My experiences

It was few days back that I had a chance to watch CHAK DE INDIA for the second time.
For those who don’t know about this movie, this is one of the few good movies from our beloved Shah Rukh Khan.

I am quite impressed with this movie and it is one among the few movies of substance from Shah Rukh Khan. What exactly I mean, I will tell you later.

Anyways, so the story starts with the Indian Hockey Caption being harassed by his country fellows for his inability to hit a goal in Penalty Stroke in the world cup final against Pakistan. Unfortunately, the caption belonged to minority Muslims. Feeling insulted and dejected, the caption leaves home and disappears in the search of peace.

He appears again after many years with a motive, a desire to show his country that he is as patriotic as anybody else for his country. He takes the task of Coaching Indian Women’s Hockey Team with a mandate of bagging Gold in the Olympics.

Shah Rukh’s role of coach in the movie was center point of attraction. He played the role so brilliantly that it made the entire movie enthralling and captivating. As a coach he knew his responsibility was not only teaching the hockey players but also to gel them together as a team. Irrespective of best individual players in the team, the team can never win till the players play together with a common motive, and nobody understands it better than a coach.

As shown in the movie, the players were from diverse background with personal motives. All of them wanted to perform the best in the world cup hockey tournament but none of them was ready to compromise with their ego and personal objectives for the team to succeed.

Each of the two front attackers wanted to make most of the goals. They will never pass the ball to one another. The most senior player in the team wanted to play the game like one man army with complete autonomy. There was no leader in the team who could lead the team in the right direction. The team was lacking a mentor and the coach filled this gap.

During this enduring journey the coach faced significant hurdles. However, having learned lessons during his last world cup defeat, the coach had turned quite stoic and knew how to tackle those issues. He fought with the Executive panel for sponsoring girls hockey team to Olympics. The panel had headstrong people with opinion that girls are born to cook food at home and that’s the best girls can do. In another incident, the coach has to make whole team his enemy to unite them; this episode went to the extent that at one point the team decided to replace the coach.

I was completed enthralled with the direction of the movie. The director has done a great job in shaping the movie. This movie teaches excellent lesson on leadership qualities. And that’s why I say that the movie has substance unlike most of the movies of Shah Rukh where he do some funky stuff and moves along (Like Om Shanti Om and Don)