IN a scene from R Balki’s Ghoomer, Paddy (played by a rejuvenated Abhishek Bachchan) asks his protégée Anina (Saiyami Kher) to practise her bowling on the night of Diwali. When she hesitates, her coach angrily claims it takes commitment to actually earn happiness. “Varna intezaar karna har saal Diwali ka, khush hone ke liye,” he says, to a woman who has not too long ago lost her right arm in an accident. Anina is at her coach’s doorstep with a candle and some sweets in hand, alongside her boyfriend (Angad Bedi). A boyfriend who Paddy — in his drunken stupor — attempts to physically detach from his student.
It’s an uneasy sequence to walk through, especially if you’ve not known sporting passion and the bitter taste its glory inevitably comes with. No form of greatness in physical sport can be accomplished without suffering its physical and mental costs. Ghoomer offers the familiar trope of a bad teacher turning potential into greatness, not necessarily because he is conflicted and toxic himself, but because sympathy can’t always offer the redemptive arc sought by those accustomed to losing. Sometimes, only victory means victory.
A good underdog story requires a ledge, a philosophical conduit for the unlikely to become plausible. Mentors, coaches, teachers and every father or mother figure that has guarded and guided a restless young person to some sort of measurable feat, have done so by injecting a bit of themselves into that person.
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In Whiplash, possibly one of the greatest toxic roles pulled off in recent memory, JK Simmons plays a music teacher who hurls a cymbal at a student for not getting his rhythm. “Not my tempo,” he says, repeatedly. The crime here isn’t insubordination but laxness, the casualness that, to a teacher’s eye, indicates incurious, submissive drift. It’s also the kind of ailment that teachers in the business of manufacturing greatness ought to sniff out. In Tar, Cate Blanchett, publicly humiliates a young man for conflating genital prowess with musical giftedness. It’s a valuable lesson, delivered in the kind of condescending tone that exposes her own smug, but earned self.
Tough teachers are a cinematic antique, but so are the good ones. In Chak De! India, Shah Rukh Khan walks that tightrope between harsh and just, to extract from a team of uninspired women, something akin to passion and desperation. In one scene, he allows his team to fight a couple of goons at a restaurant. To his methods, it’s a necessary step towards building a team ethic. Not all sporting lessons can be disseminated on the field.
Teachers, their attitudinal constructs, also mime the intensity of the subject matter and the nature of the pursuit. It’s why Jack Black, in The School of Rock, is a disarming, rebellious mess. As an incompetent adult, he sows chaos as a way of discovering that which cannot be eked out through design. The greatest prodigy of his rag-tag school band is the one with the thickest shell.
The teacher-student relationship is an endearing analysis of how the human condition reacts to provocation and persuasion. The lesson, more often than not, acts as a function of the leaf used to turn the pages of the book: A thorny one need not necessarily produce an edgy totem of toxicity. A soft one need not glide into walking-talking poetic overtures either. As Greg and Tom symbolise in Succession, two equally twisted men can only ever teach the other degradation.
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Nowhere more so than in The Karate Kid and its subsequent spin-off Cobra Kai is the battle between schools of thought delineated so clearly. Mr Miyagi’s contemplative, kind methods collide with Cobra Kai’s poisonous yet infectious aggression. To the show’s credit, both approaches raise champions. Not both, however, produce admirable human beings. A sporting lesson may not always adapt to the complexity of the outer world. On the outside, losing is a form of trained deprivation. Victory is the art of smudging — almost hiding — its stretched wounds.
In Ghoomer, Abhishek Bachchan finally finds shoes that fit. He is reprehensible, unlikeable and borderline sociopathic. He’s also, self-admittedly, a loser, a man in the search of purpose. In being kind — especially to the trans woman he lives with — he chases a kind of sport. But for the finality of what it means to win, he must eventually chase winning.
Ghoomer goes overboard in turning an unlikely underdog story into a redemptive arc that can also feel preposterous, but it reconciles the difficulty of raising a winner, with the difficulty of turning winning into a waking habit. Nobody who went to sleep at night content, woke up maddened by the desperation to get somewhere, or become someone. It’s maybe a habit that cannot be inculcated through soft nudges. It requires that last-dash mentality, that make-or-break direness, an innate sense of anguish that pushes a former hero, in The Dark Knight Rises, to make a fatal leap without the security of a rope. Sometimes, it’s the rope that teachers need to pull away for us to become someone we never could with it.
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WHIPLASH | CHAK DE! INDIA | SCHOOL OF ROCK | COBRA KAI
