Iqbal is not only about cricket

Deepti Patwardhan | August 26, 2005 13:40 IST


Lance Armstrong's first autobiography, one of the most inspiring books and the biggest sports bestseller, simply read It's Not About The Bike.

It was his journey from a rebellious child to a cancer survivor to Tour De France winner. It was his fight against cancer that found a global recognition with the triumph in of the most grueling sports events.

Like Armstrong's bike, cricket is a metaphor; a benchmark of success in Nagesh Kukunoor's latest film, Iqbal. It works because of the kind of fervour cricket has whipped India's heartland.

It's not too hard to believe a woman in a nondescript village dancing in celebration as India wins a cricket match, already sowing the seeds of ambition in the child she's carrying.

The Bollywood Cricket Quiz

Iqbal (played by Shreyas Talpade) grows up to eat, sleep and live cricket. Like most 18 year olds, he detests work or sharing the responsibilities of earning bread and butter for his family. He is unique not because he is dumb and mute, but because he does not consider that a limitation. Neither do his mother and sister, who share his aspiration of becoming a cricketer in the national team.

Far from the growing 'scientific training' for cricket, Iqbal practices bowling alone on a dry patch of land with pruned branches as stumps. Steaming in from the other end, bare feet, his only aim is to strike the stumps.

His first taste of professional training comes when his sister convinces the coach (Girish Karnad) of the Kolipad Cricket Academy to enroll him. Though the politics in the Academy finally takes over and Iqbal is thrown out, he learns the most important lesson thus far: the difference when a batsman stands between himself and the wicket.

The disappointment lasts only for a while, till he finds out that the village drunkard Mohit (Naseeruddin Shah) had been a fast bowler for the state team but never quite went on to represent India.

While Mohit is happy drowning his frustrations in the bottle and leading an anonymous life, Iqbal just won't relent. He pesters Mohit into teaching him the finer points of bowling. Mohit picks up the challenge reluctantly, struggles to make him understand about the game in sign language.


When Iqbal finally achieves his dream and walks out of the Indian dressing room onto the ground, he can't hear the deafening cheers in the stadium. But he has lived the moment so many times in his dreams, he doesn't need to.

Iqbal is a simple tale of grit of an 18 year old and his family superbly told by Nagesh Kukunoor. The director takes care of the technicalities of cricket without delving into them too much. And the sprinkles of humour, like naming Iqbal's buffaloes after cricketers and making them field, helps ease the intensity.

The story does not have any twist and turns and runs on predictably. It is to Kukunoor's credit that he still holds the audience interest right down to the last ball. Actors bring the story to life with zealous honesty.

Shreyas Talpade, making his debut in Hindi films, puts in an outstanding performance. He virtually carries the film on his rugged shoulders, etching Iqbal's simplicity and courage. Through the film, you live with every emotion the character goes through. Shreyas manages to hold his own against actors like Naseeruddin Shah and Girish Karnad.

Shweta Prasad, Iqbal's sister, once again shows on-screen maturity beyond her age after Vishal Bharadwaj's Makdee.

Naseeruddin Shah moves around the film's canvas effortlessly, indifferent one moment, moved by the boy's determination the other. He becomes his teacher, then mentor, and finally a friend. His annoyance finally boils over with the cricket 'system,' when its politics try to sink Iqbal, just as they had once with him.

Despite the many reels of Iqbal's toil, the real conflict is depicted in the scene where his parents fall out over his persistence with the game. As his mother explains, their struggle to keep the stove burning, them running into debts or having to sell of their farmland was their failure; Iqbal's ambition had nothing to do with it.

It's a story that leaves you inspired and shows the power of the human mind. Iqbal is not only about cricket.

Movie Review : Gentle fable of valiant, non-violent aspirations

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Producer: Subhash Ghai
Director: Nagesh Kukunoor
Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Shreyas Talpade, Shweta Prasad, Yatin Kareyekar, Prateeksha Londkar, Girish Karnad
Music: Himesh Reshammiya, Salim_sulaiman, Sukhwinder Singh, Amartya Rahut, Shriram Iyer, Kedar-Sarosh,


"When the heart begins to think like the head... that's when real success is achieved," says coach Naseeruddin Shah to his special student, a deaf-and-mute boy who strives to become a national cricket player.

The world of Nagesh Kukunoor's latest film is a mellow one of basic and valuable emotions. This isn't the first film where the director has dealt with the ambiguous world of adolescent dreams. Unlike Kukunoor's "Rockford", "Iqbal" rocks to a rustic and heartfelt raga-rhythm.

The location: a small Muslim village. The texture: tender and basic. The end result: a film that exudes the familiar aura of sweet dreams.

Though the music (Salim-Suleiman) and songs (Sukwinder Singh) tend to hammer in the message a trifle too insistently, this is a world where heart and head could easily exchange places.

Kukunoor's control over the emotional quotient ensures that Iqbal Khan's struggle to realise his dream doesn't get too maudlin. Each time Iqbal spins that ball across the dusty field, the screen lights up like the sun glimmering in a glorious giggle from behind surly clouds.

And yet a lot of brains has gone behind those spinning balls. Consciously or otherwise, Kukunoor has torn leaves out of Ashutosh Gowariker's "Lagaan" and Sanjay Leela Bhansali's "Black" to create a quaint and compelling nugget on the triumph of the human spirit.

Wisely, Kukunoor doesn't allow Iqbal's journey from bucolic anonymity to national-level recogntion to be heavy handed or overstated. Often, the narration is so light to the touch, you tend to mistake the airiness for shallowness. To compound the sense of an extra-blithe soufflé, there are characters who appear to be straight out of a guidebook on symmetrically articulate cinema.

Iqbal's doting mother (Prateeksha Londkar), his forbidding cynical father (Yatin Karyekar) and his precocious and supportive sister (Shweta Prasad) and, most of all, the burnt-out alcoholic coach (Naseer) redeeming himself by taking on the corrupt system to get his protégé to be successful... these are characters we've encountered before, in movies from "Rocky" to "Chariots Of Fire", and from "Naache Mayuri" to "Black".

It's in the way that Kukunoor criss-crosses, mixes-and-matches characters and attitudes that the storytelling shines beyond the realm of the familiar. If Iqbal's rapport with his coach is devoid of surprising moments, it's also heart warming enough to make you forget its lack of newness.


The glow of lived-in emotions springs up on you like a summer breeze caressing your face just long enough to make you count your blessings for the gift of life.

"Iqbal" is a very gentle fable of valiant and non-violent aspirations told through a lyrical labyrinth of clichéd, but nonetheless charming characters. The wheeling dealing sports coach, played by Girish Karnad, or the unctuous sports manager, who swoops down on the new bright hope on the cricket field, are all characters we've met on several occasions in various arresting and subverted avatars.

Kukunoor gives a special twist and a turn to these simply imagined people. Destiny, fortitude and diligence aren't treated as lofty concepts, but offshoots of destiny, better left unruffled rather than subjected to serious tampering.

Substance doesn't sit uneasily over "Iqbal". It's a derivative influence implanted on the radically uncomplicated narration by the director's deft, if somewhat over-simplified, vision.

The performances infuse a supple vigour to the fragile tale. Shreyas Talpade is more than adequate as the unspoken and yet highly expressive protagonist. But Shweta Prasad, who plays Iqbal's doting kid sister, steals every scene from Talpade. Her precocity and wisdom are put to specially telling use in her sparring scenes with Naseer.

Naseer is, in fact, the life and breath of "Iqbal", never mind if the breath of his character is intoxicated! Through the alcoholic fumes his persona emerges as yet another character of true worth, frail and yet triumphant. He's specially remarkable in his moments with little Shweta and the sequence where Iqbal's mother warns him she'll personally kill him if her son fails to realise his dream. ("The women of this family seem to be exceptionally dangerous," Naseer cocks an eyebrow).

Finally though, the lightness of the material, and the luminous light that the narration casts across the frames are leitmotifs energising the film's emotions only to the point where the characters appear to glow with reasonable flow of light. There are no outbursts of inventive energy to irrigate the theme beyond a point.

And we look at Iqbal as a child of a lesser god with the mind of a genius and the destiny of a winner.


The winning streak underpins some of the weaker moments in "Iqbal" (like that longish sequence in the darkened courtyard where the "evil scheming" coach Girish Karnad tries to buy off "innocent dreamer" Iqbal's conscience).

You can't come away from this big-little film without cheering for its twin heroes... the physically challenged 18-year old Iqbal and his washed-out inebriated coach whose twinkling eyes and inbuilt sense of humour carry forward the tale from its deliberately frail beginnings to a rousing finale.

Iqbal qualifies as a must-see effort, not so much for its virtuosity as its artlessness of vision. No one here tells a lie. Not the storytellers, not his creations.


© Copyright 2005 by MusicIndiaOnLine.com

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Why didn't you post the Adarsh report?

I have left that honour for you man!

Well then, good news:
HE doesn't like it, so then WE MUST like it!!

I remembered that he liked it and because he does not see masses drooling over it, so he pulled him self back, and inched into NO ENTRY!

yeah, well, thats how all his reviews end up (box office fate). which is the lousiest way to critique a film. his "movie review" should be titled "Box Office Analysis"

I wish I could throw my boots at his head!!

I'll give you mine, all new and old ones too!

I am not Pro SRK or Asoka, but with all its Limitations/Drawbacks/ Pros and Cons/ imho, Asoka was a better made film than THE RISING.

Here is Moran's review:



Mangal Pandey he gives ****!

and the BEST OF ALL these , MOTHER OF PERIOD FILMS BASED IN 1857 was SHYAM BENEGAL's JUNOON!

Seriously indeed if anyone needs to talk about the uprising they need to look at JUNOON and replicate how beautifully Benegal recreated the era.

I also agree that ASOKA was certainly better than THE RISING in terms of subject and attempt and final product.

And finally, I will provide truckloads of filth and garbage, to be unceremoniously emptied on Adarsh's pea sized brains !

Imho, Mangal Pandey is DISGRACE to a MARTYR OR FREEDOM FIGHTER'S STORY!

I have lost faith, whatever I had in Aamir Khan, and Ketan will only suit to make A MAYA MEMSAHAB, OR MANGALE SAHAB WITH BUTT!!!

Film industry completely awed by Iqbal

http://www.indiafm.com/news/2005/08/27/5699/index.html

By IndiaFM News Bureau, August 27, 2005 - 03:22 IST
Subhash Ghai’s Iqbal was premiered on Thursday and opened to an overwhelming round of applause by the viewers that also included some prominent filmmakers from the industry. And everyone was just in complete awe of the film.

Vidhu Vinod Chopra is in all praise for Subhash Ghai for daring to attempt movies on such offbeat themes. Vishal Bharadwaj, of Maqbool fame, acclaims the director’s expertise in executing the deaf and dumb portions of the title character very naturally and without pulling any emotive strings. Rajkumar Hirani sees Iqbal in a new perspective and appreciates the fact that the movie breaks the rigid rules of Bollywood of having a romance angle in it. According to Sudhir Mishra, the director of Chameli, what clicks about Iqbal is its display of the victory of the human spirit and the rise of underdog.

And last but not the least, from the man who came up with one of the best Hindi films on the sports theme comes the most gratifying comment. Says Ashutosh Gowariker, the director of Lagaan (that had around 2 hours of cricket footage); Iqbal is the best film on sports ever!

Great reviews but poor box-office!

By Our Correspondent ©2005 Bollyvista.com






A Still from 'Iqbal'
Nagesh Kukunoor's 'Iqbal' may have fetched good reviews, a standing ovation and all of that, but in reality, none of this has translated into solid box-office returns.

Tickets are available in current bookings in most centres and theatres, which are far from running to full capacity. Sad indeed!

Well now Iqbal is not a Bunty aur Babli right.

yup, that explains " NO ENTRY" in the theatre

What a sad state for indian cinema , i am looking forward to this one hopefully we will get a decent DVD - cant expect it to be show in local theaters here ! .