The importance of being Milkha Singh

Suman K. Sharma
This essay is not a critique on the biopic on India’s pride, Milkha Singh; it is rather a perception of the movie’s significance.  Milkha Singh is now 78 (born 1935), and the movie covers just the thirteen years of his growing up from 1947 to 1960.  What is the relevance then, one might ask, of a sporting incident that had happened fifty-three years ago? As a nation, we are not overly fond of sports, though a one-day cricket match with our arch-rival Pakistan might prove a different matter altogether.  For us, most field-and-track competitions are just that – won on the field and kept track of by sport enthusiasts and civil service aspirants mugging up for their General Studies paper.
Bhag Milkha…is important because in telling the story of an individual, it ends up telling the story of what a man of determination can achieve.  Boy Milkha sees his parents butchered along with other villagers by horse-ridden, better armed and blood thirsty marauders.  He runs away from his ancestral village for dear life.  Forced to live in a tent of a refugee camp with his elder sister and her boorish husband (with only a thin piece of cloth to veil their marital bed), he has to nightly hear, in the silence of a dormant volcano, the humiliation of his sibling giving in to her spouse’s naked desire. One day that volcano erupts and he gives his tyrant jija a sound thrashing before taking to the road once again.  From vagrancy he takes an about-turn to enlist with the army. Here the steamroller discipline of the instructor and the unreserved camaraderie of the fellow recruits give Milkha a sense of belonging.  His racing career starts with not one but two enticements – freedom from fatigues and a daily quota of milk and a couple of raw eggs!  Soon enough, his aspirations rise.  He wants to don the ‘India blazer’ (signifying the status of a national champion), set a record in his sport and in time to attain the prominence of a national hero such as Mahatama Gandhi.  He achieves all – defeating his rival at a national event, setting a record of covering 400 meter sprint in 45.73 seconds (electronic time) – it took Indian athletes more than 38 years to break Milkha Singh’s record, when Paramjit Singh, an inspector in the Central Reserve Police Force, ran 400 meters in 45.70 seconds (electronic time) in 1999 – and going by Bhag Milkha…. Prime Minister Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru declared a national holiday to honour our hero’s victory over Pakistani sprinter, Abdul Khaliq.  The huge success comes to Milkha Singh not without him straining himself to limits, following the arduous regimen set for him by his coaches, taking pain and humiliation in his stride and to a large extent, maintaining his animal spirits which refuse to admit defeat.  End of the day, Milkha Singh is a man like everyone else.  In one touching scene, he is shown slapping himself hard on his face a score of times for having indulged in dalliance when he should have been practicing on the field.  The film begins and ends with Milkha Singh’s reluctance to lead a sport delegation to Pakistan.  It takes all the persuasive powers of his mentors, a Secretary to the Government of India and Prime Minister Nehru himself to make him agree to the proposal.  Milkha Singh goes to Pakistan, confronts the ghosts of all those victims of 1947 mayhem and comes back home a winner!  In the concluding scene, we see a smiling boy-Milkha running side by side his adult persona in the last lap of the historic race.  Aspirations pacing with fulfilment!
But behind Milkha’s smiling face is the cartography of his relentless pursuit of excellence – that perhaps is the importance being Milkha Singh.

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