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BBC News
By Sudha G Tilak
image captionJaipur Pink Panthers won the inaugural league
For more than six months in 2019, award-winning British director Alex Gale followed a team of players of kabaddi, a traditional fast-paced contact sport played by millions of Indians.
Gale was covering Jaipur Pink Panthers, a professional kabaddi team owned by Bollywood star Abhishek Bachchan. His series, Sons of the Soil: Jaipur Panthers, which premiered on Amazon Prime Video last week, is a fascinating peek into the transformation of a traditional game into a highly competitive and popular spectator sport. We were trying to show the new glamour that has been brought to the sport but also celebrates the heritage and roots of the sport that make it so desi [indigenous.]. We have really tried to capture what makes kabaddi unique and attractive to more and more people in and outside India, Gale told the BBC.
them standing there and saying part of what we want to do is send a message. in that case they were sending a message back to america, that it was insufficiently egalitarian. in this case he s saying our country is more egalitarian. one of the last closets for gay people is the locker room. we could have either boycotted the games like we did in 1980 in response to the soviet invasion of afghanistan or like john carlos, actually attend and stage a political protest, which is illegal, but to stage a political protest to say, hey, this is who we are, we exist and we re human like you and we can actually compete like you. sometimes the protest isn t even a john carlos version, it s just going and beating, and by beating, not only are we human but we may be superior athletes in some way. that s right. again, that was a decision in 1936 to attend the nazi olympics. with a certain kind of political significance of actually
significant. reporter: when you look at the difference between sochi and munich, wolf, it is staggering. i mean, now you ve got the ring of steel. we just talked about that. check points, magnet to himters, search points going on. and you compare that to munich in 1972, and the contrast is amazing. in 1972, those games were dubbed in german the happy games. the germans were sense active, the only olympics they hosted since 1936, when there was the nazi olympics. they wanted to promote an atmosphere of peace and harmony and they and security there was intentionally pretty lax, because of it. they wanted everything to be very open. well, of course, we know the result of that. in 1972, the israeli team quarters from wide open, palestinian terrorists snuck in wearing track suits. they carried assault weapons in duffle bags, easily got over a chain link fence with the help of other athletes who thought they were sneaking in after a night out. of course, that can t happen now. and so w