Sometime ago, K. Keerthivasan, who would have certainly made a great sportsman if he had not taken up journalism, established the correlation between sports and life at large in an engaging manner. Keerthi analysed almost everyone in local journalistic circles who takes his table tennis seriously, explaining how he would display at the game attitudes he brought to his work, family and friendship.
I’ll keep the findings of his study a secret, due to their capacity for controversy and especially because it does not present me in a very flattering light. I think he was bang on, except where it concerned me.
The point here is sports is capable of presenting insights into the human mind, as it almost always has a way of drawing out deep, genuine and powerful emotions. And this, for me, explains why a film pivoting around a sport, a tournament or a game is invariably a good watch. It is easy to weave a plot around any of them.
I am aware of a few such films, two of them based on the theme of car racing and rallying: Those Daring Young Men In Their Jaunty Jalopies and The Great Race . These films are not profound and hardly pretend to make a commentary on the human situation. Their value lies in the fact that both of them leave you with the satisfaction that comes from being told an engaging story. Last week, I was thinking about the latter, the trigger being the iconic Great Race in the United States, a veteran precision-pace race that is believed to have been inspired by the film.
Over the years, the car rally has acquired as much gloss as the film, producing many heroes who have beaten the odds — which began to show up when they tried to turn a lemon of a car into something worthy of a rally — to win the race.
The 2014 edition of the rally, which is spread over two weeks and covers a considerable portion of the country, from coast to coast, concluded on June 29, as usual with an array of mouth-watering (judge for yourself from the pictures) antique cars rolling over the finish line.
As always, participants have logged in accounts of experiences and places visited through the nine-day-long event. As the rally organisers skirt around the big cities of the United States, focusing instead on the smaller ones, the towns and the villages, these accounts, many of them accessible at greatrace.com, make a refreshing travelogue.
I have been hoping something along these lines happens in India, especially in Chennai. It is my desire that the effort by a handful of antique car owners in Chennai to drive their cars from the city to Puducherry and back, once a year, gets bigger and bigger over the years and finally reaches the scale on which the Great Race is organised.
