14 Oct, 2010, 05.26AM IST,ET Bureau
Forget khap panchayats! Haryana women make waves
In the 2007 movie Chak De! India, the Indian women's hockey team
returns from Sydney after defeating favourites Australia in the finals
of the World Cup.
At Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport, one of the stars of
India's victory in the movie is asked by her boyfriend (Abhimanyu
Singh — a take-off on the glamorous cricketer Yuvraj Singh) to marry
him, and she refuses , saying, "Our relationship was always about you
and you. Now I have also emerged as an individual in my own right."
Last Monday, in real life as opposed to the reel variety, Indian women
overshadowed their male counterparts by winning India's first-ever
Commonwealth Games gold medal in athletics in 52 years since the
legendary Milkha Singh scorched the track in the 440-yards event at
Cardiff in 1958.
The Flying Sikh, as Milkha was known, was sceptical of India's chances
in the track-and-field events of the current Games.
However, 2010 is not 1958, and Indian women athletes were determined
to prove Milkha wrong. Which they did in style, with two village girls
from Haryana and one from Punjab — Krishna Poonia, Harwant Kaur and
Seema Atil — creating history by sweeping the gold, silver and bronze
medals, respectively, in the discus event. The Hissar girl Krishna won
the gold with a back injury.
"We will tell him (Milkha) that we can win gold medals too," the three
winners said. Haryana may have made dubious headlines of late through
its khaps and honour killings. But the state's discus-throwers have
proved that Haryana women can not only overcome that medieval mindset
but shatter it!
Some 26 years after P T Usha narrowly failed to win a medal at the
1984 LA Olympics, Krishna Poonia, Harwant Kaur and Seema Atil have
demonstrated that "the woman of today is faster than the man in every
way," to quote from the calypso song by the legendary Harry Belafonte
. Bravo!
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