New Delhi: P.V. Sindhu is only 24 years old. Up until five days ago, when the World No. 5 became the first Indian shuttler to win the BWF World Championships in Switzerland, she had yet to make it to any tournament final in 2019. Her clinical 38-minute annihilation of Japanese arch-rival Nozomi Okuhara was the stuff of legends — a 21-7, 21-7 victory followed by tears and a shower of congratulatory tweets, including one from Akshay Kumar.
Heartiest congratulations @Pvsindhu1 on becoming the first Indian to win a ?at the #BWFWorldChampionships2019. What a feat to achieve, you completely smashed it ??
— Akshay Kumar (@akshaykumar) August 25, 2019
Within minutes, social media started to go into overdrive speculating about Kumar, who has anointed himself our Nationalist Feminist No. 1, playing Sindhu’s coach, Pullela Gopichand, in a biopic. Forget Sonu Sood, who has apparently been diligently working on his own Sindhu biopic for two years now — when it’s about Khiladi Kumar, even Gopichand gets excited. In a recent interview, the coach said he thinks it “would be awesome if Akshay Kumar plays my part. He is one of the people I admire the most”.
Given Kumar’s penchant for taking real-life success stories of women and turning himself into the hero of the piece, this was enough for the good people of the internet and their memes.
Indian women menstruate, Akshay gets a movie.
Indian woman wins a medal, Akshay gets movie.
Indian women launch Mars Orbiter, Akshay fucking Kumar gets a movie.
WHAT DO WE HAVE TO DO AROUND HERE GET A WOMAN CENTERED MOVIE IN WHICH A WOMAN GETS THE LEAD ROLE? https://t.co/27x2ZuMMMS
— Vidya (@VidyaKrishnan) August 29, 2019
Akshay Kumar getting ready for his new Biopic on P V Sindhu pic.twitter.com/dSho49zXHm
— Ankush (@_James_Bong) August 25, 2019
The euphoria surrounding PV Sindhu’s win appears to be about everything except the young world-class athlete. Amid all the conversation around Akshay Kumar’s appropriation of women’s success stories to further his own career, it doesn’t seem like anyone cares about who portrays Sindhu.
Has anyone asked her if she would be okay with a biopic on her life at this point? What might be the impact of a biopic on her career right now, considering the Tokyo Olympics are less than a year away?
Sindhu still has work to do, biopic is premature at this point
Sindhu’s new coach, South Korean Kim Ji Hyun, who came on board as recently as March this year, said a few months ago, “There are so many skills she has to work on, especially net skills and deception.”
“Step by step, we’re working on skills and changing tactics as you can’t use the same tactics over and over again,” she went on to say.
But if red-carpet appearances are written in her future, 24-year-old Sindhu may just become a myth too big for her ‘soft-spoken’ game to contain. Sports biopics, or any biopics for that matter, are usually written with retrospective wisdom, allowing film-makers to accurately assess and contextualise a person’s overall impact at the end of their careers.
If ‘Justin Bieber to star in own biopic, aged 16’, doesn’t sound like it contains an oxymoron somewhere, then the first 16 (or 24) years of your life must have been incredibly exhaustive.
M.S. Dhoni’s self-aggrandising pat on the back, by way of producing the Sushant Singh Rajput starrer MS Dhoni: The Untold Story in 2016, is a great example of this myth-making project. With three years (and counting) still ahead of him, there was evidently a lot more ‘untold’ in a future yet to happen. The movie itself didn’t tell us much, other than the fact that Dhoni was the epitome of perfection, scored only sixes, resolved all kinds of conflicts in minutes and was somehow freed from the dark, confusing, uneasy thoughts that must form a significant part of his experience.
Biopics are opportunities to know more than what meets the eye, but Indian cinema often doesn’t even show what’s historically factual. Mahavir Phogat (whom most of the country now visualises as Aamir Khan, thanks to Dangal) wasn’t crying in a locked closet when his daughter won her Commonwealth Games match — which, incidentally, wasn’t close at all but dominated by Geeta Phogat from the very beginning.
The question is, how will we be made to remember Sindhu now? Emerging as an attacking force through the struggle and uncertainty of what’s been a statistically difficult year for her, or through a poster of Akshay Kumar’s larger-than-everyone-else’s smiling face?
To immortalise Sindhu now would be short-sighted, limiting the scope of the story to one moment of victory rather than a lifetime’s worth of wins, losses and lessons learnt. A dramatised script could unnecessarily hype up aspects of her life — such as her alleged rivalry with Saina Nehwal, who is herself set to be portrayed by Parineeti Chopra on screen next year. More importantly, it could make competitive athlete complacent, placing an honour too soon at a pair of feet that should be busy training and not getting distracted by glamour and its trappings.
Also read: Mission Mangal poster: Does Bollywood need an Akshay Kumar to sell women’s success stories?