1 year later
It’s hard to believe that one year ago, the 5th World Women’s Boxing Competition was wrapping up in Ningbo, China (three hours from Shanghai, pictured above). Ameesha and I were there with the Indian team. Here’s a quick recap of what’s been going on since.
We went back to India. This time, we stayed with world bronze medalist Chhoto Loura in her apartment in Ambala, Haryana. Afterwards, we made our way back to the north-east state of Manipur to see four-time world champion Mary Kom. (We actually had a tough time getting permission to go there. It’s a restricted area due to terrorist activities in the region. The same thing happened in 2006 when we last visited Mary.) We also caught up with Sarita Devi (2006 world champion) and her family.
We came home. And started the long, long process of viewing, transcribing, and logging our 142 hours of footage. Why, oh why did we shoot so much? We were finished by July, thankfully.
In August: a breakthrough. Women’s boxing became an Olympic sport. The media picked up on the story and our girls began popping up all over the interweb. We also started getting more requests for information about our own film. Keep an eye out for a story on Art Threat in the next few weeks.
And now, editing. It’s a long process, but we hope to have the film completed within the year.
Flashback to 2008: Here are some more photos that we dug up.
Our dear Emily (second from right), who came to India to help us with still photography and sound, hanging out at the beach with boxers (from left) Kavita, Jyoti, Sushma and Chhoto.
Head Coach Mr. Anoop Kumar (in white) sits with Mr. Rao during one of the frequent sparring sessions during the national training camp. Because there are nearly 40 boxers at the camp, they always have someone in their weight category to practice with, which is more than can be said for most other countries in the world. Two-time Irish world champion Katie Taylor, for example, had to train with men. And when it became clear she was a strong fighter, none of the women wanted to face her in competition. The Indian team doesn’t have that problem.
Recovering from fever. We each took turns getting sick. Good old Ameesha took excellent care of Emily and I and was always willing to walk to the store (even when it was 45 degrees) to get us ice-cold water, juice, rice, hard-boiled eggs, Cadbury chocolate, Sprite – you name it.
India has a number of boxing centres. The state of Haryana is one of them. Many of the strongest fighters are from there.
In the summer of 2008, we lived and breathed boxing. We spent an average of six hours a day watching their training sessions. After a few days, we developed our own rhythm and split up the tasks between the three of us. Ameesha and Emily took turns taking photos and recording sound (on a Zoom H2 Handy Recorder, which is really quite handy), while I filmed and recorded sound independently.
Flash forward to China in November/December 2008. Ameesha and I were rather amused by these stern instructions at the entrance of a park in Shanghai. Some of our favourites: “Don’t strip to the waist and lie at discretion. Don’t climb rockeries. Don’t dally with, scare, and capture birds, crickets, fishes and shrimps (except for operation items). Don’t gather a crowd to make a speech. Don’t relieve yourself everywhere.”
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