Yash Raj Films’ Chak De! India was apparently based on the life of an Indian hockey player Mir Ranjan Negi. He was the goalkeeper during the Asian Games 1982, when India faced a defeat with the score of 1-7 against Pakistan. This was a humiliating experience for Negi where he faced allegations of letting his country down deliberately. Later in his life, Negi coached the National Women's hockey team and the team went on to win Gold at the Manchester Commonwealth games. Shah Rukh Khan, as Kabir Khan, reportedly portrayed Negi's character in the film. A college level hockey player himself, it didn't take SRK long to pick up the game. The film starred SRK with Vidya Malvade along with a group of debutante girls as hockey players. The film spoke of patriotism, integrity and rising above humiliation to attain redemption. Surprisngly, Shah Rukh Khan didn’t like the film the first time he saw it. In an interview with a leading portal he said, “We had some of the brightest minds making the film like Aditya Chopra, Jaideep Sahni, Shimit Amin. We had young girls who learnt how to play hockey. We had Yash Chopra backing it. But when I saw the film at it’s first screening, we all looked at it and felt it was the worst film we had ever made in our lives.The girls didn’t know this because for them seeing themselves on screen for the first time was a big thing. So they were irritatingly screaming and dancing while the four us were sitting there and crying. We had reached that stage of failure where you start telling people listen we did what we wanted to. This what we set out to make and success and failure is transient and we will come back. It was really really sad,”

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