The Meaning of Milkha...

From seeing his family being massacred during the Partition to begging for food at the Delhi railway station as an orphaned refugee to arguably India’s greatest-ever individual sportsperson, Milkha Singh remains a story that will be told over and over again. The relevance of this legend will only be more pronounced with time.

This essay is a personal tribute to a man who defined an era. It is inspired partly by the rumor of the film and partly through all the fascinating interviews one read about the man. This is a small attempt, a little fragment to the mosaic of the greatness being assembled around him. To write about Milkha Singh, is to write about a different era. It is to evoke a different set of emotions, a different philosophy of life. To see him as a runner is not enough. The sociology of sport is not enough to explain the man. In a new and independent India where our heroes were Nehru and Patel, Azad or Gandhi, Milkha Singh represented a new kind of hero-as the athlete, as the earthly son of the soul.

Milkha Singh, like many of the time was a child and creature of partition. Partition not only divided a nation but tore into the heart of a people. Many Indian biographies suggest surviving partition and exorcising-as their two main aspects. Milkha had to race against history to create history. Milkha saw his parents, brother and sister killed before him. As an orphan, he had only his siblings to rely on. Milkha tried to join the army but was rejected thrice. Finally, he joined the electrical wing of the army and then raced into folklore.

The army in India is a great institution and sociology of the army and its relation to village India has never been written. The army has created employment, a career, an honorable way of life for millions of Indians. For the honor and codes it provides, the army becomes a form of therapy. The Flying Sikh was a flying soldier. He realized he joined the army as an orphan, he graduated as a pilot. Singh, like many villagers could have been a dacoit or a thug if the army was not there. Milkha was never to forget that the Flying Sikh was first a flying soldier.

Archana Masih tells a wonderful story of Milkha’s home. There are no galleries of medals, no nostalgias of victory in the house. Only two pictures adorn the walls, one of the American doctor who saved his wife Nirmal Kaur’s life and other a picture of Havaldar Bikram Singh, a Kargil martyr.

To paint Milkha as a soldier, a patriot and a citizen is critical. He once complained that today we honor our cricketers not our martyrs. Our cricketers behave like mercenaries while our martyrs are forgotten. Milkha is a soldier as icon. Today we forget how the army created a sporting nation, became the nursery for the sporting greats in athletics and hockey. In an odd way our middle class obsession with cricket has blinded us to the role of army.

Milkha Singh lived with the pain of Partition through his running career. Pakistan was that empty painful space in his heart, a home which could no longer be home for a child born in Lyallapur. It was towards the end of his career that he found his cure. The Pakistanis had invited him to run against their best athletes and Milkha Singh was reluctant to go, unsure of his feelings. It was Jawaharlal Nehru who persuaded him to go and told him that he did not want more Milkhas to happen on either side. He told him that he was a soldier and his job was to fight the battle within. Milkha was afraid to smell what he called the blood in the air in Pakistan, ran and it was Ayub Khan, the President of Pakistan who gave him the sobriquet “The Flying 

Sikh".

There was something ethical about running at that time. It was the body, a pair of shoes running against the limits of one-self. The body stands as its own truth. Technology has little role to play. Almost anyone can run. Jogging and running is one of the democratic sports. Before jogging became a lifestyle thing, one just ran around the compound or the maidan barefoot or in plain canvas. Running is a philosophy in motion. You run to create a different world, a better world.

One has to understand Milkha Singh in that perspective. Milkha Singh was a runner. He just ran. He ran at a time there was little science to running in India. One trained by racing against the elements, by running on sand or running till one bled through exhaustion. There were coaches but they were not the time and motion managers, the biophysics experts we have today. One just wore shoes. There was no Nike, no prosthetics, one just ran. One trained the body but running was never the scientific experiment it is today.

Milkha Singh like our other Indian runners never won an Olympics medal. He just raced into the hearts of people who understood the poignancy of a sporting event. Milkha Singh was expected to win atleast the bronze. But he ran a badly strategized race. He opened too fast and then realized he had to slow down. He however slackened at the wrong moment to see three runners race past him. It was bad timing and he could never catch-up. There was a tragedy of defeat and regret here. For Milkha the real defeat was that he could not plant the Indian flag at the Olympics. He had tears of a patriot.

It was a race he was to run and re-run in his mind unable to forget or forgive himself for that burst of rashness. Yet even that event revealed the simplicity and greatness of the man, a legend reminding himself that he had feet of clay. Greatness is a power to look humbly at oneself and face it candidly.An absent minded government awarded him a Padma Shri and then presented him with a belated Arjuna Award. Milkha refused the latter quietly chiding the government by saying that they gave him his BA degree before awarding him his matric certificate. For pure economy and sheer simplicity, he was devastating.

The genius of Bollywood lies in the fact that it has always captured India better than social science, journalism and literature. The title says it all. The plea, “Bhag Milkha Bhag” or“Run, Milkha Run” was not the command of the coach but his father’s last plea begging him to flee so that he could save himself. The double poignancy of the title gives one a new understanding of the man and his era. FarhanAkhtar, who plays Milkha Singh in “Bhag Milkha Bhag”was profound when he said there is a Milkha in all of us. It was a reminder that all of us are runners, racing against ourselves and history.