugby 7s stars: Springboks winger Bryan Habana, Samoan fly-half Lolo Lui, New Zealand Sevens skipper DJ Forbes besides English legends—ex-captain Lawrence Dallaglio and Wasps and England full-back Danny Cipriani—in rugby’s biggest hard-sell for a place in the 2016 Olympics, competing with six other sports for two available spots.

The Class 7 student of Marwari Commercial HS, one among six children of a humble fisherman, knows nothing about IRB President Bernard Leppatest and lesser still of rugby’s four visits to the Olympics in 1900, ‘08, ‘20 and ‘24 before it was ommitted from the grand sporting movement. But Chavan will find his frames happily juxtaposed alongside rugby’s marquee moments like Nelson Mandela presenting the William Webb Ellis Cup to South African captain Francois Pienaar and the All Black’s venerated Haka.

An image of Chavan scoring a dramatic try along the Bombay Gymkhana touchline in a colts game, dissolving into a grand montage of an Olympic stadium will be the lasting impression that scores of global delegates of the IOC will take home when they tick mark or cross out rugby. “It aimed to show how wide the the sport has spread beyond traditional lands like England, Australia and South Africa,” said Wilder Films executive producer Richard Batty from London. “There was an element of convenience in choosing India, because we’ve shot there before and find it a very exciting, vibrant place. Also, there’s a good level of cinema experience in India. Except for the director, producer and cameraman, the rest of the crew was Indian,” he added.

Chavan was a clear choice after the crew watched to teams the Magicians and Rhinos play a club game at Mumbai, and the youngster caught their eye with his uninhibited sprints along the length of the Gymkhana grounds. “We were looking for a boy who was good at rugby, and with a lot of charisma—Chavan was lovely to work with. The narrative was simple— a young boy watching rugby on TV, who could be a potential Olympic athlete if he trained hard and played well. He’s 11 or 12 now, and we’re targeting 2016 when he’ll be about 20,” Batty said, adding that he was mighty surprised by what he saw in India. “Not rugby’s presence, but the high and structured level at which they’re playing. The world associates India with cricket, but here we wanted to show the wide appeal of rugby through this Indian boy,” he said.

Helmed by Wilders directors Jim North and Paul Gowers, the 2:38 minute capsule has Chavan zigzagging through a narrow lane of a Mumbai chawl after being handed the typical tin meal ‘dabba’ by his mother. And interspersing footage from tournaments and the world’s leading players exalting the virtues of the sport, is Chavan’s range of rugger manouvres—a sprint down the flanks, a timely back-pass, and finally cutting past two defenders, a the screen-stealing touch-line try, with Mangesh’s celebrating face with Mumbai’s heritage architecture, the CST station and BMC in the backdrop.

For Chavan, who started rugby just a year ago, the video was nothing more than a chance to practise his sprinting skills. “They shot the try scene 10-12 times, and it was a little boring doing it again and again,” the boy says, before adding that his fisherman father and five siblings were simply happy to hear that he’d been part of a film-shoot. Shyly, he told them, he’d played the hero.