Chak De !!!

Chak de !! ... Yes, that seems to be the new cry of the nation. Be it for an individual who needs some inspiration or a whole team that needs to be motivated to defeat the opponents. And the credit goes solely to the movie by Yash Chopra.

It’s the tale of a hockey player surrounded by match fixing allegations who makes a comeback and regains all respect by coaching the women’s team to a World Cup victory after 7 long years of a life of misery. But that my friends, is not what the movie is all about.

The movie is all about everything that we need to prosper as a great nation, succeed as a great team and only lastly succeed as an individual. We tend to forget at times that we’re Indians and we only identify ourselves by the state we come from. It feels like we live as citizens of various states rather than of ONE country. We fail to realize that a team is one entity and not a composition of various individuals. This is the first lesson that Kabir Khan, the coach of the Indian women’s hockey team teaches 16 girls from different states, that they’re here to play for one country. To be a team member means to be able to give up self interests for the team goals, to overcome to desire to succeed as an individual for the sake of the team.

Respect one another and treat everyone equally regardless of one’s background and knowledge or skill is lesson number two. Skill and knowledge can help you but won’t take you far if you don’t succeed as a person. Personal biases shouldn’t exist in a team if there are any intentions of the team to succeed. He says that the team can learn how to play hockey but what they need to learn more importantly Respect.

The very fact that we need to put our nation and our team before ourselves in whatever we do stirs up a lot of patriotism as well among people who think patriotism is a word used only for the freedom fighters. All in all, a great movie to watch. Great acting, great direction, great movie!!!