First Impressions:CHAK DE INDIA ! rocks

Imagine you are at a Cinema hall. You watch the movie and the movie has a happy ending. At the end like in any movie, you have the names/credits scrolling out on the screen. In the typical Movie halls of India, as soon as the names start scrolling, people get up from the seats and start to walk out. But when you see that every single person in the audience has not moved an inch till the very end to watch the names/credits, you should know what impact the movie has had on the audience.

This is what precisely happened when I went to watch Shimit Amin's Chak De India, a beautifully crafted movie on an underdog Indian Women's Hockey Team going on to win the Hockey World Cup. The narration of the story was so gripping that it left the audience asking for more in the end. Hats off to Shimit Amin and Jaideep Sahni (the story, screenplay and dialogues are penned by him) for giving Hockey it's long due credit in a country where it is purported to be the national Game, but is hardly followed or played by anyone. (In fact ask any of the school going kids what India's National sports is, the inevitable slip of the tongue answer would be Cricket).

Shimit with the help of a power packed performance by Shahrukh Khan ( as a disgraced Indian Hockey Player , who takes up the challenge of Coaching the Women's Hockey Team to regain his lost pride), has packed the movie with the required patriotism, used the Male-Female chauvinism to his advantage and has brought out a movie which for sure will go down in the Indian movie history as a landmark film. (Apprently the movie is based on Mir Ranjan Negi, a real life Hockey player who coached Women's Hockey team which won the Commonwealth Gold medal in 2002 ). If Lagaan set the tempo for sports based movies in India, Chak De India takes it to the next level. So intense was the movie that the audience in the later half of the movie cheered to every goal which the hockey players hit on their way to winning the "Women's Hockey World cup".

But the real stars of the movie ought to be the small time actors and some real players who formed a part of the 16 member hockey team. Some of them really trained themselves for the Hockey game scenes and the training showed in the actual movie scenes. Also Shimit's filming of the hockey matches needs a special mention as it is very difficult to bring in the intensity into games which were actually not played in the first place !! . Some of the matches in the movie appeared so very real and seems like the production team has spent a lot of time and fortune to film these game scenes.

All in all , must watch movie for all our Cricket obsessed Indians. Shimit craftfully has even taken digs at Cricket in the movie and it makes the movie even more enjoyable especially for non-Cricket fans like me :). So go watch the movie for an entertaining and intense 2 hours !!. And I sincerely hope we Indians move out of the Cricket obsessiveness and take more interest in other games. (Or will it require another movie on say Football or basketball for this to happen ?).