And we made our choices. We chose not to falsely glorify everything about India. We chose not to skirt the issues of gender, religion, region and language biases but take them on, because we thought that was patriotic. We chose not to conveniently edit out the inconvenient truths, hiding behind national team’s thrust forward as examples of perfectly channelised nationalism by sports administrators. We chose to display our admiration for incredible people in unfashionable clothes, many belonging to parts of India which the shining new India doesn’t have much time for. We chose to giveutmost respect to the foreign teams and coaches our team played against, and not portray them as devils incarnate out to destroy our 5000-year-old civilisation.

We chose to treat athletes like athletes, irrespective of the fact whether they were Indian or foreign, women or men, winners or losers. And we did all of this not because we thought we were some great messiahs who would redefine either films or nationalism, but as storytellers telling a story the only way we understood it — with the sensibilities that made sense to our hearts and minds. We tried to neither use chauvinistic patriotism to push our characters for commerce, nor sweep the genuine patriotism of national athletes under a carpet of chic modernity.

And today, even in the third week, the audiences are rewarding us, scene after scene, in theatres all over India.

What does this show? To us it appears to show the same thing that general elections in this country have shown, decade after decade. That the Indian people are by and large reasonable, like to live with each other, and believe in a patriotism that is not violent, chauvinistic and stupid. And they are perfectly happy to look within themselves, warts and all, and still be proud of what they need to be proud of. They don’t need films, politicians or supposed external enemies to feel more Indian. There is a time honoured name for this kind of patriotism — it’s called the spirit of sportsmanship.

... contd.