The sun is making it obvious that summer is here; maybe I should say instead that social media is making it clear that this summer is all about CSK. As fans wait or, must I mention, cannot wait to see their beloved Chennai Super Kings back in action this season of the Indian Premiere League, dozens of videos are doing the rounds to step up the energy. I have watched just one and it begs to be talked about because it left me with ‘the feels’, even after its length. That a sport-fans-made video would leave me hopeful was surprising given that my relationship with cricket lasted only as long as my high school crush; my love for sports is a series of misses as a fat woman reserved for the sidelines.
This seven-minute video released by the channel ‘Fully’ is the sum of over 3,000 hand-drawn frames, fifty plus days of work and ‘an immeasurable amount of love’ as the makers put it. Since it was uploaded on YouTube, the video has had nearly 4.5 lakh views and is trending the charts as I write this. Titled ‘Dear CSK’, it begins with a dedication to ‘every Indian woman who dares to dream’.
Drawing upon the life of a girl born in a small town in 1989, the animations take us through a childhood in which everything boils down to a pink-blue binary, with different rules for boys and girls, a varied set of expectations, and guidelines assigned according to the gender at birth. When the narrator recounts being asked to stay home while her brother was never at home, or describes being dissuaded from sport in the fears of growing darker, or getting hurt, it echoes our society that teaches children that boys are different from girls, that a princess in treatment is in fact one ‘protected’ with terms and conditions.
We see going forward, the narrator moving from Chennimalai to Chennai, with dreams of the big city only to be disappointed by college and hostel ‘only for women’ rules but determined to know what the hullabaloo about cricket is, goes with her boy classmates for the first ever CSK match. Amid the cheers, whistles and drum beats she says she saw fathers and fans in an unabashed display of team loyalty, friendships come in and shame go away as pinks, blues and all differences fade away into an army of yellow. ‘What a great unifier sport is’, I thought to myself here as even the non-sportsperson in me worked up a smile, and then it left me with a vision of an army, not yellow, but all the colors of the rainbow, uniting to diversify those in the pitch, pool, track and field. If fans could all be one, then there should be a way to bring players of sport together as just sport persons, throwing out differences in gender, sexualities, caste, class, religion and body types.
By fronting sport as a melting pot of differences, the video gave me, as it would every viewer the chance to visualise MSD and Mithali playing together. How wonderful would that be, to see the male and female captain stand shoulder to shoulder just as sport-persons (with the same pay)? Or if hundreds of Santhi’s weren’t chased away from running toward dreams due to sex test spectacles? When the video ended, citing Mithali Raj, Mary Kom and PV Sindhu as reasons enough for girls to dream of a career in sport, I realised I am harboring hope for future generations to grow up without gender discrimination. And I have hope too for the CSK Cup, cricket, and sport and society at large.
Archanaa Seker
seker.archanaa@gmail.com
The writer is a city-based activist, in-your-face feminist and a media glutton