Bhaag Milkha Bhaag: Sinew And Soul

So when you peel and throw all conflicts and let the skeletons of the past go and your heels are like hooves

with horseshoes, then you don’t run. You fly. And sometimes in life, the full circle spans 400 metres and what you run from must be faced if you want to beat not just the past but yourself. And that is what winners do, don’t they?. Beat their own inadequacies, fears and the stories that hold them back. The voices of ghosts. The bloody pile of unresolved pain. The end of innocence.

 **

Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Bhaag Milkha Bhaag in the end is not about just Milkha Singh but every one of us because everyday we too run a race towards light, towards vindication, in the search of a flamboyant moment that will set everything right, make sense of every loss we have suffered and bring us, yes, full circle, our wounds healed, our sense of self restored. Milkha is fond of such flamboyant gestures and he pulls them off again and again.

 **

Facing the bullies in a  refugee camp, beating up his brother-in-law as a child, finishing two tins of desi ghee to cock a snook at a policeman who wants to have his share, going back home in a Team India blazer to meet a sister who has never seen him triumphant and to give something of hers back to her, sprinting with bandages to prove a point to rivals who have beaten him up to prevent him from running, slapping his own face after losing a race, and then finally, going back to a dark moment in his childhood, to sit and cry and mourn and then shed all baggage and fly towards immortality. To live up to the meaning of ,”Nanak naam jahaz hai..jo chade so utre paar.” To know that beyond the realm of religion is faith that a man can place in himself, in a teacher (Milkha calls his trainer Guru ji) and in a vision for his life that can take him everywhere he wants and beyond.

 **

This is not the first time we have seen Milkha Singh’s life story on screen though. In the 80s, we had on Doordarshan, a simply told episodic narration of Milkha’s flight from Pakistan to glory through the challenges of poverty and pain. I was a bit apprehensive about this bio-pic after I heard Farhan Akhtar’s trainer say that the reference point for Milkha’s physique in the film was Brad Pitt in The Fight Club!  They had maybe lost the soul of the Flying Sikh in trying to build a show-stopping body. And sure enough there are moments dedicated to the edifice that Farhan’s Milkha becomes after a gruelling session that am not sure even the real hero himself  underwent whose training field was life and the biggest teachers, pain and deprivation. And yes, we see the celebration of what the human body can become with will power, hard work and dedication(three life lessons from Milkha Singh) but then you forget it all when you see both the actor and his character go down on their knees in  a Pakistani village, remembering a day of carnage and crying the way only people with a deep soul hurt can cry. And so the soul vs physique debate ends.

And sure, one remembers Paan Singh Tomar, with a not too different story. Only his biggest challenges came after his many victories and that story was about how sometimes even your best is not enough to counter the worst the world has to offer and Irrfan Khan was never anything but Paan Singh Tomar but comparisons are odious because let us also remember who Farhan Akhtar is. He has, for the want of a better phrase, “a sense of cool”  bred in his DNA. He has made films that exemplify this and one of them has a cult following till date. And yet, that director with urban sensibilities, that occasional actor playing mostly with roles within his comfort zone has gone all out to embrace a character he has nothing in common with.

**

And he embraces Milkha Singh with blood, sweat and tears, with every sinew, muscle, with every thing he has within him and yes, his Punjabi is not really all there (can you imagine a Farhan Akhtar not knowing how to respond to the question, “Relaxing?”) but we are nit picking. In his head, he is Milkha and soon enough, he is in ours too. Just as it is inspirational to watch the forgotten story of India’s first star athlete during the time when even a pair of shoes with spikes was hard to come by, it is stirring to watch a metrosexual, stylish, free-spirited director/actor to turn into a man who wants to win the first race of his life for a glass of “dudh” and two eggs, who wants the Team India blazer so badly that he sneaks into the quarters of a star athlete to try it on, who after losing a major trial in India because a piece of stone pierces his heel, is told portentously, “The stone will not always be big enough to be visible.” And so Milkha discovers that the biggest stone in his heel is his history and that it will make him look back during the most historic race of his life and cost him his biggest triumph.

 **

But then this is not the story of defeatism and so Farhan makes it from the starting block to the finishing tape with a burst of energy that is heroic, almost super-human and with tears that are human. This is his finest hour and it could not have come easily to him so more power to performers who want to do the impossible.

 **

Pawan Malhotra. Beyond doubt, one of India’s finest and most neglected actors gets many gold dusted moments here. Not one false note  ever with this man. And Divya Dutta who renders every other woman in the narrative incidental. Art Malik has a powerful cameo though his British accent comes in the way a bit and little Jabtej Singh has some of the most moving moments to himself.  And how deliciously ironical that the man who coaches Milkha for his big win is played by Yograj Singh, the man who could have been another Kapil Dev or so says cricket lore though he too came full circle by giving us Yuvraj Singh but we are digressing. Catch Mehra too in a small appearance  as a pilot that carries Milkha to Melbourne. And it is with a sense of relief that I watched how Partition was dealt with without the demonification of any one community or country and no, contrary to reports, the film is not jingoistic. Mehra is too sensitive a film-maker to indulge in cheap pyrotechnics.
**

My only grouse with the film was the Zanjeer like flashback and maybe some songs could have been trimmed though the music by Shankar Ehsaan Loy with lyrics by Prasoon Joshi  are everything the film asked for. This one though not as realistic as Dhulia’s impassioned tribute to Tomar redefines what an entertainer can do and also revives the genre of a bio-pic and how and reminds us that India has other heroes apart from Tendulkar. That there is a man still amongst us who surmounted great odds to make history. In the end, the cry of , “Bhaag Milkha Bhaag,” is meant to rouse us all from the lives we are leading to the lives we could. If we ran too with all that we have, without looking back.

 **